Stanislas Dehaene

Collège de France and NeuroSpin, CEA Saclay · Functionalist

Stanislas Dehaene Photograph by Per Henning, NTNU, CC BY 2.0.

Stanislas Dehaene took Bernard Baars’ global workspace metaphor and made it a neuroscience. The global neuronal workspace adds the physical claim that conscious access occurs when a stimulus crosses a threshold and triggers ignition, a sudden non-linear amplification that recruits distant cortical areas and makes the content available to many systems at once. Below that threshold, processing is real, influences behaviour, and stays unconscious.

Ignition matters because it is a signature rather than an interpretation. It has a timing, a scalp distribution and a threshold, which means the theory makes predictions that can fail. That is why global workspace indicators appear in nearly every framework for assessing artificial systems, including the indicator properties work.

The awkward part for AI is that transformer architectures have no bottleneck. Every token attends to every other, so nothing competes for a limited resource and nothing is excluded. A theory built on selective access has little to grip when everything is equally accessible, and whether an artificial workspace can be built rather than approximated is the open question his framework poses.

Known for. Global neuronal workspace theory, and the ignition signature of conscious access

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