Consciousness and record formation: SMM/DTT and the global neuronal workspace

01Access is more than storage

The global neuronal workspace hypothesis concerns the broad availability of selected information across cognitive systems. Its proponents model interactions through which a local representation can become influential in memory, decision and report. A stored trace that never participates in those functions is not equivalent to a globally available content. This gives DTT’s outer accessibility a concrete comparator, but the relevant world is an organized brain and its cognitive processes, not the entire cosmos. ^[1]

02What the SMM/DTT distinction contributes

SMM begins with one nonspatial generative source. DTT distinguishes its inner production from the outer order in which completed results become accessible. The six inner levels are nested functional dependencies within that production; the seventh denotes outer completion. They are not six independent clocks, six spatial directions, or six simultaneously occupied temporal axes. This distinction makes the framework more specific than a general claim that everything changes: it asks how a world of persistent relations can be generated before its spatial representation is taken for granted.

The experienced present is usually richer than an isolated instantaneous sensation. A spoken word, a rhythm or a movement is apprehended through relations among successive phases. SMM/DTT’s production/completion distinction offers a language for asking how an integrated event becomes available, but it does not make the experience of a present identical to a fundamental cosmic completion. A conscious observer is a complex physical and interpretive subsystem with its own memory, expectations and report capacities.

Three questions should be distinguished. Which neural or functional processes allow information to be integrated? Which processes make that information available for report and action? Why is the process accompanied by experience at all? A theory may make progress on one without settling the others. DTT can contribute a general account of record formation and nested dependencies. To become a theory of consciousness, it would need a specific bridge linking those structures to a subject’s experience. The number of inner levels alone does not select a duration of awareness or a neural mechanism. ^[3]

03A worked functional contrast

Imagine two systems that both classify an image correctly. The first sends the answer only to a local indicator. The second makes it available to verbal report, planning, working memory and correction of future behavior. Their input-output classification accuracy may match, while their functional access differs. A workspace account treats that difference as theoretically important. DTT’s completion instrument could likewise distinguish a latent source relation from a broadly usable record. The analogy concerns availability; it does not prove that every completed DTT record is conscious or that every broadcast system has experience.

04What the contemporary comparison contributes

The 2025 COGITATE study directly compared specified predictions of global workspace and integrated information theories and reported challenges for both. That finding does not make SMM/DTT correct by elimination. It shows why a consciousness proposal needs commitments about the location, timing and maintenance of accessible content. DTT currently supplies a general architecture of generation and record, so a consciousness extension needs an observer-specific bridge before it can enter such a comparison. ^[2]

05A productive source-based extension

A DTT observer model could define local processing, retained state, a completion criterion and the set of downstream operations that can use the completed content. It could then derive a measurable relation between integration time, report availability and perturbations of memory. The six nested levels should be connected to functional necessity rather than matched to six brain regions. The philosophical question of why the process is experiential can remain explicit alongside the functional model. This division lets SMM contribute a concrete account of temporal access while avoiding the unsupported claim that a general cosmic completion mechanism already constitutes a theory of consciousness.

06A further conceptual benchmark

Hear the three notes C, E and G in sequence. At the third note, the first two are no longer physically arriving in the same way, yet their temporal relation contributes to hearing an arpeggio. If only the current acoustic sample existed for the listener with no retention, the musical relation would be lost. If the notes were all treated as simultaneous, their order would disappear. The experienced present therefore includes a differentiated relation to what has just occurred. This example motivates a memory-sensitive model of temporal experience, while leaving open whether the relevant unity is explained by neural integration, phenomenological structure or a deeper metaphysical account.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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