Key points

Global Workspace Theory is among the leading scientific theories of consciousness.

GWT predicts that sensory experience will be sparse — only a few things can occupy the workspace at a time.

The difference between sparse and abundant sensory experience seems like it should be introspectively obvious.

However, we are disappointingly incompetent at this introspective task.

Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim is: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a "global workspace" so that many parts of your mind can access it at once — speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a f

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