Workspace_and_Ignition

Workspace & Ignition

Orrin's "consciousness bottleneck": every cycle, parallel subsystems compete to place content in a global workspace (Baars 1988 / Dehaene 2014). One winner crosses the bottleneck, is broadcast back to every subsystem, and becomes the live thought you see in the UI. Separately, an ignition gate decides whether the cycle spends the energy on deliberate reasoning.

flowchart TD
    subgraph Competition
      A[Control signals] --> C{Salience competition}
      B[Goals & demands] --> C
      H[Host state] --> C
      SB[Bound situations] --> C
    end
    C -->|winner| BC[Broadcast to all subsystems]
    BC --> TS[Thought stream / UI]
    BC --> WP[Additive prior on action pick]
    C --> IG{Ignition gate}
    IG -->|salient / uncertain / conflicted| DL[Deliberate: inner loop]
    IG -->|quiet| RX[Reactive, low-power]

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The global workspace

Subsystems propose candidate contents that compete on salience (brain/cognition/global_workspace.py). The winner crosses a single bottleneck and is broadcast into context for the next cycle. Hysteresis keeps a salient content in focus across cycles, so the thought stream is continuous rather than flickering. The stream is the output of this bottleneck, not a log.

The ignition gate

The background substrate — control signals, host coupling, demands, the workspace competition — runs every cycle regardless. The gate (should_think(), brain/think/deliberation_gate.py) then decides whether to cross into full deliberation. User input, high uncertainty, a strong signal, a control-signal spike, prediction error, goal drift, or stagnation all ignite it; a periodic floor (MAX_SILENT_CYCLES) guarantees it never stays silent too long.

Three couplings that keep it coherent

• Workspace prior (ORRIN_WORKSPACE_PRIOR) — the broadcast winner is an additive prior on the action pick, so what's "in mind" and what gets done are one bottleneck, not two.
• Conflict recruitment (ORRIN_CONFLICT_RECRUIT) — System-2 deliberation is recruited by workspace conflict, not fired on a schedule (Botvinick et al. 2001).
• Decaying writeback — after a moment is selected, priors are nudged back down in a bounded, decaying way (no promotion path to identity). See Binding and Workspace Writeback.

All three are fail-safe and feature-flagged. See The Cognitive Loop for where this sits in the cycle.

Code pointers

• brain/cognition/global_workspace.py — the competition, bottleneck, broadcast
• brain/think/deliberation_gate.py — should_think()
• brain/loop/deliberate.py — the deliberate path