# Core Question
Is consciousness tied to global broadcasting, or can experience exist without reportability?

# Description
This cluster isolates the boundary between raw perceptual processing and global cognitive access. It tests whether “ignition” across frontal executive networks is required for subjective awareness, or if it merely reflects downstream motor planning and task execution.

# Explananda
## Sperling Paradigm
### Description
Subjects shown a 12-letter grid for 50ms reliably report seeing all letters as clearly present during the flash, yet can accurately identify only 3–4 immediately after. When cued to a specific row within the iconic memory window, accuracy rises — suggesting the full array was encoded. Was the full array consciously experienced?

### Challenge
This generates opposing predictions from the major theories. GWT predicts consciousness requires broadcast into the frontal-parietal workspace (~4 items), so the unreported letters were not conscious. IIT predicts the full array is genuinely experienced, with the bottleneck in reporting rather than in consciousness itself. The challenge cannot be evaded by appealing to memory limits.

## Report Ablation
### Description
In a language-capable system, ablating a small set of internal representations — the “verbalizable” directions identified by the Jacobian lens, suppressed within an intermediate band of layers — causes the system’s experiential and sensory language to collapse into a flat, mechanical register, while its reasoning, fluency, and task performance remain intact.

### Challenge
The intervention isolates the experiential report from the competence beneath it, forcing each theory to specify whether such a report is evidence of experience or a dissociable capacity. GWT must clarify whether the ablated subspace is a workspace or a report-generating component that resembles one and must explain why removing it spares the broad flexible cognition a workspace is posited to enable. HOTT must distinguish loss of a higher-order representation from loss of its expression and must further account for the cross-agent result, which a strictly first-person higher-order account does not obviously predict.

## Blindsight
### Description
When patients with damage to their primary visual cortex (V1) deny seeing an object, yet can accurately guess its location or emotion at a rate well above chance.

### Challenge
Different theories predict opposing outcomes. RPT argues it lacks consciousness because the local recurrent loops in V1 are destroyed. GNWT argues the visual information fails to “ignite” the frontoparietal workspace. HOTT highlights it as the perfect example of a first-order state lacking a higher-order thought, while AST sees it as attention operating without the brain building a schema to model it.

## Split-Brain Patients
### Description
Patients who have had their corpus callosum severed, meaning the left and right hemispheres of the brain can no longer communicate directly.

### Challenge
Tests the boundaries and unity of the conscious self. IIT uses its strict mathematical isolation rules to calculate whether the patient now hosts two separate, distinct conscious minds (ϕ-structures). GNWT looks at whether a single, fractured workspace can still achieve global ignition across hemispheres, while HOTT focuses on how the meta-representations in one hemisphere monitor the lower-order states of the other.

## Split-Brain Unity
### Description
In split-brain patients, the corpus callosum (the structure connecting the brain’s two hemispheres) is surgically severed, allowing the hemispheres to process information largely independently. Naive physicalism would predict this creates two separate streams of consciousness, yet patients typically report, and behave as, a single unified self.

### Challenge
This case directly tests whether a theory equates consciousness with raw physical/neural activity, or with something that emerges from the organization and integration of that activity. A theory that treats consciousness as simply “brain activity happening” struggles to explain why severed hardware doesn’t produce two conscious agents. A theory that treats consciousness as emergent must specify what, mechanistically, still holds unity together after the connecting structure is cut (mere assertion that “it emerges” isn’t sufficient; it has to say how).