Applying Global Workspace Theory to the Frame Problem

Murray Shanahan (1)
Bernard Baars (2)
(1) Department Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Imperial College London
(2) The Neurosciences Institute
San Diego CA

The frame problem was originally couched as a difficulty within classical Artificial Intelligence: How can we build a program capable of inferring the effects of an action without reasoning explicitly about all its obvious non-effects? But many philosophers saw the frame problem as a symptom of a wider difficulty, namely how to account for cognitive processes capable of drawing on information from any domain of knowledge or expertise. So-called informationally unencapsulated processes of this sort, exemplified by analogical reasoning, are especially troublesome for theories of mind that rely on some sort of modular structure to render them computationally feasible.

However, one thing is clear. If the frame problem is a genuine puzzle, then the human brain incorporates a solution to it. In global workspace theory, we find clues to how this solution might work. Global workspace theory posits a functional role for consciousness, which is to facilitate information exchange among multiple special-purpose unconscious brain processes. These compete for access to a global workspace, which allows information to be broadcast back to the whole system. Such an architecture accommodates high-speed, domain-specific, processes (or modules) while facilitating just the sort of crossing of domain boundaries required to address the philosopher's frame problem.