Deep Field / source

The Cognitive Staircase - Consciousness as Iterated, Priced Closure

In 2025, the COGITATE consortium - designed to force a decisive empirical confrontation between Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNW) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) - delivered a mixed verdict: posterior sustained activity tracking stimulus duration was confirmed, but the frontal ignition event that GNW posits as the hallmark of conscious access was not observed in the specific form GNW predicted, though some frontal content-related activity was detected (Melloni et al., 2025).¹ Neither theory fully accounted for the observed pattern. The result prompted discussion of refinements, auxiliary hypotheses, and the design of COGITATE-2 - but not yet a structural explanation of why the impasse occurred.