The Groovy Commutator and Consciousness

A speculative application to the binding problem.

Setup for Perception

• D: saliency (what changes under attention)
• I: bind (feature integration)
• C: mismatch detection (XOR)

The Binding Problem Reformulated

Does feature-integration commute with attention?

• D(I(features)) = attending to bound objects
• I(D(features)) = binding attended features

When these don't commute, you get:

• The aperture problem
• Change blindness
• Flash-lag effect

Wild Speculation

• G = 0: pure feedforward processing (philosophical zombie?)
• G = noise: no binding at all
• G ≠ 0 structured: genuine consciousness

The groovy commutator of perception may be non-zero precisely at the edges of conscious integration.

Highly speculative. Related: Binding Problem, Attention, Change Blindness