A temporal access code to consciousness?

While questions of a functional localization of consciousness in the brain have been the subject of myriad studies, the idea of a temporal access code as a specific brain mechanism for consciousness has remained a neglected possibility. Dresp-Langley and Durup (2009; 2012) proposed a theoretical approach in terms of a temporal access mechanism for consciousness based on its two universally recognized properties. Consciousness is limited in processing capacity and described by a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. The time ordering function of conscious states is highlighted and neurobiological theories of the temporal brain activities likely to underlie such function are reviewed. Arguments for a purely temporal access code for conscious states are discussed, including Ramachandran’s ‘Remapping Hypothesis’, research on the ‘Coherence Index’ and coincidence detectors, and theoretical models of adaptive resonant matching of bottom-up and top-down representations. We conclude that a purely temporal resonance mechanism provides the most parsimonious neurobiological explanation of consciousness and propose a ‘time-bin resonance model’, where temporal messages for conscious state access are generated on the basis of signal reverberation in dedicated neural circuits. When above a certain threshold, such reverberation produces meaningful biophysical time bins in terms of specific temporal patterns which trigger, maintain and terminate a conscious brain state. Spatial information would be integrated into provisory topological maps at non-conscious levels through adaptive resonant matching, but not form part of the temporal access code as such. The latter, decorrelated from the spatial code, would operate without any need for firing synchrony on the sole basis of temporal coincidence probabilities in dedicated resonant circuits through the progressively non-arbitrary selection of specific temporal activity patterns in the continuously developing brain. 1. What is phenomenal consciousness? The many different definitions of phenomenal consciousness proposed in the literature (e.g. Kihlstrom, 1987; Natsoulas; 1983; Dennett; 1991; Posner, 1994; Block, 1995; Revonsuo, 2000; Zeman, 2001; Dietrich, 2003) disappointingly reveal that a truly operational definition of the phenomenon as such, indispensable to its scientific investigation, has not been found, yet. The major problem here is that to define phenomenal consciousness, we refer to introspective considerations, as pointed out almost two centuries ago by William James (1890). In the first book (part 4, section 6) of the Treatise of Human Nature (1740), the