Sammenfald

Abstract

The discrete-perception literature has established, against the phenomenology of the stream, that conscious contents update in frames rather than flowing continuously. It has not settled what triggers a frame, and its default answer, a periodic sampler tied to cortical rhythms, sits poorly with the evidence it is asked to carry: frame timing is variable, rhythm predicts resolution but not content, and access events are all-or-none rather than clocked. This paper proposes the trigger. Sammenfald, Danish for coincidence in its literal sense of falling-together, names the claim that the atomic event of conscious access is a cross-channel coincidence detection: a frame fires when independent parallel processing threads converge on a shared representation, and at no other time. The claim identifies four descriptions of one event drawn from four literatures that cite each other rarely: global-workspace ignition as its neural-correlate description, binding-by-synchrony as its mechanism-level description, the multi-thread convergence event of the Feegle Architecture as its phenomenological capture, and the insight moment of the creativity literature as its reward-salient special case. The identification makes conscious frame rate variable by construction, recasts occipital alpha as per-channel carrier rather than content clock, reinterprets fatigue-driven flicker-fusion decline as a raised coincidence threshold, and explains why the aha of retrieval convergence and the moment of access share a signature. A serialised contrast case and five predictions close the paper.