CONCEPT
The Fourth Bound
Simon's 1971 identification of attention as the constraint that persists when information, computation, and time are all relaxed — the bound that AI cannot dissolve because it is a property of consciousness itself.
The fourth bound is attention. Simon identified it in 1971, writing about the design of information systems: 'What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.' The formulation treats the relationship between information and attention as metabolic rather than competitive — information is the fuel, attention is what burns, and more fuel does not produce a larger fire if the furnace is the same size. The fourth bound is the bound that no tool relaxes, because it is not a property of the information environment but a property of consciousness. Every conscious agent, however powerful the tools available to her, must still decide where to direct her attention, and that decision is bounded by the same cognitive architecture — roughly four to seven chunks of working memory, a serial processing system that fatigues, a biological attentional apparatus unchanged since the Pleistocene — that bounded the decisions of Simon's 1947