 A reason why assumptions about linearity may have been problematic is that when, following Broadbent, we think about hierarchical perceptual processing while bearing in mind the communications engineer’s concerns about capacity limitations, it then becomes natural to make some additional assumptions about the way in which this hierarchically organized architecture supports personal-level cognition. The early/late debate’s problems are more plausibly blamed on these additional assumptions, rather than on any assumptions about linear or hierarchical organization per se. Given that some physical properties of a thing must first be represented in order for a person to become aware of that thing’s semantic properties, it is natural for the communications engineer to suppose that no further representation of these physical properties needs to be generated in order for that person to also be aware of those properties, so that a person who is experiencing the semantic properties of a stimulus must have been through a process that already gives them an experience of that stimulus’s simple spatial properties. This additional supposition would be a mistake, since the brain represents the physical properties of stimuli in multiple, parallel, somewhat overlapping systems, only some of which put the subject in a position to think about the properties that they represent. In order to get to a representation of the meaning of the word on a page, the subject’s brain must represent that word’s physical properties, but it turns out that the brain’s representation of these physical properties need not put this perceiver in a position to form thoughts about them. Their access to these properties might require that the properties be represented all over again, in some parallel system. From the point of view introduced by Broadbent – that of a communications engineer who is concerned with the management of limited capacity channels – this seems strangely profligate. At least some of the problems with the early/late debate can be attributed to this: not an assumption about linearity per se, but an assumption about the linearity of the processes that support personal level thinking.