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Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

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Submitted by: Baars / Harmon

Submit Date: 2004-06-17

A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

Bernard Baars (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

By Willis W. Harman

What should we expect from a theory of consciousness? Will it "explain" why I have certain thoughts and feelings? Will it predict them?

Those may have been among the aspirations of some of the die-hard physicalists of yesteryear, who held the universe to be completely deterministic. We would ask somewhat less of a theory of consciousness today. Among the questions such a theory or conceptual model might be expected to illuminate are:

* How do we explain the ability to attend to some stimuli and be unaware of others?

* How do we explain the unconscious processes involved in memory access?

* Why do we lose conscious awareness of habituated stimuli and automatic skills?

* Why are we unconscious of so much of what goes into shaping our conscious perceptions and images?

* Why are we unconscious most of the time of the conceptual context, the presuppositions that form the framework of our thoughts about the world?

* Does the common idea that we have "conscious control" over our actions have any psychological reality?

* When we say that "I" am conscious of something, what is the nature of the "I" to which we refer?

Bernard Baars, in his recent book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, bravely plunges in where other illustrious figures before him have ultimately given up. As he says: "Historically, psychologists have neither addressed nor evaded consciousness successfully, and two major metatheories, introspectionism and behaviorism, have come to grief on the horns of this dilemma."

Partly because of the failure of nineteenth-century psychologists to build an adequate psychology on the basis of introspective self-reports, the situation in the early part of this century was quite unsatisfactory. Some scientists, notably Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, had inferred the existence of unconscious processes, from such observable events as post-hypnotic suggestion, conversion hysteria, multiple personality, slips of the tongue, and motivated forgetting. However, a couple of generations were to go by before this concept of the unconscious would have significant impact of scientific psychology. That was mainly because of the digression called behaviorism.

Behaviorism was an attempt to construct a scientific psychology which dominated the social and psychological sciences from around 1913 for the next half century. Behaviorism utterly denied that conscious experience was a legitimate scientific subject, but it promised at least a consistent physicalistic basis on which psychology could build. The strategy and dogma of behaviorism held that the only data from which a scientific psychology can be constructed are observations of physically measurable behavior.

The inadequacies of strict behaviorism are now apparent to all. Within behaviorism there was strong resistance to dealing with inferred, unobservable constructs such as percepts, feelings, and mental images; only the behavior of reporting these subjective experiences could enter into the discourse. This made it completely impossible to derive adequate psychological theories. Modern cognitive theory starts from a different basic assumption—namely, that one can speak scientifically of both conscious and unconscious processes if the properties of both can be inferred from publicly accessible evidence.

In attempting to create a cognitive theory, then, consciousness is considered to be an "inferred, unobservable construct" from "reliable evidence". According to Baars, "Scientific psychologists have once again begun to speak of meaning, thought, imagery, attention, memory, and, recently, conscious and unconscious process—all inferred concepts that have been tested in careful experiments and stated in increasingly adequate theories. Our view here is that both conscious and unconscious process involve inferences from publicly observable data."

Baars' aim is both ambitious and refreshing. Whereas most scientists before him have seemed quite willing to ignore the evidence of the mystics and spiritual explorers, he deals with the issue head on: "In thinking about conscious experience we are entering a stream of ideas that goes back to the earliest known writings. Any complete account of human thought about human experience must include the great technical literatures of Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; but it must also include European philosophy from Plato and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the various strands of mystical thought in the West. Indeed, the history of ideas in all developed cultures is closely intertwined with ideas of perception, knowledge, memory, imagination, and the like, all involving conscious experience in different ways."

A preliminary analogy. The problem Beers is dealing with is complex; he invites us to consider it in terms of metaphors. He suggests the following analogy to provide a preliminary idea of where he is going.

Imagine a large committee of experts, enough to fill a large auditorium. Suppose this assemble were called upon to solve a series of problems that could not be handled by any one expert alone. Various experts could agree or disagree on communication: Each expert can best understand and express what he or she means to say by using a technical jargon that may not be fully understood by all the other experts. One helpful step in solving this communication problem is to make public a "global" message on a large blackboard in the front of the auditorium, so that in principle anyone can read the message and react. ("Global", in computer science parlance, means accessible to all the specialized processors throughout the system—or, in this analogy, to all the experts.) In fact, the message would only be read by experts who could understand it or parts of it; however, one cannot know ahead of time who those experts are, so that it is necessary to "broadcast" it, to make it potentially available to anyone in the audience.

At any time a number of experts may be trying to broadcast global messages, but the blackboard cannot accommodate al of the messages at the same time. Furthermore, some of the messages may be contradictory. So various of the experts may compete for access to the blackboard, or some of them may cooperate in an effort to broadcast a global message.

The heart of the analogy is between the blackboard and what we term "consciousness" or "conscious awareness". The experts in the assembly hall correspond to specialized unconscious processors in the mind. Most of what is going on in the auditorium does not make it to the blackboard—in other words, is unconscious. Only what gets put on the blackboard or global workspace is, so to speak, "conscious". Such a model seems to fit many aspects of information processing in the brain-mind system, as these have been revealed in the wide range of experimental research on which Baars bases the book.

The "global workspace" concept. Baars starts with the rather well-established concept that the brain-mind system seems to be comprised of a vast collection of "intelligent", specialized automatic information processors, distributed throughout the brain and nervous system. Some of these operate in parallel with others; some are nested and organized within other processors. These unconscious processors are highly efficient in their specialized tasks, such as analyzing visual images, searching the memory, translating strings of letters into meanings, processing syntax, or other specialized processes in vision, memory, language, and motor control. They are, in general, far more efficient that the conscious mind would be performing the same tasks. Compared to the equivalent unconscious processes, tasks performed consciously are slow, vulnerable to interference from other conscious or effortful mental processes (such as other sensory input), and hence prone to error.

The basic metaphor with which Baars characterizes the processes associated with consciousness is what he terms a "global workspace", which is more or less analogous to the blackboard just discussed. Processors can compete or cooperate to gain access to the global workspace underlying consciousness. Information which thus comes into conscious awareness is then in a form available as "messages" to any other interested systems. Any conscious experience emerges from cooperation and competition between many different input processors.

One consequence of this is that a global message must be internally consistent, or else it would degrade very rapidly due to internal competition between its components. Further, conscious experience requires that the receiving systems be adapted to, matching, or acting to achieve whatever is conveyed in the conscious global message. Another way of stating this is that any conscious message must be globally informative. But any adaptation to an informative message takes place within an unconscious context. This is the third of the key concepts that Baars works with. In addition to specialized unconscious processors and global workspace.

Contexts are relatively enduring structures that are unconscious, but that can act to influence another, conscious representation. One example is the unconscious stereotype, such that one reacts with fear to a person having certain characteristics. Another kind of context allows us to recognize a particular object as being of a certain class—a chair, say, or a dog. Expectations and unconscious desires comprise still other examples. Any of these amounts to a set of unconscious beliefs and images, which influence conscious perception.

Conscious contents and unconscious contexts interweave to create a "stream of consciousness". The interplay between them is useful in solving a great variety of problems, in which the conscious component is used to access novel sources of information while unconscious contexts and processors deal with routine details. Voluntary control of action can be treated as a special kind of problem solving, with both conscious and unconscious components. And if we take one plausible meaning of "self" as the dominant, enduring context of many conscious experiences, we may also say that conscious experience provides information as to the self-context.

The place of this book. Baars' framework appears to unify a great bulk of empirical evidence relating to consciousness, in a reasonable way. It neither asserts nor denies any metaphysical proposition about consciousness. In that sense the theory is philosophically modest. It does not attempt to resolve epistemological issues of long standing; it merely tries to provide a conceptual framework comprehensive enough to accommodate the findings of nearly two centuries of psychological research.

As the author himself notes, his treatment here leaves many important areas for future work. These include the issue of time perception, the apparent size limit on short-term memory, the question of reflective thought, sleep and dreaming, and, above all, the areas of altered states of consciousness and the "universal similarities in mystical experiences, spanning the length of recorded history".

There will come a day, I believe, when we study consciousness not from the standpoint of something akin to "information", added on to a world picture ultimately based on physical sense data, but instead take a fundamentally different approach in which consciousness is a primary causal reality. That is not the role of this book. It is, rather, a deliberate — and, I would judge, successful — attempt to bridge the gap between positivistic science and a true science of consciousness, to ease toward a way of viewing consciousness that would be too much of a discontinuity if we tried to make it in one leap.

This book is not for easy bedtime reading. However, those who are seriously concerned with the question of how science is to deal with consciousness must regard it as a very significant contribution.

Willis Harman was the former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. From Professor of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford, he moved to SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where for sixteen years he did research in futures studies and strategic planning. He was the author of Global Mind Change and Creative Work, among other books. He died in 1997.

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Link: http://www.noetic.org/publications/review/issue17/r17_Harman2.html

The Origin of Consciousness. There are many theories explaining the origin of consciousness. Here some of them. 1) God blowing consciousness into man whome he created from clay 2) 20 billions years ago all matter (all elementary particles, all quarks and their girlfriend antiquarks, all kinds of waves: electromagnetic, gravitational, muons….) – all was assembled in “singular point”. Then there was a Big Bang . Question: when was there consciousness? a) Before explosion, b) At the moment of explosion, c) After the explosion. It is more probable, that it existed after the explosion. Then there is a question: what particles (or waves) were carriers of consciousness? Mesons, muons, leptons, bosons (W+, W- , Z) ,quarks, …gluons field ….. ets …? On this question the Big Bang theory does not give an answer. But can it be that consciousness was formed as a result of the interaction of all elementary particles, all waves, all fields? Then, on the one hand, the reason for the origin of the Big Bang is clear: everything was mixed, including consciousness, and when it is mixed then it is possible to construct all and everything. But on the other hand, it is not clear: why farmer John can think simply, clearly and logically. 3) Ancient Indian Veda approve, that origination of consciousness is connected with the existence of spiritual, conscious particles – purusha . 4) Modern physics affirms that the Quantum of light is a privileged particle as in one cases, it behave as a particle, and in other case, acts in a way which causes a wave. How is a particle capable of creating a wave? The behaviour of Light quanta (dualism ) is explained simply. A quantum of light has its own initial consciousness. This consciousness is not rigid, but develops. The development of consciousness goes “from vague wish up to a clear thought”. * * * If you have time and desire, I ask you to visit my site http://www.socratus.com Best regards. Socratus.
by: israelsad@bezeqint.net

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