Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems.
Please see my Wikipedia entry (under Bernard J. Baars) and my basic theoretical ideas about consciousness under Global Workspace Theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baars
I'm an experimental psychologist by training, and early on became deeply committed to understanding the fundamental questions of consciousness, volition, and self. When I got started that was not really allowed in academic psychology, but I persisted, and was able to make a difference over a long period of time. Currently we are seeing a historic wave of brain and psychological findings on those topics, which is so big that nobody is really keeping up with it all. However, with Dr. Nicole Gage, I've written an introductory college textbook that I believe does as good a job as possible, called "Cognition, Brain & Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience." (Elsevier, Inc., Academic Press, 2007; 2nd edition is now in press). I've also written a general audience book called "In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind". (Oxford University Press, 1997), and other works.
If the Amazon Kindle program works, I might do some Kindle publishing soon!
I am also interested in "higher" states, in altered mind and brain states, and in all the varieties of conscious and unconscious phenomena. It's a huge field, but we are learning a great deal. So we do our best to make sense out of it all; it's a tremendous amount of fun!
My co-editor Nicole Gage and I are very interested in hearing from instructors who are using, or considering our textbook. We ***NEED*** your input! If you are interested in consciousness from an up-to-date scientific point of view, you might consider our University of Arizona WebCourse, through the Center for Consciousness Studies, the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Thank you very much!
