Customer Reviews

In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bernard Baars presents a highly readable account of his Global Workspace (GW) theory of consciousness. The GW is a cognitive architecture model that is based on a simple, theater metaphor. Briefly, it imagines that consciousness occurs on a center stage. The stage is equivalent to a working memory buffer. Conscious experience consists of a spotlight area on this stage. The spotlight is shifted, to illuminate various contents, according to both involuntary and voluntary forms of attentional control. The players that compete (and cooperate) for access to the stage include the variety of exteroceptive senses, interoceptive senses, and more abstract ideas. The theater stage has a limited capacity, but it creates vast access, by broadcasting information to a variety of unconscious routines and effectors (the audience). A variety of context operators also work `behind the scenes' to provide the necessary stage backdrops.

In this short and concise book, Baars devotes a chapter to each of the components of the theater metaphor. While the GW theory of consciousness is a cognitive model, Baars also delves a little into brain anatomy. He pays some attention, for example, to the Extended Reticular-Thalamic Activating System (ERTAS).

One of the things not fully addressed by Baars in his model is the subjective nature of consciousness. For example, with any conscious experience, there is a sense of self in the act of knowing. Baars makes no mention of the work of Damasio on the primitive self-representational mechanisms in the brain, though he does develop to some extent, his own idea of `self as deep context'.

Baars believes that the way to make progress on the issue of consciousness is by gathering empirical evidence. Once consciousness can be treated as a variable, we can begin to make some headway in understanding it. One way of treating consciousness as a variable is through the method of contrastive phenomenology in which a single experimental task is performed under both conscious and unconscious conditions, with the differences between the two being closely tracked.

Overall, the theater metaphor has considerable heuristic value - it allows for a considerable amount of information to be packaged in a very simple manner. It turns out that the general mechanism (a limited-capacity center stage which creates vast access to specialized control systems) is a sound design solution for complex nervous systems.

I think it is fair to say that Baar's global workspace model is the most influential cognitive model of consciousness out there. The theoretical work is simply outstanding. Few would today contest the main idea behind the model -that the function of consciousness is to broadcast information to separate functional modules all arround the brain-. Some recent papers by Baars, available on line, summarize all the emirical evidence that has appeared the last decade in favour of the model. Baars is currently at the neurosciences institute, headed by Gerald Edelman, and it is no surprise his latest views seem to include reentrant connectivity and Edelman and Tononis concept of complexity. However, although this is clearly a step forward, it is far from being a THE answer consciousness studies is looking for. Baars himself sees a gap between the cognitive model and the neurophysiological machanisms involved. He has presented the ERTAS model, but it is not clear how it has stood to recent neuroscience. I'm not saying i'ts been falsified, but it has been deprived of supremacy. However, the global workspace is still a brilliant contribution to the study of consciousness. Some philosophical nuances are still roaming, however. There is no qualia in the theather, and it is not clear how the audience could be conscious..how would they enjoy the show?.

I became interested in "philosophy of mind" several years ago and have since read a variety of books dealing with the mind-body-consciousness problem. "In The Theater of Consciousness" was my first read from the field of cognitive psychology. And a good read it was. It provides a concise yet comprehensive review of what can be said about human consciousness from the empirical perspective. This book is ten years old now and obviously misses a decade of new research. But I suspect that most of what Bernard Baars presents is still relevant, and provides a good foundation for what cognitive psychology is doing these days. It also helps to enhance one's understanding of what the neuroscientists and artificial intelligence people are up to.

In evaluating a technical book intended for a lay audience, the author's attitude towards his or her readership is very important to me. Dr. Baars displays a very considerate attitude. He provides a lot of drawings, conceptual diagrams, try-it-yourself exercises, and even a few brain scan photos (quite impressive for 1997; were the book to be re-issued today, it could include a lot more of these, given the progress made in neuro-scanning since then). In the Epilogue, Dr. Baars expresses his gratitude "to the reader who has come this far on our shared journey". My goodness, an academic doyen who actually thanks the layman for reading his book! That's quite rare (and quite refreshing).

Dr. Baars' "theater spotlight" and "global workspace" metaphors for consciousness and its relationship to unconscious processes (and even to neuron-level workings) are indeed very useful and thought-provoking. This book will indeed help you to understand why your mind does what it does. For example, the section on "attention" as the funnel of consciousness and "absorption" as the mind's focus upon a subject absorbing all of its limited capacity to be conscious, helps to explain how we often "suspend our disbelief" when watching TV or a movie. It also helps to explain how commercials and sales pitches work - if someone wants to sell you something and they can absorb all of your attention through entertainment, there's not enough room left for your skeptical facilities to operate. So you buy, and only later on does your critical/analytical component get back "on stage" within your conscious mind - "gee, I wonder if that was really worth the money?" (But then the ego-rationalization "actor" appears, saying "of course it was worth it, we don't make mistakes, it's gonna be great").

Another important concept is "mental contexts". Dr. Baars gives a much better explanation than I can, but in a nutshell, mental contexts are sub-conscious tendencies or "primers" that shape one's interpretations of sensory inputs. They basically help you decide just what it is that you are seeing or hearing or smelling or feeling or reading. They are changeable -- think about how you interpret the word "flies" in the lines "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana". Time and fruit change the contexts here. Contexts can be applied on a higher level too, and help to explain how great intellectual discoveries come about. E.g., Einstein managed to derive and apply a unique context regarding what was widely known about space, time, motion and gravity. As a result, relativity was born.

This book and its like do not close the "explanatory gap" regarding the nature of consciousness. That will require a major, high-level "context shift" akin to what Einstein did with physics. But Dr. Baars does provide a good summary of what will certainly need to be accounted for if and when that context-shift does arise. In the mean time, I feel obliged to return Dr. Baar's gratitude for reading his book. Thank you, Dr. Baars, for writing a very good summary of what cognitive psychology offers to the field of consciousness studies. Your book clearly does help the non-specialist to understand what cognitive researchers are up to, and indeed to help the layman better understand her or his own conscious mind. Your book was very much worth the money and time that I invested into it.

What is consciousness? Or at least how does it work? Historically, the last individual to seriously address these questions was the great American philosopher William James, who in his seminal tome 'Principles of Psychology' (1890) outlined the essentials of a fairly comprehensive 'stream of consciousness' theory. But for most of the twentieth century the hard-problem of consciousness was either studiously avoided or redefined as something else. But in recent years with the demise of Behaviorism and its repressive dogma, groups calling themselves Cognitivist Psychologists have emerged who are resurrecting the pioneering work begun by James over 100 years ago. For serious readers interested in 'getting their feet wet' in the relatively new field of Cognitivism, Dr. Bernard Baars' highly readable book 'In the Theater of Consciousness' would serve as an excellent introduction. I have to rate it 5 STARS. Also, if this book whets your appetite for more, you may want to consider Baars' more rigorous 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness' where his global workspace theory is more fully developed.

For such a small book this is chock full of information and is one of the easiest to read books on the subject of the brain and how we think that I have seen.

Baars explains the structure of consciousness in highly readable, involving, accurate, and scientifically deep terms. (Amazing but true!) His book is laced with exercises that demonstrate the phenomena he is explaining in entertaining and often surprising ways. His analysis is just about the only comprehensive functional account of consciousness. This is a must read for anyone interested in scientific understanding of the mind

POINT OF VIEW

My targets are artificial intelligent systems which can learn like children do. Thus I am always interested in the findings of other disciplines like Psychology, Neurosciences, Linguistics etc. who dig out some interesting structures 'behind' the observable phenomena which appear as the underlying 'machinery' for all that observable behavior. Books who overcome the abundant details of a discipline and -- moreover -- can talk in a language, which is understandable beyond the borders of the own discipline are rare. 'In The Theater of Consciousness' is such a rare book.

LASTING ACTUALITY

Although the book has been written in 1997, about 14 years ago, it hasn't lost too much of it's importance. It's main power is the revelation of a general structure behind the great variety of baffling phenomena accessible to our mind through our consciousness of being there, with our body, in a world. These findings have been possible on account of more then 20 years of intensive research in the field of (cognitive neurosciences. And, indeed, I became aware of this book through many recent papers in the realm of computational intelligence citing this book as an important paradigm which can be used as a guideline for the construction of an artificial consciousness.

RETURN OF A PHENOMENON

There was a time when psychology as 'behavioral psychology (behaviorism)' dispelled the subjective dimension of human experience and tried to explain human behavior without relaying on 'consciousness' and closely related phenomena. This was a fruitful exercise to understand better the limits of such an approach and to learn what is needed, if one tries to explain cognitive properties like language, thinking, planning in a more appropriate theory. Parallel contributed other disciplines like evolutionary biology, ethology, and the neurosciences new empirical findings which underlined more and more the fact, that the evolution of the brain structures is responsible for the increasing complexity of human behavior. Especially emerged a new acceptance that the so-called 'consciousness' seems to be one of the major biological adaptations to improve a flexible, adaptive behavior in a complex changing environment. And at that point of the story comes the book of Bernhard J.Baars and presents a good readable, science-based view of the human consciousness.

BEHAVIOR, PHENOMENA, NEURONS

Although it is not possible to give a direct empirical account of the content of someone's consciousness (the so-called 'phenomena' ), Baars takes a clear stand for these kind of data because it is in praxis always sufficiently possible to get some descriptions of phenomena which can practically be distinguished and repeated. Thus, one can correlate behavioral data with phenomenal data. Besides this one can correlate observable behavior to some degree with the behavior of neuronal assemblies. With these methodological differentiations it is possible for Baars to develop a model of the consciousness as a kind of an 'interface' (called by Baars 'publicity organ',p.7) between the external environment (with the behavior) as well as the brain and the body as the 'internal' environment.

THE THEATER METAPHER

To bring all the different phenomena together in one coherent 'view' Baars uses the 'metapher' of the consciousness as a 'stage' and the whole body is then the 'theater' where the outer and inner senses as well as the ideas are the 'players' which want to act on the stage, and behind the stage is the 'unconscious' audience (embracing many different processes) which perceives the events on the stage and process them further with feedback loops. This 'picture' is helpful It is a simple exercise to turn it in an ordinary mathematical structure -- like in physics -- to present a full-fledged mathematical theory of this view of consciousness).

LIMITED CAPACITY

There is one property of the consciousness which is most important: although the consciousness has access to many parts of the brain, it can in reality always process only a very small fraction of all available data.

CONSCIOUS - UNCONSCIOUS

Those players which can appear within consciousness are 'conscious', everything else is 'unconscious'. Because the overwhelming part of the brain and the surrounding body is 'unconscious' it follows that a human person in the 'light' of its conscious processes always sees only a small fraction of the body and the world 'measured' by the body. If parts of the unconscious structures (parts of the body, parts of the brain) will be changed in some sense then this can only perceived by the consciousness if this has some effects which can become conscious. If one replaces parts of the brain -- or of the body -- in a 'functionally equivalent' manner then the consciousness will not be able to perceive this (strictly speaking (from the point of consciousness): if all parts of our body (including the brain) would be replaced by artificial components which would be 'functionally equivalent' then the consciousness would not be able to detect these changes).

CONTEXT - IDENTITY

In this sense Baars calls everything outside of the consciousness, which has causal influence of the stream of phenomena, simply the 'context' of the consciousness. The context serves as a kind of framework which induces the profile of the 'self'. Changes in the structure of the self can have an impact on the 'psychological structure' of a person, can cause 'emotional disturbances', can induce multiple personalities, and much more.

READ YOURSELF

My short description can by no way give an adequate impression of this wonderful book. I enjoyed it a lot. Perhaps it will do the same with you.

I felt like the book conveyed the principles of consciousness effectively, and that the author engages the reader to maintain interest and attention.

Baars allows any reader to follow his tour through the theater theory of consciousness in an easy readable approach. He makes sure the reader has adequate examples of real life events and situations in order to better understand an interesting theory. Where does the human species go from here?