Abstract
Renewed interest in consciousness is evident in contemporary cognitive psychology. While there is reasonable agreement on the empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness, there is less consensus on the shape of a theory. This paper specifies a number of empirical constraints, stated as pairs of conscious-unconscious contrasts, and suggests a rather small set of principles that can organize these constraints in a rather straightforward way. These principles include the following: First, the nervous system is viewed as a “distributed” information processing system, in which highly complex and efficient processing is performed by specialized processors in a relatively independent way. These processors may be “data driven”—i.e., they may decide by their own criteria what is worth processing, so that a central mechanism is not needed to exercise executive power over the specialized processors. However, these specialists do require a “central information exchange” in order to interact with each other. This central interchange has been called a global data base. In operation, a global data base bears a striking resemblance to “working memory.”
Consciousness is what we might expect in an organ, added for the sake of steering a nervous system too complex to handle itself.
William James (1890)
The development of this paper was supported by the Cognitive Science Program, UCSD Center for Human Information Processing, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and by USPHS Biomedical Research Support Grant 5 S07 RR 07067-12 to the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
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Baars, B.J. (1983). Conscious Contents Provide the Nervous System with Coherent, Global Information. In: Davidson, R.J., Schwartz, G.E., Shapiro, D. (eds) Consciousness and Self-Regulation. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9317-1_2
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