Bernard J. Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind (New York: Oxford University, 1997); xiv + 193 pps.
Historically, the most influential individual to seriously address the question, What is consciousness and how does it work?, was the American philosopher William James. James, in his seminal work, Principles of Psychology (1890), outlined the essentials of a fairly comprehensive ‘stream of consciousness’ theory. However, for the better part of the twentieth century the hard-problem of consciousness was either avoided or redefined as something else. In fact, the scientific community long considered consciousness to be a subjective phenomenon not amenable to serious investigation. With the demise of Behaviorism in recent years along with its dogma, however, Cognitivist Psychologists are resurrecting the work begun by James over 100 years ago. Bernard J. Baars, Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute (San Diego, CA), picks up where James left off. The book under review herein, a paperbound reprint of a 1997 book, brings the reader to the frontlines of the consciousness debate, offering them an expansive overview of how top scientists currently understand conscious experience. When this book was originally written, now over ten years ago, the study of consciousness was beginning to see remarkable strides in terms of knowledge gained, which reflected important technological breakthroughs at that time, as well as the enormous efforts of researchers involved in its study.
In this short book, Baars first attempts to illustrate the ‘variable’ nature of consciousness. Once consciousness can be treated as a variable, we can begin to make some headway in understanding it. Indeed, a 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. Moreover, within this book, Baars presents a highly readable account of his Global Workspace (GW) theory of consciousness. GW theory generates explicit predictions for conscious aspects of perception, emotion, motivation, learning, working memory, voluntary control, and self systems in the brain. It has similarities to biological theories such as Neural Darwinism and dynamical theories of brain functioning. The GW model is a cognitive architecture one that is based on a simple, theater metaphor. Baars’ GW model is the most influential cognitive model of consciousness extant today, for better or for worse. In fact, few today would contest the main idea behind the model – that the function of consciousness is to broadcast information to separate functional modules all around the brain.
Baars devotes a chapter to each of the components of the theater metaphor. A theater contains a stage with props and actors, a spotlight, stagehands, a director, and an audience. Within the model, a variety of context operators work `behind the scenes’ to provide the necessary stage backdrops. If all goes as expected, when the lights dim, all members of the audience focus attention on a few actors at a time, as they are spotlighted on the stage. The ‘players’ that compete for access to the stage include the variety of exteroceptive senses, interoceptive senses, and abstract ideas. So then, at any point in time many sensory stimuli, ideas, and events are potentially accessible to human consciousness, but we can attend to only one at a time. Baars argues that neural structures work unconsciously behind the scenes in tasks analogous to the director, the stagehands, the audience, and the spotlights to determine the contents and directions of our consciousness. 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’).
In a particularly interesting assertion, Baars contends that consciousness is widespread among all vertebrates. Humans differ from other species only in terms of the content and foci of consciousness, but not in the possession of consciousness itself. So then, according to Baars, consciousness has extended in humans to the effect that humans are able to be flexible in terms of behavior, and they are also able to synthesize discrete informational entities into new, more complex concepts. Moreover, in a notable contribution to the area of consciousness study, Baars notes the importance of unconscious mental processing for human understanding and problem-solving abilities. In a small, but nevertheless significant critique of this book, I note that Barrs perhaps should have paid more attention to the Extended Reticular-Thalamic Activating System (ERTAS). Another area of criticism relates to subjectivity, as Baars does not fully address the subjective nature of consciousness in his model of consciousness.
The theater metaphor, as presented by Baars, has considerable heuristic value, as it allows for a considerable amount of information to be distributed in a concise manner. 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. This book offers an invaluable introduction to the field, brilliantly weaving together the various theories that have emerged as scientists continue their quest to uncover the profound mysteries of the mind–and of human nature itself. 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. While some knowledge of neuroscience is probably helpful, Baars goes out of his way to make a potentially over technical topic understandable. Nonetheless, Baars does his part within this text to bridge the Cartesian gap between mind and body, and for that reason alone should be commended. In sum, this book is a valuable resource for general readers, upper-division undergraduate, graduate students, and professionals.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.
ABSRACT:
Baars, Bernard, J. 1997. In the theatre of consciousness: The workspace of the mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (In this short book, Baars illustrates the ‘variable’ nature of consciousness. Building upon this variable nature of consciousness, Baars then uses a theatre metaphor to explore how consciousness creates access to knowledge sources within the brain. Baars contends that consciousness is widespread among all vertebrates; humans differ from other species only in terms of the content and foci of consciousness. Humans are able to use consciousness to synthesize discrete informational entities into new, more complex concepts. Baars notes the importance of unconscious mental processing for human understanding and problem-solving abilities.