On Consciousness & the Brain with Bernard Baars
Consciousness is a core question of life. Making progress in understanding therefore has an endless number of benefits – philosophical, scientific, medical, and practical.
People have perceived the conscious brain for centuries, as the great nexus of human life - of social relationships, of personal identity and life history, and in emerging challenges. Consciousness is the encounter of biology with the present moment.
There are many ways to think about consciousness in the long history of human ideas - in philosophy, biology, the humanities, and the arts. If there is a chasm between subjectivity and the brain, it has not been discovered so far. Indeed, we have a growing understanding of many relationships between the structure and functions of the brain and our own private experiences.Global Workspace (GW) ideas emerged over the last half century of experimental studies on conscious and unconscious brain events. The emerging science tends to avoid traditional dichotomies between subjectivity and the physical brain.
There is no evidence for such a gap, and there is a great deal of evidence for the opposite.
GWT provides a widely used framework for our rapidly growing understanding. GWT has developed inductively, with the best evidence available. Global Workspace provides a set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been in the last twenty years. Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) is the most current version of GWT – attempting to take into account the complexities of the living brain.
Many therapeutic approaches can be seen in this framework, including psychodynamics and depth psychology, but also cognitive behavioral techniques.
In each episode of our podcast "On Consciousness with Bernard Baars," we will explore and discuss the emerging evidence.