Online research in philosophy

We consider Baars’ "Global Workspace" theory of consciousness and discuss its possible representation within a model of intelligent agents. We first review a particular agent implementation that is given by an abstract machine, and then identify the extensions that are required in order to accommodate the main aspects of consciousness. According to Baars’ theory, this amounts to unconscious process coalitions that result in the creation of contexts. These extensions can be formulated within a reified virtual machine encompassing a representation of the original machine as well as an additional introspective component. This computational framework is illustrating throughout using a simple working example.

It would be hard to deny that the experience of emotion is one of the most significant aspects of consciousness. While it is possible to imagine a being who enjoyed some forms of consciousness while lacking any awareness of its emotional states, such a being’s conscious life would be radically different from human consciousness. Yet, I believe that in fact we are surrounded by such beings and, most of the time, we ourselves are such. This is not to say that such beings lack emotions, or that they lack consciousness, or even that they lack a specific sort of emotional consciousness. But to be conscious of one’s own emotional state is much more complex than any of that, and much more rare. The framework within which I want to explore emotional consciousness is that of the representational theory of consciousness (RTC). One of the most exciting and fruitful advances in recent philosophical research in consciousness, there is now a plethora of distinct versions of RTC (see for example Carruthers 2000, Dretske 1995, Gennaro 1999, Lycan 1996, Rosenthal 1985, 1993a, 1993b, Tye 1995). Although I think the ultimate mystery of how or why the brain generates conscious experience remains unresolved by RTC, the theory nonetheless offers many insights into the nature of consciousness, and provides a theoretical viewpoint which addresses many of the philosophical problems of consciousness. In this paper, I want to extend the RTC so as to provide a theory of emotional consciousness and emotional introspection. The RTC postulates that if a cognitive system is conscious then it represents. More, consciousness is a kind of representation. Obviously, not every system that represents is conscious and not every representation generated by a conscious system is a conscious representation. Unfortunately, it is not yet very well understood what are the exact criteria for a representation’s being a conscious representation. Very abstractly, RTC posits that representations which play a certain ‘appropriate’ role within a cognitive system of ‘sufficient’ complexity are conscious representations..

Baars (1988, 1997) has proposed a psychological theory of consciousness, called global workspace theory. The present study describes a software agent implementation of that theory, called ''Conscious'' Mattie (CMattie). CMattie operates in a clerical domain from within a UNIX operating system, sending messages and interpreting messages in natural language that organize seminars at a university. CMattie fleshes out global workspace theory with a detailed computational model that integrates contemporary architectures in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Baars (1997) lists the psychological ''facts that any complete theory of consciousness must explain'' in his appendix to In the Theater of Consciousness; global workspace theory was designed to explain these ''facts.'' The present article discusses how the design of CMattie accounts for these facts and thereby the extent to which it implements global workspace theory.

The subject of consciousness, long shunned by mainstream psychology and the scientific community, has over the last two decades become a legitimate topic of scientific research. One of the most thorough attempts to formulate a theory of consciousness has come from Bernard Baars, a psychologist working at the Wright Institute. Baars proposes that consciousness is the result of a Global Workspace in the brain that distributes information to the huge number of parallel unconscious processors that form the rest of the brain. This paper critiques the central hypothesis of Baars' theory of consciousness.