Bernard J. Baars:
In the spring of 1997 I was following up my Tucson II "Towards a Science of Consciousness" (1996) presentation by preparing for another go-around. This time it was the June meeting of the 1st conference for the newly formed Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) at Claremont College in Pomona CA, USA. I decided to not be as broad as at Tucson, and narrowed the focus to discussing how the Maxwell's Demon scenario and the Turing Machine are essentially the same systemic apparatus ... indicating that consciousness requires a temporal stream of information ... in contrast to the growing notion of physicists-cum-physiologists that consciousness occurs when wave functions collapse and thoughts congeal into reality even though time grinds to a halt in the process. They were relegating consciousness to the same cubby hole as "spooky action- at-a-distance" quantum mechanics.
While preparing my poster presentation I took the time to research the work of other participants, earmarking who I ought to learn from even as I yearned to share my own quirky perspective. As I scanned the ideas of this man I found myself making more enthusiastic margin notations than usual, criss-crossed stars and exclamation marks peppering almost every page.
There have been some extraordinary advances made in the past decade by many competent researchers hoping to draw the mystery of "thought" and "mind" into the light of perceptive understanding. Bernard Baars is one of the rare few who has explored the metabolic mechanisms and organ/organelle interactions and understood the dynamic interactions on the micro and macro scales of activity and experience. His concept of the brain/mind as a focussing alert awareness which uses and reticulately integrates the whole of its structure as a global workspace, looks at the physiological architecture and discerns how it produces observed and experienced behaviors.
In particular, I was most excited because Baars enunciated a certain dynamic for neurally conscious systems, which I had hypothesized for systems generally ... that being the fixing of a system's best-state of Integrity as one which is not so rigid as to be unable to cope with encountered energy or information, nor to be so saturated with energy/information that it can't process any more. The health of a system is a substantial range ... the bulk of a gaussian bell curve ... within which there is lattitude for the processing and handling of many flows of energy and information.
To quote from Baars' "A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness" (1988)
Chapter 10, p347-348
"Consciousness, too, has apparently gathered multiple functions in its evolutionary histroy; we explore some of these functions in this chapter (see also Rozin, 1976; Baars, in press a). But perhaps the most fundamental function is the one we remarked on in Chpater 1: the ability to optimize the trade-off between organization and flexibility. Organized responses are highly efficient inwell known situations, but in the face of novel conditions, flexibility is at a premium. Of course the global workspace architecture is designed to make "canned" solutions available automatically in predictable situations, and to combine many different knowledge sources in unpredictable circumstances."
"If we were forced to choose one premier function of consciousness, it would be the ability of the consciousness system to combine a variety of knowledge sources in order to define a single, coherent experience."
{This is similar to the Integrity proposal that many 'local entropies' integrate into larger singular assemblies. JNR)
The capacities for self-maintenance include goal orientation, constant comparation/evaluation, the ability to draw on resources held dormant, and the capacity to create stimulation in balance with external environments.
This site will include Baars own material, links and access to electronic versions of his books and papers, and reviews and analyses by his peers. It is the slant of the Ceptual Institute website to show connections with the Integrity Paradigm, but also to make clear how work like Bernard Baars' is higly regarded for many reasons.
I n d e x
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