A cognitive theory of consciousness      Bernard J. Baars Cambridge University Press, 1988.   1.5  Some common themes in this book    1.5.1 Conscious experience reflects the operation of an underlying limited capacity system   1.5.2 Every conscious event is shaped by enduring unconscious systems that we will call “contexts" 1.5.3 Conscious percepts and images are qualitative. events, whereas consciously accessible intentions, expectations, and concepts involve nonqualitative contents 1.5.4 Is there a lingua franca, a trade language of the mind? [ NO!!!] 1.5.5 Are there fleeting "conscious" events that are difficult to report, but that have observable effects? [ Yes. They are preconscious coalitions. ] Page 61: Many unconscious specialists can compete or cooperate for access to the global workspace. Once having gained access, they can broadcast information to all other specialized processors that can understand the message. P. 89: Freud has nothing to say about unconsciousness that is due to habituation, distraction, or hypnotic dissociation - those phenomena are all quite obvious to him, and require no explanation. He is really concerned with the dynamic unconscious, the domain in which wishes and fears are purposefully kept unconscious, because their becoming conscious would lead to intolerable anxiety. The dynamic unconscious is a conspiratorial unconscious one that aims to keep things from us. 2.3.3 Spreading activation and inhibition to carry out cooperative and c ompetitive processing 1: Conscious representations are internally consistent and globally distributed Page 77   2.4.1 Conscious experience has a strong perceptual bias 2.4.2 The conscious moment: Temporal limits on conscious stimulus integration 2.4.3 The Threshold Paradox   The reader may already have noticed a problem with our approach so far. Namely, in order to recruit a coalition of specialized processors to work on some global message, we must broadcast it. But it needs the help of other systems to become a global message in the first place. [CT loops allow competing coalitions to aggregate] P.79. Several sources of evidence suggest that conscious events have very wide distribution in the nervous system. Consider: 1  Any conscious or effortful task competes with any other 2  Conscious feedback can be used to gain a degree of voluntary control over essentially any neural event 3  Event-Related Potential studies show that conscious perceptual input is distributed everywhere in the brain until stimulus habituation takes place 4 The Orienting Response, closely associated with conscious surprise at novelty, is known to involve every major division of the nervous system 5  The reticular-thalamic system of the brain stem and midbrain is closely associated with conscious functions 6  All aspects of a conscious event seem to be monitored by unconscious rule systems, as suggested by the fact that errors at any level of analysis can be caught if we become conscious of the erroneous event P.119 4.2.1 The Contexts of Perception and Imagery 4.2.2 The Context of Conceptual Thought - Scientific paradigms as largely unconscious contexts 4.2.3 Intentions as goal contexts 4.2.4 Other types of context 4.3.1 Contexts as stable coalitions of specialized processors 4.3.2 The current Dominant Context imposes unconscious constraints on what can become conscious 4.3.3 Contexts do not completely predict conscious experiences P.130 Model 2. Adds Contexts. ------------ Skip ------------ 4.6  Chapter summary   We have explored the pervasive influence of unconscious systems that act to evoke, select, and shape conscious experience. The evidence for such effects is very strong. Indeed, there is no conscious content without context. P.138  [ jch - chunking ] The GW system is designed especially to cope with novelty and informative stimulation, because it allows many knowledge sources to work together on a single, novel source of information. The premier function of consciousness, we will argue, is to facilitate this cooperative integration of novel information (10.0). The more informative an event is, the more adaptation is required, and the longer the event must be in consciousness to achieve adaptation (5.5). Model 3: Conscious experience is informative -  it always demands some degree of adaptation Table 5.1. Contrasts between information and redundant phenomena*   * The specific phenomena include: stimulus habituation with repetition, stopped retinal images, automatization of practiced skills, automatic visual images, semantic satiation, inaccessibility of stable conceptual presuppositions, habituation of the Orienting Response, and lack of conscious access to routine contextual systems. [ jch - are chunking and the cortical algorithm related or the same thing? Habituation is preconscious. The stimuli comes in, but is not novel. Thus is handled locally. ===>> Adaptation Principle Emotional and biological contexts - do they participate via coalitions? Paradigms - scientific, cultural, etc. assume they are long term predispositions, self reinforcing Parts from "parts therapy", aka IFS, Internal Family Systems The Elephant. ] P.142 But if the input requires a deep revision of our current contexts, we do not experience it either- it is too confusing or disorganized to experience as such, though we may experience fragments and tentative interpretations of the input. [ jch - but we do experience confusion] Adaptation cycle: 1) confusion, 2) learning, 3) habituation Cortical Algorithm 1) Error, 2) training, 3) local handling Dalmatian in Park is a very trivial context! ] P.144 5.1 .1 Context-creation 5.1.2 Conscious experience corresponds to the information stage of adaptation 5.1.3 Redundancy Effects occur at all levels of processing - Perceptual Redundancy Effects - Conceptual Redundancy Effects - Redundant goals also fade from consciousness, even though they continue to operate as goals - Redundancy Effects are not limited to conscious processes: All neural structures adapt to predictable input 5.1 .4 Adapted systems can provide new context for later conscious experiences - The case of conceptual presuppositions: Conscious contents can turn into new contexts P151 - contextualization and decontextualization. P156 - Figure 5.4   modeling reduction of uncertainty. P158 - Figure 5.5  Diagram of Model 3 ----- Skip 159...162 ----------------------- On Jun 28, 2015, at 1:19 AM, Bernard Baars wrote: Hi Jan --- sorry, it's my Dutch spelling reflexes taking over, "Yon" is just not Dutch enough. (:))  Thank you for your typically thoughtful outline of my 1988 book.  I'm increasingly feeling the need for an online seminar on brains, conscious and non, maybe on a weekly basis. Using skype or whatever. I find myself more isolated here (just moved to Oceanside) and it's no fun. I need more "live" intellectual stimulation.  I think my friend Henri Montandon might also be interested.  On the particulars  you raise:  1. lingua franca - spatiotemporal coding is very common in the C-T system. There is a newly discovered semantic "thesaurus" in frontoparietal ventral stream (I'll check that to be sure). There are intriguing "fast insight" (pre-linguistic) moments that also suggest a general-purpose semantics.  However, conscious perception increasingly strikes me as a remarkable mix of particularity and abstraction. Some of these ideas are still inchoate, so they are interesting to talk about, to see if they clarify. If signals really "percolate" (Robert Kozma's term from math) through the levels of the visual "hierarchy" possibly IT/MTL could encode multiple visual feature layers. There is much talk about this kind of thing in recent papers, multiple-scale patterns of representation, but I don't see it yet. It usually takes me a long time to become convinced of something.  2. I agree that "context" is too broad for comfort. The only thing is that the concept is indispensable. Because of residual behaviorism (I believe) the idea of unconscious shaping of conscious contents requires some explicit term of art. "Context" has now been kidnapped by the memory people to mean "surrounding stimuli," so I'm re-labeling it "framing." There is a wave of new evidence on it - but it has long been observed in perception laboratories. The phenomenon is old as the hills, but without a clearly defined term, people simply overlook it. I suppose it could be called "unconscious framing" or "u-framing," to hammer the idea home.  3. I'm tackling the cortical network literature, now grown very large and interesting. It may require changes in GWT, but it's not obvious yet. It essentially comes down to the nature of "quasi-autonomous knowledge sources." Are they patches of cortex? Yes. Are they single neurons? Yes. Are they giant networks? Yes. Are they dynamically changing C-T networks? Yes. Maybe I should adopt Stan Franklin's term "codelets."  4. Memory theorists have always been too narrow in their definitions of terms. There are now some articles that treat synaptically encoded "memory traces" as codelets. There is wide agreement that experiential memories are encoded in very widespread synaptic changes throughout cortex (and connected organs). But many people still talk as if neuronal "memories" are snapshots. They are much more dynamic, and plausibly quasi-autonomous.  The 1988 story was inferential. Now we have direct evidence, and the basic ideas have to be re-checked with the new evidence.  5. The role of consciousness in learning is still neglected, in spite of half a century of evidence. Again, I think it's a leftover from the Dark Ages. It's tempting to write something short and punchy to make that case in contemporary terms, maybe for a Trends journal. Once the csns >> learning assumption becomes clear, all kinds of other issues fall into place --- global propagation is just the input side of massively distributed memory traces in cortex, and memory traces are plausibly active codelets. Suddenly the whole theater comes alive.  Let me know if the live seminar appeals to you. I think Henri will like it if we can find a good time. Others may be interested, too.  Best wishes, Bernie On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 5:13 PM, YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh ‪‬ wrote: I am still in awe of how well you were able to put things together almost 30 years ago.  1.5.4 Is there a lingua franca, a trade language of the mind? This has to be NO, right? Pinker’s the “Stuff of Thought” was fun. 1.5.5 Are there fleeting "conscious" events that are difficult to report, but that have observable effects? [ Yes. They are preconscious coalitions. ] I like snowballing - how coalitions coalesce into the dominant coalition. I’d like to capture that in my little model. [ jch - are chunking and the cortical algorithm related or the same thing?  Adaptation cycle: 1) confusion, 2) learning, 3) habituation Cortical Algorithm 1) Error, 2) training, 3) local handling Habituation is preconscious. The stimuli comes in, but is not novel. Thus is handled locally. ===>> Adaptation Principle - people get used to anything, being rich, being a quadriplegic, anything except chronic pain, random loud noise, and relationships. Context is huge. However, I think you are using context way to generally. Dalmatian in Park is a very trivial context! You also seem to say that the existing dominant coalition is a context. Emotional and biological contexts - do they participate via coalitions? Paradigms - scientific, cultural, etc. assume they are long term predispositions, self reinforcing latent coalitions? Parts from "parts therapy", aka IFS, Internal Family Systems - latent coalitions that have wired and fired together forever. All of these are part of the "The Elephant” as opposed to the conscious “rider”. What follows are my raw notes - mostly just to remind me of things. YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh <> jch.com <> Pixelsmith - Haidt coined "elephant and rider." Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis: We need Love and Attachments,  Gratifying Work, and a Connection to Something Larger. Begin forwarded message: From: "YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh" Subject: Baars 1988 Date: June 21, 2015 at 7:31:09 PM EDT To: "YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh" Baars 1988