Gang Fang's Blog

Concepts

The brain’s processing of information and our experience of that processing. And the experience is what we called consciousness.

Consciousness is our awareness of ourselves and our environment.

Everything psychological is simultaneously biological.

Dual processing: the principle that information is simultaneously processed on separate conscious and non-conscious tracks.

Selective attention: the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus or group of stimuli.

The easy and hard problems in consciousness research

The easy problem is concerned with a mechanistic analysis of neural processes. The Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) is to address this easy problem.

The hard problem is concerns with experience and subjectivity. What do I feel this way? Currently there is an explanatory gap between the subjective experience and biological processes/bases that we can measure. And the 4 major theories to address the hard problem are below:

4 major theories of consciousness

1. Higher order theories:
   higher order processing of stimuli as having multiple meta-layer of representations is central to consciousness. It consider consciousness not functional but a result of meta-analysis. These theories are often challenged by evidences that the anterior area performs only an executive function and not in charge of consciousness.
2. Global workspace theories
   This theory, associated with cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars, suggests that consciousness works like a spotlight, highlighting select information for detailed processing from a vast array of potential inputs. The selected information is broadcasted throughout the brain, creating our conscious experience.
3. Integrated information theory
   This starts with consciousness and works backwards to a physical system. This is challenging to substantiate as producing a quantifiable measure of consciousness is fraught with challenges.
4. re-entry theory:
   The top-down signaling and bottom-up signaling together approximate bayesian inference. This has been largely substantiated by evidences showing that top-down control is correlated to perceptual experience. However, it is concerned more with the local states of consciousness and can’t adequately address the global state of consciousness.

The state of research of GWT:

Global Workspace Theory also has significant empirical support, with evidence suggesting that consciousness does involve widespread communication across many areas of the brain. However, the specifics of how this “broadcasting” of information creates a unified conscious experience remain a topic of ongoing research.