Notes From Bernie 

I’m a cognitive scientist by training, and early on became deeply committed to understanding the fundamental questions of consciousness, volition, and self. My current work might be called the psychobiology of the (un)/conscious brain.

When I got started that was not really allowed in academic psychology, but I persisted, and was able to make a difference over a long period of time. Before nominal retirement I spent about ten years with Nobelist Gerald M. Edelman at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and also learned a great deal from Walter J. Freeman’s Neurodynamics and Robert Kozma. I have long worked with Stan Franklin, the guiding light for LIDA / GWT at the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.

The last comprehensive update of Global Workspace Theory came out in 2013 in a Frontiers paper, and is now integrated into my current book, “On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity” – my latest collection of fully updated works on global workspace theory – from 1988 through 2013.

In my next book for Oxford University Press, I’m currently explaining it in more depth than ever before.

Currently we are seeing a historic wave of brain and psychological findings on those topics, which is so big that nobody is really keeping up with it all. However, with Dr. Nicole Gage, I’ve written an introductory college textbook that I believe does as good a job as possible, called “Cognition, Brain & Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience.” (Elsevier, Inc., Academic Press, 2007; 2nd edition is now in press). I’ve also written a general audience book called “In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind”. (Oxford University Press, 1997), and other works.

I’ve always been deeply interested in the ethical and moral implications of human consciousness, and therefore also in animal consciousness. However, the  current wave of enthusiasm for “conscious computing” strikes me as just another kind of reductionism, in the spirit of behaviorism. The ethical key for consciousness is summarized in the Indic greeting, “Namaste”: I acknowledge the conscious self in you. We are in danger of converting that into “I can reduce you and me to a big Adaptive Neural Network.” Reductions are often proposed for a purpose, and Pavlov’s reduction of behavior to conditional reflexes was horribly abused in the New Soviet Man program, which claimed to be “conditioning” a new human being. I hear very similar talk today, and it seems very disrespectful of a world of conscious beings.

Biologically, consciousness arises with the double cortex, the paleo- and neo-cortex, and the latter emerged 200 million years ago with the mammals. The (u/)conscious cortex in humans has perhaps 80 billion neurons and literally quadrillions of synapses. We do not know the “necessary and sufficient conditions” for the conscious brain, but there is now a great deal of interest. Our current models are exciting but far from adequate. But the conscious cortex, which may emerge in utero perhaps in the third trimester, is our “leading edge of learning and adaptation.”

There is much evidence to that effect.