Chapter
Five
The theatre
imagery and try to answer the question another
way. Others are more radical and even throw out the
idea that things are unequivocally in or out of the
stream of conscious experience, or that there is any
such stream at all.
In the rest of the chapter we will give examples of
each type, but almost any theory of conscious-
ness can be categorised in terms of its answers (or
non-answers) to the big three central questions. 1)
Does the theory try to solve the problem of why
there is subjective experience at all? 2) Does it try
to explain what makes some events conscious and
others unconscious? 3) Does it try solve one or both
of these problems by positing a mental or neural
theatre? If so, is this a Cartesian theatre? Bear these
questions in mind as you assess the ideas that follow.
We’ll start with the most explicitly theatrical of cur-
rent theories. Bernard Baars’s global workspace the-
ory (GWT) was first developed in the 1980s, and has
since been extended in biocomputational directions
(Baars and Franklin, 2009) and into a fully-fledged
neural theory (by Dehaene and his collaborators;
see below).
Baars begins by pointing out the dramatic contrast
between the very few items that are available in
consciousness at any one time and the vast num-
ber of unconscious neural processes going on. The
best way to think about this, he argues, is in terms
of a theatre. Focal consciousness acts as a ‘bright
spot’ on the stage, which is directed to different
actors by the spotlight of attention, possibly sur-
rounded by a fringe of events that are only vaguely
or potentially conscious (Mangan, 2001; Shanahan,
2006). Meanwhile, ‘The rest of the theater is dark and
unconscious’ (Baars, 2005a, p. 47). The unconscious
audience sitting in the dark receives information broadcast from the bright spot,
while behind the scenes there are numerous unconscious contextual systems
that shape the events happening in the bright spot.
GWT is explicitly based on the ‘Theater Hypothesis’ (Baars, 1988), or ‘A theater
metaphor and brain hypotheses’ (2005a). These entail a ‘theater architecture’ that
includes a ‘theater spotlight’. Conscious events happen ‘in the theatre of conscious-
ness’ or on ‘the screen of consciousness’ (Baars, 1988, p. 31), and ‘Conscious contents
correspond to the bright spot on the stage of working memory’ (2005a, p. 47).
What makes this theory more than just a loose metaphor, claims Baars, is its
grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Backstage are the processes creating
the current context, while the bright spot of attention corresponds to the con-
tents of consciousness, and the rest of the stage to immediate working memory
PRoFILe 5.2
Bernard Baars (b. 1946)
Born in Amsterdam, the Neth-
erlands, Bernard Baars moved
to California with his fam-
ily in 1958. He trained as a
language psychologist before
moving into consciousness
studies. He says that living
with cats makes it seem obvi-
ous they are conscious, with ethical implications for deal-
ing with animals, babies, foetuses, and each other. His
well-known global workspace theory was inspired by ar-
tificial intelligence architectures in which expert systems
communicate through a common blackboard or global
workspace. He describes conscious events as happening
‘in the theatre of consciousness’, where they appear in
the bright spotlight of attention and are broadcast to the
rest of the nervous system. He advocates investigating
consciousness through the method of ‘contrastive anal-
ysis’: comparing closely matched conscious and uncon-
scious events. He was a Senior Fellow in Theoretical
Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego,
and co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of
Consciousness, as well as the journal Consciousness and
Cognition and the online resource Science and Conscious-
ness Review. As far as consciousness is concerned, he
thinks we are at last beginning to see the light.