Chapter
Five
The theatre
multiple decentralised networks (2005a, pp. 47–48), but in GWT consciousness
is required to integrate and coordinate these otherwise autonomous networks.
So, the brain turns out to be highly centralised after all. How exactly this kind of
integrative function might be achieved by virtue of things in the spotlight being
conscious is a question not addressed by Baars, and one we will return to in Chap-
ter 11, on the function of consciousness.
On this theory, what makes an event conscious is that it is being processed within
the global workspace and is made available to the rest of the (unconscious) sys-
tem. So, when you drive with full attention, information pertaining to the red
traffic light is processed in the global workspace. When your workspace is filled
with philosophical speculations and imagined conversations, the red light is no
longer in the spotlight on the stage, and is relegated to the fringe or even to the
darkness.
Baars’s preferred method of investigation is to treat consciousness as a continu-
ous variable, contrasting ‘more conscious’ with ‘less conscious’ events, while hold-
ing the contents of experience constant. He calls this way of looking for the NCCs
‘contrastive analysis’, and says it could be adapted to test predictions specifically
of GW theories. Experiments using scanning or other methods might be designed
to find out what processes in the brain are involved when the same thing is right
in the spotlight of focal consciousness, in the less conscious fringe, or outside
consciousness altogether.
An example is the fading of words into short-term memory. The same words
might be at one time in conscious inner speech (in the bright spot on the stage),
then fade into unconscious but easily accessible working memory (still on the
stage but out of the spotlight), and then become conscious again (move back
into the light) when retrieved, or alternatively fail to be retrieved (leave the stage
altogether). Any complete theory of consciousness has to explain the difference,
says Baars. Rather than worrying about the hard problem, we should get on with
the task of finding out what makes events more or less conscious.
We can now assess GWT by its answers to our three questions: 1) Why is there
subjective experience at all? 2) What makes some events conscious and others
unconscious? 3) Does it posit a mental or neural theatre, and if so, is it a pernicious
Cartesian theatre?
On the last point, GWT obviously involves theatres, but Baars (1997a, p. 292)
argues that ‘Working theatres are not just “Cartesian” daydreams’ and that fear of
the Cartesian theatre is misplaced, for no one believes in a single point at which
everything comes together, and his theory does not require it. Yet he does argue
for something like a convergence zone somewhere in the brain. He claims that
‘there is indeed a place in the visual system where “it all comes together” ’, and
that this may be involved in constructing the global workspace. He likens the
visual system to a (rather complicated) staircase, at the top of which ‘The brain
regions for object recognition appear to be where the contents of consciousness
emerge’ (in Blackmore, 2005, pp. 16, 13). He adds that the spotlight might corre-
spond to some kind of attention-directing mechanism, and that research on the
self-systems which construct inner speech and provide a running narrative on our
lives could usefully be guided by the metaphor of a theatre. Despite his rejection
of ‘Cartesian daydreams’, Baars does assume that at any given time some things
‘all of our unified
models of mental
functioning today are
theatre metaphors; it is
essentially all we have’(Baars, 1997a, p. 301; also
1997b, p. 7)