Chapter
Five
The theatre
further effect, ‘igniting the glow of conscious qualia, gaining entrance to the Car-
tesian Theater, or something like that’ (Dennett, 2001b, p. 223). ‘Those who har-
bour this hunch are surrendering just when victory is at hand,” says Dennett (ibid.),
because global availability just is a conscious state. Consciousness is like ‘fame in
the brain’ or ‘cerebral celebrity’; fame is not something in addition to being well
known, nor is consciousness. When Dehaene says in his later book Consciousness
and the Brain simply that ‘consciousness is global information broadcasting within
the cortex’ (2014, p. 13, our italics), he seems to endorse the ‘there’s nothing extra’
idea. But when he continues the sentence – ‘it [consciousness] arises from a neu-
ronal network whose raison d’être is the massive sharing of pertinent information
throughout the brain’ (p. 13, our italics) – space is opened up again for the other
interpretation: that once it’s been shared, something else happens to the infor-
mation to make it conscious.
So how should we interpret GWTs? Especially since being given a new neural
spin by Dehaene, they have remained popular, but like many if not most current
theories of consciousness, they also evade or are ambiguous about the critical
question of what actually makes something conscious. This is true of the many
spin-outs and implementations of the theory (e.g. Maia and Cleeremans, 2005;
Gaillard et al., 2009; Raffone and Pantani, 2010) as well as its main expositions. Thus
the British neuroscientist David Rose concludes that ‘It is difficult to keep in sight
what consciousness actually is in global workspace theories, let alone its source’
(2006, p. 222). In particular, GWTs can often raise rather than answer the questions
‘is consciousness the cause or the result of access to the global workspace?’ and ‘is
global availability a consequence of or an explanation for consciousness?’ (p. 223).
One question to ask is whether the brain is actually organised with a GW, and
what precisely this would mean (Dehaene, 2014). If it is, then we must ask
whether entry to the GW is a cause or a consequence of something becoming
conscious. Either way, we must then decide whether just being in the GW bright
spot accounts for the blueness of blue or the feeling of observing your mental
images, or whether something more is needed to turn the contents of the GW
into subjective experiences. For Dehaene (2014, p. 262), there is no question that
‘Once our intuition is educated by cognitive neuroscience’, the hard problem will
be revealed as non-existent. On the basis of what we have learned about the the-
atres of the mind so far, do you agree?
THEORIES WITHOUT THEATRES?
Getting rid of the idea that we need a theatre of some kind – that is, a distinc-
tion between things that are in or out of consciousness, or between bits of brain
where consciousness does or doesn’t happen – is vastly difficult. Some of the
simplest ways of doing it are identity theory, which equates conscious experi-
ences with brain activity, and the eliminative materialism espoused by Paul and
Pat Churchland (e.g. P. M. Churchland, 1981; P. S. Churchland, 2002), which thinks
there is nothing to be explained beyond the material. Paul Churchland is happy
to talk about qualia such as the redness of the red light, and even to revel in them
as what makes life worth living, but denies there is any special problem of subjec-
tivity. He likes to take lessons from the history of science. ‘Electromagnetic waves
don’t cause light; they’re not correlated with light; they are light. That’s what light
‘the theatre metaphor
seems to have outlived
its usefulness’(Rose, 2006, p. 223)WHAT IS CONSCIOUS
NOW?