The Global Workspace Needs Metacognition

Exploring the “Global Workspace” of Consciousness

As an explanatory principle in biology, vitalism has long been in decline, as one discovery after another revealed that mechanisms provide convincing explanations—hearts are pumps, genes are code—for all manner of life’s phenomena. But even through the 20th century, the mind has been vitalism’s last redoubt, because there has been no simple, satisfactory, mechanistic explanation of the most puz...

Learning and Creativity in the Global Workspace

CONSCIOUSNESS: A Mathematical Treatment of the Global Neuronal Workspace Model CONSCIOUSNESS: A Mathematical Treatment of the Global Neuronal Workspace Model

except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now know or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if the are not identified as ...

Global Workspace Theory and Synthetic Phenomenology

1 From a high school world history book in the Year 2580: " October 31, 2517 was a historic day for synthetic-born kind. Cognos Baars, a 10 th generation global workspace nonhuman, hacked into the community hologram board which scrolls across the front door of Wittenberg's Castle Church, issuing a set of 0101 Theses that shocked the world. Written in passionate prose, Cognos elaborated upon rea...

Crossing the Threshold Paradox: Creative Cognition in the Global Workspace

I present a hypothetical global model of everyday creative cognition located within Baars’ Global Workspace Theory, based on theories of predictive cognition and specific work on statistical modelling of music perception. The key idea is a proposal for regulating access to the Global Workspace, overcoming what Baars calls the Threshold Paradox. This idea is motivated as a general mechanism for ...