Search for the Right Questions to Ask.

Historically, scientific advances come after many efforts to work out the right questions to ask. It took twenty centuries for scientists to figure out the right questions to ask in order to determine the existence of atomic elements.

In the case of consciousness, it is very easy to ask questions without empirically testable answers. One misleading question is to study the unconscious by subliminal stimulation. The problem is that subliminal stimulation doesn’t do very much. The really powerful robust phenomena pop out when we study “habituation” or “automaticity” due to repetition.

The right path is to study robust phenomena.

The best way to study unconscious processes is through habits and automaticity, which you get by repetition. It is important to look for robust phenomena like this. 

Recent evidence by Deco et al. (2019) defines a functional “rich club” of active cerebral nodes and connectivities that may function as a dynamic global workspace, one that is not rigidly tied to a single anatomical region of cortex. This leads us to the cutting edge in brain evidence. There may be other ways to identify global workspace dynamics, but this appears to be a well-specified candidate. In this course, we study this and other brain evidence in support of GWT.

The search for the best question:

• Science depends on asking the best question to point to the most useful answers. There are always questions that are not productive or which point in the wrong direction. When a debate repeats over and over again for many years, there is probably something wrong with the question being asked. Many metaphysical questions show that circularity. Consciousness is a major biological adaptation, and therefore should have important survival and reproductive functions.

• A brain-based global workspace integrates many sources of information into a single conscious gestalt, and then propagates that summarized gestalt to other parts of the brain.

• The connectome reveals the major street map of the cortex. The “functional connectome” shows how brain signals travel over that street map. The brain’s version of a global workspace must unify that street map from one experience to the next.

• Recent theory by Deco et al. (2021) has proposed a functional “rich club” of active cerebral nodes and links that may function as a dynamic global workspace, one that is not rigidly tied to a single anatomical region of cortex. This gives us one viable hypothesis for a brain-based global workspace underlying the flow of conscious experiences.