Consciousness Has An Integrative Function

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Understand how consciousness can be seen as the key to understanding our surroundings and organizing our actions.

2 Lessons

1 Video

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40min

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Neuroscientists Bernard Baars and David Edelman examine the controversies of the causal role of consciousness in the brain.

Somewhere, you’ve likely encountered the idea that consciousness doesn’t really do anything, that it’s a kind of glow around the machinery, real enough to notice, but no more causally important than the whistle on a steam locomotive. That idea has a name — epiphenomenon — and it has a specific author: Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s own public advocate, writing in the nineteenth century. It’s an interesting metaphor. It’s also physically impossible, and we’ll show you why in the first few minutes of this conversation.

David Edelman is a neuroscientist, son of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, and someone who has spent a career thinking about exactly this question from the inside of a biologist’s toolkit — so he and Bernard Baars took Huxley’s whistle apart together. If consciousness doesn’t cause anything, it couldn’t have been shaped by evolution; there would have been nothing for natural selection to act on.

So a more compelling question is posed instead: if consciousness is causal, what is it actually for?

Some have argued that consciousness is only a side effect of the brain, but from an evolutionary point of view, major adaptations result from intense genetic pressures, which are causal.

The exact nature of that causality is still under debate. These controversies are exactly what this course is about.

This is a concise, in-depth conversation between two scientists who’ve spent their careers on this question, arriving in alignment: consciousness is fundamentally an integrative function.

Press play, and let’s take the whistle apart.

LEARNING OUTCOMES: After completing this course you will gain the skills to

Refute the epiphenomenon argument on its own terms. Explain why Huxley's "steam whistle" metaphor for consciousness fails — both on its physics and on evolutionary grounds.
Apply the "retrospective" model of consciousness to everyday experience. Use the idea that awareness reflects sensory information gathered a fraction of a second earlier to explain why conscious perception can feel instantaneous despite real neural transmission delays.
Identify when consciousness is doing genuine work versus when it isn't needed. Recognize the pattern: consciousness engages most when input is novel, ambiguous, or biologically significant, and fades from awareness when input becomes fully predictable (sensory habituation).
Explain integration as consciousness's core function, using real cases. Trace the same underlying mechanism — binding separate signals into one coherent, actionable whole — across examples as different as combining sight and sound into a single perceived event, and resolving an ambiguous word.
Evaluate sensory-substitution and cross-modal technologies with an informed framework. Use real examples to assess how new or unconventional sensory channels can be integrated into a unified conscious experience.
Distinguish causal claims about consciousness from merely correlational ones. Apply the reasoning from this course to evaluate other claims about mental phenomena: asking whether a proposed function could plausibly have been shaped by selection, or whether it's more likely a side effect with no causal role.

Who is this course for?

This course is for you if you are interested in, or teach, or study any of the following subjects: Psychology, Neuroscience and Education, Cognitive Science, Health Education, or Philosophy. And anyone working in AI who wants to understand the biological basis of consciousness before assuming machine minds.

Trusted by academics

“Baars was just waaaay ahead of everyone else in approaching questions concerning consciousness as scientific questions. He's done vastly more than metaphor-slinging philosophers to make progress. His preference for testable hypotheses as opposed to dead-end thought-experiments have made a major difference in shifting the topic to a secure knowledge base from which real progress can be made.”

“Eyebrows are no longer raised even among neuroscientists when the topic of consciousness is discussed, largely due to authors like Bernard Baars. His works explain many insights of the complex workings of the brain.”

“Bernard Baars is both one of the pioneers of the cognitive study of consciousness and currently one of its most important contributors.”

“Bernard Baars is the leading thinker behind the Global Workspace theory of consciousness that has been recently championed by top neuroscientists, such as Stanislas Dehaene.”