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A NEUROSCIENTIST, A MAGICIAN, AND THE REAL SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Three brilliant minds, twelve in depth conversations — a grounded, biological way to begin to understand your own consciousness, and how science studies it.

12

Lessons

13

Videos

All Levels

Skill Level

2.35 hrs

to complete

Flexible

Your pace

Examine valuable scientific insights on what cephalopods, card tricks, and antibodies teach us about the conscious brain.

You’ve felt it your whole life — the sense that you’re in here, watching, deciding, experiencing.

You need a guide who has spent a career studying this question from the inside: a scientist who helped found the field in open dialogues with a leading neuroscientist and a professional magician, asking the same plain questions you’d want to ask.

That's this course.

Over twelve video lessons, you’ll watch three working minds: a psychobiologist, a neuroscientist, and a master of misdirection build the case for consciousness as something real, biological, and knowable, one concrete example at a time: an octopus escaping its tank, a card trick that exposes the limits of brain imaging, an immune system that “chooses” without ever being told what to choose. No mysticism or jargon you have to google.

You will advance your understanding of consciousness and you’ll have a framework — one you can use to evaluate every claim about the mind you encounter afterward, and see clearly which ones hold up.

  • Naturalizing consciousness series

Consciousness In Context

Psychobiologist Bernard Baars and neuroscientist David Edelman are joined by renowned master of misdirection and sleight of hand, professional magician Mark Mitton, as they consider consciousness within the larger scope of biology.

Begin this Course

After completing this course you will gain the skills to

  • Distinguish suggestive evidence from settled proof when evaluating any claim about animal or machine consciousness, including headline-grabbing "mind-reading" and AI sentience claims.
  • Spot the hidden constraints behind a striking result in an experiment, a demonstration, or a media claim by asking what was narrowed or controlled before the "reveal," rather than accepting the output at face value.
  • Apply selection-based reasoning (the same logic that explains how the immune system works) to evaluate competing explanations in biology, cognitive science, or any complex adaptive system you encounter.
  • Recognize when a scientific model has quietly become dogma using the historical pattern (from genetics to consciousness research) where a useful starting assumption hardens into an unquestioned boundary that erases inconvenient exceptions.
  • Evaluate consciousness claims about non-human systems — animals, bacteria, and increasingly AI — using a defensible, biologically grounded framework instead of intuition or anthropomorphism alone.
  • Read complex, non-repeatable systems scientifically, extracting reliable patterns from evolution, individual development, or brain states without needing (or expecting) laboratory-style repeatability.
  • Explain, in plain language, why consciousness is biological, grounded in memory, neural architecture, and embodied context, and use that explanation to push back on both mystical and purely mechanistic oversimplifications you'll encounter elsewhere.

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.”
Patricia Churchland, PhD
Patricia Churchland, PhDUC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita, UCSD; author of "Conscience"
“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.”
György Buzsáki, PhD
György Buzsáki, PhDBiggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine; Bestselling Author
“Bernard Baars is both one of the pioneers of the cognitive study of consciousness and currently one of its most important contributors.”
Bruce Mangan, PhD
Bruce Mangan, PhDInstitute of Cognitive and Brain Studies, University of California, Berkeley
“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.”
Peter Ulric Tse, PhD
Peter Ulric Tse, PhDProfessor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

What to know

Develop Expertise In

Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, AI

Shareable Certificate

Add to LinkedIn profile or Resume

English

Transcripts & Downloadable PDFs

In tribute to Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, his son, neuroscientist David Edelman, graciously hosts our discussions in his father's Library.

The common thread running through scientific pursuits of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman was an enduring interest in the relationship between biology and experience. Neuronal Group Selection, or Neural Darwinism, is the culmination of his efforts to reconcile the two.

Nobel Laureate, Gerald M. Edelman

Our journeys into the nature of consciousness are a tribute to my Dad, Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, to his verdant imagination, immense creativity, prodigious output, and many discussions about the scientific study of consciousness and biology that were shared within these walls.

Expertise & Foundation for this Course

Bernard Baars, PhD

Psychobiologist, FAU

David Edelman, PhD

Neuroscientist, Dartmouth

Mark Mitton

Professional Magician

On Consciousness

Course Foundation

Let's begin!

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