By George Musser
GWT has long been a case study of how neuroscience and AI research play off each other.
In the 1980s Baars put forward GWT as a theory of human consciousness. “I learned a great deal from AI my whole career, basically because it was the only viable theoretical platform that we had,” Baars says.
One provocative hypothesis is that consciousness is the common ground. According to Global Workspace Theory (GWT), consciousness is to the brain what a staff meeting is to a company: a place where modules can share information and ask for help. GWT is far from the only theory of consciousness out there, but it is of particular interest to AI researchers because it conjectures that consciousness is integral to high-level intelligence.
To do simple or rehearsed tasks, the brain can run on autopilot, but novel or complicated ones—those beyond the scope of a single module—require us to be aware of what we’re doing.
Ben Goertzel and others have incorporated a workspace into their AI systems. “I think the core ideas of the global workspace model are going to pop up in a lot of different forms,” he says.
Neuroscientists and engineers invented powerful new tools for probing the brain, leading to a burst of revealing experiments about consciousness.
“Consciousness is the global availability of information,” Dr. Stanislas Dehaene said. | By Carl Zimmer, NYTimes
But many scientists experience it as a kind of creative struggle, filled with practical and conceptual challenges that have never before been solved. We only need to look at the growth in genomics today for endless examples. | By Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific American
In the view of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), consciousness is created by the workspace itself — and so it should be a feature of any information-processing system capable of broadcasting information to other processing centers. It makes consciousness a kind of computation for motivating and guiding actions. | By Elizabeth Finkel, Quanta
Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next.
The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post [and broadcast] their results and monitor the results of the others. | By Steven Pinker, TIME
There is also ongoing debate about the relative role of prefrontal versus posterior regions of the cortex in conscious events.
But Baars and colleagues argue in a 2021 paper that this is a false dichotomy: “This dichotomy is not obvious, given the interactivity of the cerebral cortex as a whole. It is far more likely that many different cerebral regions interact with each other from moment to moment, and that a static ‘front vs. rear’ contest is simply misleading." | By Ralph Lewis, MD, Psychology Today
Throughout her 60-year career, Lenore Blum has developed new perspectives on logic and computation while championing women in mathematics and computer science. The other inspiration was the global workspace theory of consciousness, which describes conscious awareness through a theater analogy.
Consciousness is the activity of an actor in a play performing onstage; it’s under observation by a huge audience of unconscious processors, and they then vie amongst themselves to get their information up onstage to be broadcast. | By Ben Brubaker, Quanta
The computational processes behind consciousness - “Global workspace theories”, for example, postulate that consciousness arises from the presence of a capacity-limited bottleneck which collates information from all parts of the brain and selects information to make globally available. “Recurrent processing theories” emphasise the role of feedback from later processes to earlier ones. Each theory in turn suggests more specific indicators.
Our final list contains 14 indicators, each focusing on an aspect of how systems work rather than how they behave. | By Colin Klein, The Conversation
This architecture was inspired by the global workspace architecture of Baars (1988); Shanahan (2010). Here, at time 𝑡, our 𝑧𝑡 is a snapshot of the content in the global neuronal workspace, i.e. 𝑧𝑡 represented by dynamic cell assemblies linking the far-flung modules comprising the workspace perhaps by oscillating coherently with one another (Dehaene et al., 1998; Fries, 2015). | By Sana Hassan, MarkTechPost
« La première théorie est celle de l’espace de travail global (« global workspace theory, ou GWT », en anglais), proposée par le psychologue Bernard Baars et étayée par les neurobiologistes Stanislas Dehaene et Jean-Pierre Changeux. Et pour aller très vite, ce serait cette diffusion (ou « broadcast ») aux multiples sous-systèmes cognitifs de notre cerveau (attention, mémoire de travail, planification, etc.) qui nous ferait percevoir cette étrange impression subjective qu’on appelle la conscience. »| By SciencePresse
From Plato to Einstein to Newton, consciousness has teased the minds of intellectual greats for centuries. We still don’t have an answer. I know I’m conscious. You’re reading this, so you are too. But when it comes to people in a coma, or those “locked in” due to disease or injury, the question becomes far more difficult. | By Shelly Fan, SingularityHub
Over 100 neuroscientists have signed an open letter calling Integrated information theory (IIT) untestable pseudoscience. Anil Seth at University of Sussex in the UK, who is not a supporter of IIT, says: “There is valuable work going on under the banner of IIT. But there are some legitimate questions about how different theories are presented to the public. ”| By Clare Wilson, NewScientist
This picture of consciousness is called global workspace theory (GWT). In this view, consciousness is created by the workspace itself — and so it should be a feature of any information-processing system capable of broadcasting information to other processing centers. It makes consciousness a kind of computation for motivating and guiding actions. | By Philip Ball, Quanta
In GNWT, the metaphorical stage along with the processing modules were subsequently mapped onto the architecture of the neocortex, the outermost, folded layers of the brain. The (global) workspace is a network of cortical neurons in the front of the brain, with long-range projections to similar neurons distributed all over the neocortex in prefrontal, parietotemporal and cingulate associative cortices. | By Christof Koch, SciAm
Integrated Information Theory vs Global Workspace Theory - The aim is to learn more about the basis of consciousness in the brain | By Geoffrey Carr: science editor, The Economist
Experiments were carried out in 6 independent laboratories and were specifically designed to test leading theories of consciousness, GWT & IIT. Baars' GWT proposes consciousness is generated by core neural architecture that processes largely unconscious information which is integrated and broadcast to a wider network, so that it enters conscious awareness. | By Mo Costandi, BigThink
