From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Dec 06 2009 - 08:36:23 MST
Here's from an interesting piece at Edge.org: ""Signatures of Consciousness: A Talk by Stanislas Dehaene".
Quote:
"..we cannot claim to have a full theory of conscious access. But we do begin to have an idea. This idea is relatively simple, and it is not far from the one that Daniel Dennett proposed when he said that consciousness is "fame in the brain". What I propose is that "consciousness is global information in the brain" — information which is shared across different brain areas. I am putting it very strongly, as "consciousness is", because I literally think that's all there is. What we mean by being conscious of a certain piece of information is that it has reached a level of processing in the brain where it can be shared."
In other words, brain research is showing that what we call consciousness is a global pattern, only occurring when many different modules of the brain are working on the same thing to create a "global neuronal workspace," so that data is stabilized in memory long enough for the brain to work on it. Read the article to see how the experiments are designed and what they show about the functions of consciousness.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html
Tom Buckner
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