Conscious Contents Provide the Nervous System with Coherent, Global Information

Renewed interest in consciousness is evident in contemporary cognitive psychology. While there is reasonable agreement on the empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness, there is less consensus on the shape of a theory. This paper specifies a number of empirical constraints, stated as pairs of conscious-unconscious contrasts, and suggests a rather small set of principles that can organize these constraints in a rather straightforward way. These principles include the following: First, the nervous system is viewed as a “distributed” information processing system, in which highly complex and efficient processing is performed by specialized processors in a relatively independent way. These processors may be “data driven”—i.e., they may decide by their own criteria what is worth processing, so that a central mechanism is not needed to exercise executive power over the specialized processors. However, these specialists do require a “central information exchange” in order to interact with each other. This central interchange has been called a global data base. In operation, a global data base bears a striking resemblance to “working memory.”