Bernard Baars
Affiliated Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology
The Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla, California, United States
Profile – Bernard Baars (b. 1946)
Born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Bernard Baars moved to California with his family in 1958. He trained as a language psychologist before moving into consciousness studies. He says that living with cats makes it seem obvious they are conscious, with ethical implications for dealing with animals, babies, foetuses, and each other. His well-known global workspace theory was inspired by artificial intelligence architectures in which expert systems communicate through a common blackboard or global workspace. He describes conscious events as happening ‘in the theatre of consciousness’, where they appear in the bright spotlight of attention and are broadcast to the rest of the nervous system. He advocates investigating consciousness through the method of ‘contrastive analysis’: comparing closely matched conscious and unconscious events. He was Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, and co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, as well as the journal Consciousness and Cognition and the online resource Science and Consciousness.
More biographical information
Dr. Baars’ biography is available here.
Details regarding Dr. Baars’ latest book "On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity - Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory" (Nautilus Press, May 2019) can be found here and here, and on his new website, detailed above.
Twitter: @BernardJBaars
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Books preview here.
Baars, B. J. (1997a). In the theatre of consciousness: Global workspace theory, a rigorous scientific theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, 292–309. Commentaries and author’s response pp. 310–364. Journal record (abstract only) here. Direct PDF download here.
Baars, B. J. (1997b). In the theater of consciousness: The workspace of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Books preview here.
Baars, B. J. (1999). There is already a field of systematic phenomenology, and it’s called ‘psychology’. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (2–3), 216–218. Also in F. J. Varela and J. Shear (Eds) (1999). The view from within (pp. 216–218). Thorverton, Devon: Imprint Academic. Journal record (abstract only) here. Amazon preview here.
Baars, B. J. (2005a). Global workspace theory of consciousness: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 45–53. Journal record (abstract only) here. Direct PDF download here.
Baars, B. J. (2005b). Subjective experience is probably not limited to humans: The evidence from neurobiology and behaviour. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 7–21. Journal record (abstract only) here.
Baars, B. (2012). The biological cost of consciousness. Nature Precedings. Full text here.
Baars, B. J., and Gage, N. M. (2010). Cognition, brain and consciousness: Introduction to cognitive neuroscience. 2nd ed. Burlington, MA: Academic. Google Books preview here.
Baars, B. J., and Franklin, S. (2009). Consciousness is computational: The LIDA model of global workspace theory. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 1, 23–32. Journal record (abstract only) here. Direct PDF download here.
Boly, M., Seth, A. K., Wilke, M., Ingmundson, P., Baars, B., Laureys, S., Edelmans, D. B., and Tsuchiya, N. (2013). Consciousness in humans and non-human animals: Recent advances and future directions. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, article 625. Open-access full text here.
Video
The biological basis of conscious experience: Global workspace dynamics in the brain. Lecture, Evolution and Function Summer School, University of Montreal, July 2012
How consciousness functions. Excerpt from Thinking Allowed, August 2010
Audio
The hard science of consciousness research. The Connectome podcast, December 2016