Theater of consciousness

In the 17th century Rene Descartes assumed that the pineal gland near the center of the human brain is the "principal seat of the soul." In his book Passions of the Soul, he split man into a body and a soul and emphasized that the soul is joined to the whole body by the small pineal gland through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities.” Link1.  Link2. 

The pineal gland played an important role in Descartes’ account because it was involved in sensation, imagination, memory and the causation of bodily movements. The rest of the body was machine-like. However, he said very little about how the soul interacted with the body. In a different book Descartes expressed the view that everything in the mind must be conscious. In other words, there is no subconscious processing.

Descartes’ theory or model is rejected by most modern philosophers. The prevailing theories of mind are “theater models” of consciousness.

Bernard J. Baars’ In the Theater of Consciousness describes the “theater model” of consciousness as follows.

“The brain seems to show a distributed style of functioning, in which the real work is done by millions of specialized systems without detailed instructions from some command center. By analogy, the human body also works cell by cell; unlike an automobile, it has no central engine that does all the work. Each cell is specialized for a particular function according to instructions encoded in its DNA, its history, and chemical influences from other tissue. And the cell is of course the body’s basic unit of organization. In its own way the human brain shows the same distributed style of organization.

“The theater metaphor is useful because a great array of evidence indicates that consciousness creates access to many knowledge sources in the brain. And yet only a fraction of the brain seems to directly support conscious experience. This consciousness network seems to include the sensory areas of the cortex, perhaps some surrounding areas, and a few subcortical structures; together they provide the stage for the unconscious audience in the rest of the brain. Consciousness seems to the publicity organ of the brain. It is a faculty for accessing, disseminating, and exchanging information, and for exercising global coordination and control” (6-7).

Nervous system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nervous_system

I post this now because I believe it is relevant to my prior post, What is consciousness for? The sensory or afferent nerves are involved in all awareness. The motor or efferent nerves are involved in all volitional bodily movement -- of legs, arms, hands, fingers, head, jaws, etc. So the nervous system links awareness/consciousness and volitional movement. The article 'What is consciousness for?' also links consciousness and volitional movement, but makes only one brief mention of the nervous system.

Very interesting.

What is consciousness for?

'What is consciousness for?' is the title of this excellent article about consciousness and volition. The entire article is there. The abstract follows.

"The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument or convincing empirical evidence that consciousness itself has any direct causal efficacy other than volition. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction."