Topic: global workspace theory

In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. In this talk, I will examine the validity and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between consciousness and intelligence. I will do so by examining the cognitive abilities associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention Schema Theory (AST), and demonstrating that all three theories speci

The global workspace theory (GWT), proposed by Bernard Baars in 1988, claims that consciousness results from extensive and highly integrated cortico-thalamic activity. According to the hypothesis, conscious cognitive content is globally available in the brain for a variety of cognitive functions such as attention, memory, and verbal reporting. The global neuronal workspace theory, the neuronal implementation of GWT, suggests that various inputs reaching higher-level cortical regions and their feedback onto lower-level sensory representations facilitate a confluence towards a single coherent r

We examine consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations. We propose a formal TCS model, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). The CTM is influenced by Alan Turing's simple yet powerful model of computation, the Turing machine (TM), and by the global workspace theory (GWT) of consciousness originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas D