Current Models of Consciousness
Theories and models of consciousness have been extensively discussed across various fields, including philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. One prominent theory is the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), proposed by Bernard Baars in 1988, which suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of information across different brain regions and is then broadcast to a “global workspace,” making it accessible to various cognitive processes like perception, memory, and action. Another influential model is the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), introduced by Giulio Tononi in 2008, which posits that consciousness is a product of integrated information quantified by a measure called phi (Φ); the higher the Φ, the greater the level of consciousness. Higher-Order Theories (HOT), such as those proposed by David Rosenthal in 2005, argue that a mental state becomes conscious when there is a higher-order thought or perception about that state, essentially making a thought conscious if one has a thought about it. Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory (AST), proposed in 2011, suggests that consciousness arises from the brain’s model of attention, where the brain constructs a simplified model of its own attention processes to control and predict the focus of attention.
Additionally, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart…
