creators_name: Baars, Bernard
creators_name: McGovern, Katharine
editors_name: Max, Velmans
type: bookchapter
datestamp: 2000-08-28
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:23
metadata_visibility: show
title: Cognitive views of consciousness:What are the facts? How can we explain them?
ispublished: pub
subjects: cog-psy
full_text_status: public
keywords: consciousness, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, attention, awareness
abstract: At this instant you, the reader, are conscious of some aspects of the
act of reading --- the color and texture of THIS PAGE, and perhaps the 
inner sound of THESE WORDS. But you are probably not aware of the
touch of your chair at this instant; nor of a certain background taste in your mouth, nor that monotonous background noise, the soft sound of music, or the complex syntactic processes needed to understand THIS PHRASE; nor are you now aware of your feelings about a friend, the fleeting events of several seconds ago, or the multiple meanings of ambiguous words, as in THIS CASE. Even though you are not currently conscious of them, there is good of evidence that such unconscious events are actively processed in your brain, every moment you are awake.
When we try to understand conscious experience we aim to explain 
the differences between these two conditions: between the events in your
nervous system that you can report, act upon, distinguish, and
acknowledge as your own, and a great multitude of sophisticated and
intelligent processes which are unconscious, and do not allow these
operations. 

date: 1996
date_type: published
publication: The Science of Consciousness: Psychological, Neuropsychological, and Clinical Views.
publisher: Routledge
refereed: TRUE
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Recommended Readings
Baars, B. J. (1988). A COGNITIVE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Crick, F. (1994). THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: THE SCIENTIFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL. New York, Little, Brown.
Flanagan, O. (199x) CONSCIOUSNESS RECONSIDERED. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
James, W. (1893). PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER VERSION. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

citation:   Baars, Bernard and McGovern, Katharine  (1996) Cognitive views of consciousness:What are the facts? How can we explain them?  [Book Chapter]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/944/1/BKintro.htm