A Unified Theory of Consciousness

A Unified Theory of Consciousness
Andrew Brook
Paul Raymont
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada

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Preface
Our title, A Unified Theory of Consciousness, alludes to three ideas central to this book.
1. A theory of consciousness should if possible give us a unified account of all the kinds
of consciousness.
2. A theory of consciousness should if possible unify consciousness with (other aspects
of) cognition.1
3. Unity of various kinds, especially the kind of unity that Kant singled out under the
name ‘unity of consciousness’, is central to at least the human kind of consciousness.
Satisfying (1.) and (2.) and making the case for (3.) is the core of our project.2
Our account of consciousness is a cognitive account. It treats consciousness as simply a
feature of cognitive (i.e., information processing) systems of certain kinds. Many theorists deny
this, especially philosophers. These theorists urge that consciousness is not a representational or
cognitive property of any kind, and use zombie, inverted spectrum, and other thought
experiments to argue that, for any representational or cognitive property that one can think of,
that property could be present without consciousness. In our view, mounting a critique of such
anti-cognitivism is an essential precursor to constructing a cognitive model. If anti-cognitivist
arguments are left unanswered, it can easily appear as though cognitivists are simply not talking
about consciousness, have changed the topic. It can easily appear that they are merely talking
about correlates of consciousness, not the real McCoy, consciousness itself.
For this reason, before we launch the positive project, which takes up the final six
chapters, we first mount what we hope is a root-and-branch critique of current anti-
representational, anti-cognitivist views of consciousness (chapters 3 to 5).
This book will strike some people as eccentric. It does not obsess about ‘qualia’ and other
putative properties of individual psychological states, so it will strike many philosophers as
eccentric (though we do say something about qualia). But it does not obsess about attention
either, so it will strike many experimental psychologists and neuroscientists as eccentric (though
eventually we do talk about attention). Well, you can’t please everybody! In our view, neither
qualia nor attention captures what is distinctive about consciousness, qualia as usually
understood at any rate.3
1. The brackets are because, as we will see, whether consciousness even is a part of
cognition has been seriously questioned by some philosophers. This will strike non-philosophical
students of consciousness as remarkable but there it is.
2. Owen Flanagan has been discussing the idea of a unified theory of consciousness for
over a decade now (1992, 1996). His ambitions are smaller than ours. He would be happy with a
theory giving a single yet not superficial account of consciousness. We are hoping in addition to
unify consciousness with (the rest of) cognition and to provide an account of the unity/ies
distinctive to consciousness. That the jury is still out on even Flanagan’s project is a measure of
the ambitious of ours. Can we pull it off? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
3. Owen Flanagan has been discussing the idea of a unified theory of consciousness for
over a decade now (1992, 1996). His ambitions are smaller than ours. He would be happy with a
theory giving a ‘single yet not superficial’ account of consciousness. We are hoping in addition
to unify consciousness with (the rest of) cognition and to provide an account of the unity/ies
distinctive to consciousness. That the jury is still out on even Flanagan’s project is a measure of

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Now is an interesting time to be working on consciousness. From the advent of cognitive
science in the 1950s and 1960s up until well into the 1980s, most philosophers and other
cognitive researchers ignored it. Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Daniel Dennett summed
up the situation this way:
Consciousness appears to be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena,
immeasurable subjective states – in short, the one area of mind best left to the
philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of
“phenomenology” into a respectable theory. [1978, p.149]
He could have added that this was pretty much the attitude of most philosophers, too, especially
philosophers who viewed themselves as part of cognitive science. A few philosophers (Dennett
himself, Nagel, Armstrong, Shoemaker) and psychologists (Mandler, Baddeley, Hilgard,
Shallice, Sperry, Posner) worked on consciousness throughout but the temper of the time was
nicely expressed by contrast in the title of George Mandler’s well-known paper: ‘Consciousness:
respectable, useful and probably necessary’ (1975). That he actually felt the need to argue this
says all that needs to be said about the context at the time. Up until about 1985, one could easily
have concluded that in the view of most cognitive and neuroscientific researchers, cognition can
proceed perfectly well without consciousness. Indeed, some of them took that view explicitly.
It was not always so. What makes the phobia about consciousness felt by so many 20th-
century researchers so striking is that until about 1910, consciousness was a central interest of
virtually every philosopher and psychologist: James, Wundt, Stumpf, Kant, Locke, Descartes, ...
the list could go on. Then along came John Watson and behaviourism; except in the hands of a
few diehard philosophers, consciousness largely disappeared from English-language research on
the mind for most of the 20th century.
The situation began to change back in the mid-1980s. The cognitive scientist Bernard
Baars (especially 1988) developed the methodology that he called contrastive analysis (compare
the difference made by performing a task consciously and without consciousness). At about the
same time, the capacity to image the activity of the brain, especially functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), was developed, which allowed scientists to ‘watch’ people’s brains
as they did various cognitive tasks. Now that researchers had techniques better than
introspection, centres of consciousness studies began to spring up very quickly in a number of
universities. Consciousness email lists such as Psyche began. The Association for the Scientific
Study of Consciousness was founded; it will hold its ninth international conference in 2005. Two
interdisciplinary journals devoted to research on consciousness were created, Journal of
Consciousness Studies and Consciousness and Cognition. And so on. From being relegated to
scattered voices in the wilderness for most of the 20th century, consciousness was back.
Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of new work, with hundreds of important
articles and books by researchers as diverse as genetic biologists, behavioural experimentalists,
quantum physicists, linguists, brain imaging specialists, computational model-builders – and by
philosophers. The diversity is remarkable.
consciousness has been said to be so many things: a global workspace, an intermediate level of
representation, 40Hz phaselocked spiking frequency, attention, attention feeding working
memory, a result of multiple constraint satisfaction, a property emergent on brain/world
interactions, an order parameter, a form of self-organization in a dynamic system, a result of a
the ambitionsness of ours.

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certain tensor phase-space processing, a quantum phenomenon, something generated by
microtubules in cells.
There has also been an explosion of new terminology and new theories – just what one
would expect in a field where the subject is intensely difficult and serious multidisciplinary work
is being done for the very first time. Here is some of the burgeoning terminology: access
consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature
consciousness, state consciousness, monitoring consciousness, fringe consciousness, reflexive
and prereflexive consciousness, background consciousness, focal consciousness, peripheral
consciousness, conscious awareness (!! – what is unconscious awareness supposed to be like?).
qualia, transparency, consciousness as higher order thought, higher order experience, displaced
perception ... and on and on. Except when discussing views specifically associated with one of
these terms, we will for the most part ignore them and develop our own terminology as we need
it, connecting it to existing terms only when more light than heat would be generated by doing
so. As to the explosion of new work, we will introduce it when we need to do so.
There is not even agreement on something as basic as what the term ‘consciousness’
should be used to refer to. Many theorists take it to be about a special kind of access to self,
whereas others use the term more broadly and include consciousness of the world. Yet other
researchers just muddle the two together. Some even invent their own special terminology.
Not just philosophers but also some researchers doing empirical work on consciousness
view this lack of basic agreement as a very serious matter:
Despite ... impressive advances in the neurosciences over the past two decades, there is
no consensus [about the neuroscience of consciousness] in view and little prospect of a
comprehensive theory. ... I think that the main factor limiting advances in the
neurobiology of consciousness is ... the lack of a comprehensive description of
consciousness. For want of this ..., the neurobiology of consciousness might well consist
only of linking some phenomena, arbitrarily called consciousness, to the latest
fashionable neurobiological device. [Delacour 1997, p. 127, our emphasis]
One result of the conceptual chaos is that there is currently an enormous amount of talking
past one another in contemporary consciousness research. Theorists think they have a
disagreement when they are really just talking about different things. For research on
consciousness to progress well, it would be a substantial step forward if people could even
agreed on what the research is about.
There is a story about how this book came to be. One of us (Brook) has been working on
consciousness for a long time and relied unreflectively throughout on a rather atomistic view of
representation (see Chapter 1). A few years ago, the other author, Paul Raymont, come to work
with him as a post-doc. To use a famous phrase, Raymont awoke Brook from some dogmatic
slumbers. Since Raymont carried the analysis into new and productive areas on many issues, it
became apparent after a year or so of working together that the natural thing to do was to join
forces. Which we did.4
The book bears a relationship to many earlier publications by the authors. However,
4. Raymont was funded by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada). He reserves judgment on some aspects of Chapter 3. That chapter was pretty much
done when he joined the project. Nothing in the positive analysis of the later chapters depends on
the destructive work of Chapter 3 being completely successful.

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everything has been recast, nothing has been taken over unchanged, so we will not list the
individual publications. Some material derived from Chapters 1 and 3 appears in Brook’s
contribution to Brook and Akins (2005). Some material related to Chapters 6 and 7 appears in
[details of Raymont’s publications to be added when settled].
A great many people have played a role in the development of this book, including many
years’ worth of students in senior and graduate courses on consciousness. Without implying that
any of them would accept everything we say, we would like to thank (in alphabetical order):
Kathleen Akins, David Chalmers, Steven Davis, Dan Dennett, Jeff Foss, Colin Henein, Zoltan
Jakab, Jerzy Jarmasz, Luke Jerzykiewicz, Jamie Kelly, Christine Koggel, Uriah Kriegel, Kris
Liljefors, James Overall, Don Ross, Jennifer Schellinck, Sam Scott, Bill Seager, Rob Stainton,
Edina Torlakovic, Chris Viger, and Tal Yarkoni. Material from the book has been presented at
conferences of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Ontario Philosophical Society, American
Philosophical Association, Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Association for the Scientific
Study of Consciousness, the ‘Tucson’ series of consciousness conferences, Cognitive Science
Society, Ontario Philosophy Society, the McDonnell/Carleton Conference on Philosophy and
Neuroscience, and the 8th International Kant Congress, and at Carleton University, University of
Alberta, Lorand Eotvos University (Budapest), University of Western Ontario, University of
Alabama, University of Louisiana, Waterloo University, Bryn Mawr College, University of
Maryland, and elsewhere. We thank these commentators and audiences most warmly.
References
Baars, B. 1988. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press
Brook, A. and K. Akins. 2005. Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience
Movement. Cambridge University Press.
Delacour, J. 1997. Neurobiology of consciousness: An overview. Behavioural Brain Research
85, pp. 127-141
Dennett, D. 1978. Toward a cognitive theory of consciousness. In his Brainstorms. Bradford
Books, pp. 149-73
Flanagan, O. 1992. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/A Bradford Book
Flanagan, O. 1996. Prospects for a unified theory of consciousness. In Cohen, J. and J.
Schooler, eds. Scientific Approaches to the Study of Consciousness: 25th Carnegie
Symposium. J. Erlbaum Associates.
Mandler, G, 1975. Consciousness: respectable, useful, and probably necessary. In Solso, R. ed.,
Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium. J. Erlbaum Associates.
Nagel, T. 1971. Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness. Synthese 22, pp. 396-413.
Zeki, S. 2003. The Disunity of Consciousness. Trends in the Cognitive Sciences 7: 5, pp. 214-8.

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