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Today I’d like to tell you about an article that you really shouldn\u2019t miss if you\u2019re interested in the various theories of consciousness in the cognitive sciences: \u201cTheories of consciousness\u201d, by Anil K. Seth and Tim Bayne, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience <\/em>in May 2022<\/a><\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The authors start by identifying some of the classic problems in the study of consciousness. The first is the question of subjective experience itself, or, as philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, \u201cwhat is it like to be\u201d you, or me, or maybe even a bat?<\/a><\/span> Next is the distinction between these subjective, phenomenological properties of consciousness and its functional properties, if indeed it has any. For example, has consciousness been encouraged and shaped by evolution<\/a><\/span>? Does it play a particular functional role in the complex architecture of our cognitive systems? And lastly, why do we become conscious of one mental image or other piece of content and not another? And why do any given neuronal states cause us to have particular types of auditory, visual or tactile experiences\u2014or, as philosophers call them, \u201cqualia\u201d<\/a><\/span>\u2014rather than others?<\/p>\n After presenting a table of no fewer than 22 different theories of consciousness, Seth and Bayne go into a bit more detail on four major families of such theories (see diagram above).<\/p>\n Higher-order theories <\/strong> posit that a mental state is conscious if it is the subject of a meta-representation\u2014in other words, when this state is a representation of other, lower-order representations, such as sensory ones.<\/p>\n Global workspace theories <\/strong>suggest that conscious mental states are those that are globally accessible to a wide range of cognitive processes, such as attention, evaluation, memory and language.<\/p>\n