The biology of consciousness: Comparative review of Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An anatomy of Consciousness and Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind

Abstract

For many years, most AI researchers and cognitive scientists have reserved the topic of consciousness for after dinner conversation. Like "intuition," the idea of consciousness appeared to be too vague or general to be a good starting place for understanding cognition. Work on narrowly-defined problems in specialized domains such as medicine and manufacturing focused our concerns on the nature of representation, memory, strategies for problem-solving, and learning. Some writers, notably Ornstein(1972) and Hofstadter (1979), continued to explore the ideas, but implications for cognitive modeling were unclear, suggesting neither experiments, nor new computational mechanisms.