Abstract
Despite the whirl of controversy surrounding consciousness studies, there is real progress being made in cognitive science towards establishing an empirically-rigorous theory of mind, in both its conscious and non-conscious manifestations. Beginning with a broad overview of clinical and experimental findings bearing on the neural correlates of conscious processes, the author traces the development of several related models that appear to converge upon a central “conscious system”. This extended reticular-thalamic activating system (ERTAS) has been increasingly implicated in a variety of functions associated with consciousness, including: orienting to salient events in the outer world; dream (REM) sleep; the polymodal integration of sensory processes in the cortex (binding); selective attention, and volition. It is argued that the increasing convergence of models from clinical and experimental neuroscience is leading towards a general theory of consciousness which is both non-dualist and non-reductionist.
