Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book Summary: Consciousness and the Brain , published by Kaj_Sotala on the AI Alignment Forum. One of the fundamental building blocks of much of consciousness research, is that of Global Workspace Theory (GWT). One elaboration of GWT, which focuses on how it might be implemented in the brain, is the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) model in neuroscience. Consciousness and the Brain is a 2014 book that summarizes some of the research and basic ideas behind GNW. It was written by Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive neuroscientist with a long background in both consciousness research and other related topics. The book and its replicability Given that this is a book on psychology and neuroscience that was written before the replication crisis, an obligatory question before we get to the meat of it is: how reliable are any of the claims in this book? After all, if we think that this is based on research which is probably not going to replicate, then we shouldn’t even bother reading the book. I think that the book’s conclusions are at least reasonably reliable in their broad strokes, if not necessarily all the particular details. That is, some of the details in the cited experiments may be off, but I expect most of them to at least be pointing in the right direction. Here are my reasons: First, scientists in a field usually have an informal hunch of how reliable the different results are. Even before the replication crisis hit, I had heard private comments from friends working in social psychology, who were saying that everything in the field was built on shaky foundations and how they didn’t trust even their own findings much. In contrast, when I asked a friend who works with some people doing consciousness research, he reported back that they generally felt that GWT/GNW-style theories have a reasonably firm basis. This isn’t terribly conclusive but at least it’s a bit of evidence. Second, for some experiments the book explicitly mentions that they have been replicated. That said, some of the reported experiments seemed to be one-off ones, and I did not yet investigate the details of the claimed replications. Third, this is a work of cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience is generally considered a subfield of cognitive psychology, and cognitive psychology is the part of psychology whose results have so far replicated the best. One recent study tested nine key findings from cognitive psychology, and found that they all replicated. The 2015 "Estimating the reproducibility of Psychological Science" study, managed to replicate 50% of recent results in cognitive psychology, as opposed to 25% of results in social psychology. (If 50% sounds low, remember that we should expect some true results to also fail a single replication, so a 50% replication rate doesn’t imply that 50% of the results would be false. Also, a field with a 90% replication rate would probably be too conservative in choosing which experiments to try.) Cognitive psychology replicating pretty well is probably because it deals with phenomena which are much easier to rigorously define and test than social psychology does, so in that regard it's closer to physics than it is to social psychology. On several occasions, the book reports something like “people did an experiment X, but then someone questioned whether the results of that experiment really supported the hypothesis in question or not, so an experiment X+Y was done that repeated X but also tested Y, to help distinguish between two possible interpretations of X”. The general vibe that I get from the book is that different people have different intuitions about how consciousness works, and when someone reports a result that contradicts the intuitions of other researchers, those other researchers are going to propose an alternative interpretation that...