Consciousness and the Social Brain

through the eyes and is processed in the visual system reaches reportable awareness. Not all of our actions are planned and executed with our conscious participation. Systems that can, under some circumstances, function in the purview of awareness at other times seem to function with equal complexity and sophistication in the absence of awareness. In the present theory, the explanation is simply that the information computed by these systems is sometimes linked or bound to the attention schema, and sometimes not. The shifting coalitions in the brain determine what information is bound to the attention schema and thus included in consciousness, and what information is not bound to the attention schema and thus operating outside of consciousness.
    This account of consciousness is easily misunderstood. I will take a moment here to point out what I am
not
saying. I am not saying that a central area of the brain lurking inside us is aware of this and that. It is tempting to go the homunculus route—the little-man-in-the-head route—to postulate that some central area of the brain is aware, and that it is aware of information supplied to it by other brain regions. This version, a little man aware of what the rest of the brain is telling him, is entirely nonexplanatory; it is a variant of “the magician does it.”
    Instead, according to the present theory, awareness is a constructed feature. It is a complex chunk of descriptive information,
A
. It can be linked to other information. For example, information
A
may be linked to information
X
, constructing a larger, brain-spanning chunk of information,
A
+
X
. When you report that you are aware of
X
—that
X
comes with the property of awareness associated with it—it is because your cognitive machinery has accessed that larger chunk of information,
A
+
X
, and summarized its contents.
    Visual information is obviously required for visual consciousness. Touch information is necessary for tactile awareness. The information that 2 + 2 = 4 is obviously necessary to be aware of the abstract thought 2 + 2 = 4. Sets of information about oneself, one’s own thoughts andemotions and memories, are required to understand who, exactly, is conscious. All of these chunks of information are part of a normal state of consciousness. By themselves, however, they are merely representations of things. Representations of objects. Representations of thoughts and emotions. Representations of a physical body. It is hard to understand how cognition could scan such a pile of representations and report the presence of awareness. A brain would be able to report this is green, that is big, my elbow is bent, 2 + 2 = 4, I ate ice cream yesterday, but not that it consciously experiences any of that material. It would be silent on the topic of consciousness. But with a schematic description of attention bound to the larger set, with the attention schema, cognition can scan the available information and on that basis conclude that awareness is present—not only that
X
is so, but that I am aware of
X
. With that we have an account of where consciousness comes from, what it is, what its adaptive value is, how we introspect about it, and how we report on it.
    Again, I would like to be clear on what the theory does
not
explain. You cannot get from the attention schema theory to the construction of an actual, ethereal, ectoplasmic, nonphysical, inner feeling. Like the case of the squirrel in the head, the brain constructs a
description
of inner experience, not the item itself. The construction of an actual inner experience as we intuitively understand it, as we note it in ourselves, as we describe it to each other is not necessary. Whatever we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, it can’t be that, because the feeling wouldn’t have any route to get into our speech. The conclusions, certainties, reports, and eloquent poetry spoken about it all require information as a basis. To explain the behavior of the machine we need
the data set that describes awareness
. The awareness itself is out of the loop.
Strange Loops

    I hardly want readers to get the impression that the attention schema theory is tidy. When you think about its implementation in the brain, it quickly becomes strange in ways that may begin to resemble actual human experience. This final section of the chapter summarizes one of the stranger complexities of the theory. I will discuss more complexities in later chapters.
    If the