Consciousness and the Social Brain

Nonetheless, awareness can in principle be verbally reported.
    Some parts of consciousness, some things of which we are aware, are extremely hard to put into words. Try explaining colors to a congenitally blind person. (I actually tried this when I was about fourteen and lacked social tact. The conversation went in circles until I realized he did not have the concepts even to engage in the conversation, and I gave up.) However, as limited as human language is at information transfer, and as indescribable as some conscious experiences seem to be, we can nonetheless report that we have them. Consciousness can affect speech. It is tautologically true that all aspects of consciousness that we admit to having, that we report having, that we tell ourselves that we have, that philosophers and scientists write about having, that poets wax poetic about, can have some impact on language.
    Speech is controlled by muscles, which are controlled by motorneurons, which are controlled by networks in the brain, which operate by computation and transmission of information. When you report that you have a subjective experience of greenness, information to that effect must have been present somewhere in the brain, passed to your speech circuitry, and translated into words. The brain contains information about awareness, encoded in the form of neural signals, or else we would be unable to report that we have it.
    Even this preliminary realization, as obvious as it may seem, has a certain argumentative power. It rules out an entire class of theory. In my conversations with colleagues I often encounter a notion, sometimes implicitly assumed, sometimes explicitly articulated, that might be called the “emergent consciousness” concept. To summarize this type of view with extreme brevity: awareness is an aura or feeling that emerges from information-processing in the brain. When neurons in the brain are active in a certain pattern, the pattern generates or emits or allows for the feeling of awareness, a bit like heat emanating from electrical wires. Awareness is simply what it feels like to process information.
    The difficulty with these common views is not so much in what they suggest as in what they leave out. These views acknowledge the presence of Arrow A (information leads to awareness), but they leave out any Arrow B. Awareness, having been generated by information, and being a feeling or an aura, an intangible experience, is unable to apply mechanical forces to alter a physical system and thus has no means to be turned back into information encoded in the brain. As a result, there is no mechanism for us to say that we have that awareness.
    Strictly speaking, I am not arguing against the concept of an emergent awareness. It is acceptable for awareness to emerge from a physical process. But it must do more than emerge. Whatever emerges, it must also be able to impact the physical processes in the brain.
    All theories of awareness that are unidirectional, that have an Arrow A but no Arrow B, are logically impossible. All workable theories of awareness must accommodate both an Arrow A and an Arrow B. Awareness must be able to act on the brain, to supply the brain with specific, reportable information about itself, or else we would be unable to say that we have it.
The Decision on Which the Report Is Based

    Now let’s take a second step into the brain, from the ability to report awareness to the ability to decide that we have awareness. If wecan say that we have it, then prior to speech some processing system in the brain must have decided on the presence of awareness. Something must have supplied nonverbal information to the speech machinery to the effect that awareness is present, or else that circuitry would not be able to construct the verbal report.
    All studies of awareness, whether philosophical pondering, introspection, or formal experiment, depend on a decision-making paradigm. A person decides, “Is awareness of
X
present?”
    “Do I have a subjective experience of the greenness of the grass?”
    “Do I have a subjective experience of the emotion of joy right now?”
    “Do I merely register, in the sense of having access to the information, that the air I am breathing is cold, or do I actually have an experience of its coldness in my throat?”
    “Do I have a subjective awareness of myself?”
    All of these introspective queries are examples of decisions that can be made about the presence of awareness.
    Here I would