Consciousness and the Social Brain

inferred about awareness? As noted above, you can decide whether you have, inside of you, an awareness of something. Therefore awareness—or at least whatever it is you are deciding you have when you say you have awareness—can be fed into a decision integrator. We can make the task even more comparable to the visual-motion task. By making the images extremely brief or dim, we can make the task difficult. You may struggle for a moment, trying to decide whether any awareness of a stimulus is present. The decision machinery is engaged. This insight that conscious report depends on the machinery of decision-making has been pointed out before. 7 , 8
    A crucial property of decision-making is that not only is the decision itself a manipulation of data, but the decision machine depends on data as input. It does not take any other input. Feeding in some
res cogitans
will not work on this machine. Neither will Chi. You can’t feed it ectoplasm. You can’t feed it an intangible, ineffable, indescribable thing. You can’t feed it an emergent property that transcends information. You can only feed it information.
    In introspecting, in asking yourself whether you have an awareness of something, and in making the decision that you have it, what you are deciding on, what you are assessing, the actual
stuff
your decision engineis collecting, weighing, and concluding that you have, is information. Strictly speaking, the neuronal machinery is deciding that certain information is present in your brain at a signal strength above a threshold.
    Now we are beginning to approach the counterintuitive concept that awareness—the mysterious stuff inside our heads, the private feeling we can talk about—might itself be information.
The Representation on Which the Decision Is Based

    In the previous section I focused on the process of decision-making in the brain. I suggested that because we can
decide
that we have awareness, and because decisions require information, awareness might itself be information.
    That reasoning may at first seem faulty. I will approach it here by first giving an obvious counterargument. Suppose that you are looking at a hunk of rock. You can decide that the rock is present and report that the rock is present, and yet the rock is not itself made of information. It’s probably mostly silicate. (It could be argued that silicate, at the most esoteric level of quantum theory, is really just information; but I’ll put that argument aside. The rock is not an informational representation in your brain to which you have cognitive access. It is an object in the real world.) This example seems to put the kybosh on the proposal that if you can decide it is there, then it must be information.
    How can consciousness
be
information? Am I confusing information
about
a thing with the thing itself? Why can’t consciousness be an aura, or a feeling, something that is not itself information but that can affect the brain, alter the signals, and thereby provide information about itself to the neuronal circuitry?
    To get at the issue more clearly, consider the example of the rock a little more closely. Suppose you look and decide that a rock is indeed present in front of you. You can describe some of the properties of the rock. It’s large, it’s sparkling, it’s white and gray, it’s shaped like alopsided triangle. Yet strictly speaking you are not deciding and reporting on the rock itself. You are deciding and reporting on the information constructed in your visual system.
    To demonstrate the point, suppose you experience a visual illusion. A discrepancy is introduced between the real object and the visual representation of the object inside the brain. You look at a rock with illusory properties and are asked to report what is there. What do you report? Obviously, you report the informational representation, not the real thing. Due to a trick of perspective, you might decide it is triangular when it is actually square. You might decide it is smaller than your hand when it is actually larger than your whole body but much farther away than you think. Your decision machinery does not have direct access to the real object, only to the information about the object that is encoded in the visual system.
    The issue runs deeper than occasional illusions in which a representation in the brain is incorrect. A perceptual representation is
always
inaccurate because it is a simplification. Let me remind you of an example from the previous