Consciousness and the Social Brain

especially modern psychology, is a brilliant treatise so hefty that it is literally rather brick-like, Kant’s
A Critique of Pure Reason
, published in 1781. 3 In Kant’s account, the mind relies on what he termed “a priori forms,” abilities and ideas within us that are present first before all explanations and from which everything else follows. On the subject of consciousness, therefore, Kant had a clear answer: there is no explaining the magic. It is simply supplied to us by divine act. Quite literally, the magician did it.
    Hippocrates, Descartes, and Kant represent only three particularly prominent accounts of the mind from the history of science. I could go on describing one famous account after the next and yet get no closer to insight. Even if we fast-forward to modern neuroscience and examine the many proposed theories of consciousness, almost all of them suffer from the same limitation. They are not truly explanatory theories. They point to a magician but do not explain the magic.
    One of the first, groundbreaking neurobiological theories of consciousness was proposed in 1990 by the scientists Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Christof Koch. 4 They suggested that when the electrical signals in the brain oscillate they cause consciousness. The idea, which I will discuss in greater detail later in the book, goes something like this: the brain is composed of neuronsthat pass information among each other. Information is more efficiently linked from one neuron to another, and more efficiently maintained over short periods of time, if the electrical signals of neurons oscillate in synchrony. Therefore, consciousness might be caused by the electrical activity of many neurons oscillating together.
    This theory has some plausibility. Maybe neuronal oscillations are a precondition for consciousness. But note that, once again, the hypothesis is not truly an explanation of consciousness. It identifies a magician. Like the Hippocratic account, “The brain does it” (which is probably true), or like Descartes’s account, “The magic fluid inside the brain does it” (which is probably false), this modern theory stipulates that “the oscillations in the brain do it.” We still don’t know how. Suppose that neuronal oscillations do actually enhance the reliability of information processing. That is impressive and on recent evidence apparently likely to be true. 5 – 7 But by what logic does that enhanced information processing cause the inner experience? Why an inner feeling? Why should information in the brain—no matter how much its signal strength is boosted, improved, maintained, or integrated from brain site to brain site—become associated with any subjective experience at all? Why is it not just information without the add-on of awareness?
    For this type of reason, many thinkers are pessimistic about ever finding an explanation of consciousness. The philosopher Chalmers, in 1995, put it in a way that has become particularly popular. 8 He suggested that the challenge of explaining consciousness can be divided into two problems. One, the easy problem, is to explain how the brain computes and stores information. Calling this problem easy is, of course, a euphemism. What is meant is something more like the technically
possible
problem given a lot of scientific work. In contrast, the hard problem is to explain how we become
aware
of all that stuff going on in the brain. Awareness itself, the essence of awareness, because it is presumed to be nonphysical, because it is by definition private, seems to be scientifically unapproachable. Again, calling it the hard problem is a euphemism; it is the
impossible
problem. We have no choice butto accept it as a mystery. In the hard-problem view, rather than try to explain consciousness, we should marvel at its insolubility.
    The hard-problem view has a pinch of defeatism in it. I suspect that for some people it also has a pinch of religiosity. It is a keep-your-scientific-hands-off-my-mystery perspective. One conceptual difficulty with the hard-problem view is that it argues against any explanation of consciousness without knowing what explanations might arise. It is difficult to make a cogent argument against the unknown. Perhaps an explanation exists such that, once we see what it is, once we understand it, we will find that it makes sense and accounts for consciousness.
    The current scientific study of consciousness reminds me in many