Consciousness and the Social Brain

chapter, the case of color and, in particular, the color white. Actual white light contains a mixture of all colors. We know it from experiment. But the model of white light constructed in the brain does not contain that information. White is not represented in the brain as a mixture of colors but as luminance that lacks all color. A fundamental gap exists between the physical thing being represented (a mixture of electromagnetic wavelengths) and the simplified representation of it in the brain (luminance without color). The brain’s representation describes something in violation of physics. It took Newton 9 to discover the discrepancy.
    (Newton’s publication on color in 1671 9 was derided at the time, causing him much frustration. The philosophers and scientists of the Royal Society of London had trouble escaping their intuitive beliefs. They could not accept a mixture of colors as the basis for perceptual white. The difference between the real thing and the brain’s internal representation was too great for them to grasp. For an account of this and other episodes in Newton’s life, see the biography by Villamil. 10 )
    In the case of white light, we can distinguish between four items.
    Item I
is a real physical thing; a broad spectrum of wavelengths.
    Item II
is a representation in the brain’s visual circuitry, information that stands for, but in many ways depicts something different from, the physical thing. The information depicts a simplified version, minus the physical details that are unimportant for one’s own survival, and with no adherence to the laws of physics. What is depicted is in fact physically impossible. To be precise, we can distinguish two parts to Item II, let’s say IIa and IIb.
Item IIa
is the information itself, which does exist and is instantiated in specialized circuitry of the visual system.
Item IIb
is the impossible entity depicted by that information—brightness without color.
    Item III
is the cognitive access to that representation, the decision-making process that allows the brain to scan the visual representation and abstract properties such as that a white surface is present or has a certain saturation or is located here or there in the environment.
    Item IV
is the verbal report.
    In the case of looking at a rock, we have again
I
, a real physical thing;
II
, a representation in the brain that is a schematized, informational proxy for the real thing;
III
, a cognitive access to that representation; and
IV
, a verbal ability to report.
    The division into four separate items is of course an egregious simplification of what is more like a continuous process, but the simplification helps to get at a deeper insight.
    Consider the case of awareness. Suppose that there is a real physical basis for awareness, a mysterious entity that is not itself composed of information. Its composition is totally unknown. It might be a process in the brain, an emergent pattern, an aura, a subjectivity that is shed by information, or something even more exotic. At the moment suppose we know nothing about it. Let us call this thing Item I. Suppose that Item I, whatever it is, leaves information about itself in the brain’s circuitry. Letus call this informational representation Item II. Suppose the informational representation can be accessed by decision machinery (Item III). Having decided that awareness is present, the brain can then encode this information verbally, allowing it to say that it is aware (Item IV). Where in this sequence is awareness? Is it the original stuff, Item I, that is the ultimate basis for the report? Is it the representation of it in the brain, Item II, that is composed of information? Is it the cognitive process, Item III, of accessing that representation and summarizing its properties? Or is it the verbal report, Item IV? Of course, we can arbitrarily define the word
awareness
, assigning it to any of these items. But which item comes closest to the common intuitive understanding of awareness?
    Consider Item I. If there is such an entity from which information about awareness is ultimately derived, a real thing on which our reports of awareness are based, and if we could find out what that thing is, we might be surprised by its properties. It might be different from the information that we report on awareness. It might be something quite simple, mechanical, bizarre, or in some other way inconsistent with our intuitions about awareness. We might be baffled by the