Consciousness and the Social Brain

cognitively accessible. Awareness, in this view, is a description, a useful if physically inaccurate sketch of what it means for the brain to focus its attention.
    I imagine that most people will balk at the idea that awareness is based on the physical reality of a complicated, mechanistic, data-handling procedure in the brain. The one seems so ethereal and personal, the other so concrete and mundane. Likewise, Newton’s contemporaries saw white light as ethereal, spiritual, deistic, and holy, and they saw a mixture of the colors, mashed together into one beam, as something dirty, mechanistic, reductionist, and simply impossible to imagine as the basis for white. But it is. When shown that physical item, people almost always generate the construct of white in their heads. Similarly, given the physical process of attention directed atthing
X
, the brain almost always constructs the reportable knowledge that it has an ethereal, subjective awareness focused on thing
X
.
    The key to understanding the attention schema theory is to understand the distinction between the Item I being represented and the Item II that represents it. When we introspect, when we decide what is inside of us, the machinery of decision-making does not have direct access to Item I, the process of attention, because Item I is not itself accessible information. It is procedural. It is something the brain does, not something the brain knows. Instead, the cognitive machinery has access to Item II, and so when we decide what, exactly, we have inside of us, we arrive at the properties described by Item II. We report an experience, a feeling, an aura, something ethereal, something incorporeal, because that is the brain’s schematized way to depict attention.

4
Being Aware versus Knowing that You Are Aware

    In the previous chapter I suggested that awareness is information encoded in the brain. But am I mistaking awareness itself for the abstract knowledge that we have it? This chapter considers the distinction between
being
aware of something and
knowing
that you are aware of it.
    The knowledge that you are conscious is an example of metacognition, or higher-order thought 1 – 3 —so-called thinking about thinking. I do not wish to give the incorrect impression that the attention schema theory is a metacognition theory of consciousness. In the present theory, behind the metacognition, behind the higher-order thought, behind the decision that you are conscious lies the attention schema.
    In 1996, the philosopher Block 4 proposed that we have two kinds of consciousness. Intuitively we feel that we have a raw inner experience of colors, sounds, emotions, and other events (phenomenal consciousness); we also have a more abstract, cognitive ability to think about and report on those experiences (access consciousness). Does the attention schema theory equate consciousness with higher-order thought, akin to Block’s access consciousness, or does it equate consciousness with something more raw and perceptual, akin to Block’s phenomenal consciousness?
    The attention schema theory arguably encompasses both. In the previous chapter I outlined a simplified way to divide thebrain’s processing of consciousness into Items I through IV. Here I suggest that Items I and II can be thought of as more like Block’s phenomenal consciousness. They encompass the raw material (Item I) from which information about awareness is derived and a rich informational depiction of it (Item II). Items III and IV correspond more to Block’s access consciousness. They encompass the cognitive capacity (Item III) to access that information set and extract summary information and the ability to formulate a verbal report (Item IV).
    Suppose that you are looking at a living room. Your visual system contains information about the visual scene. Other processes in your brain are able to abstract from that data set. For example, if you are asked, “Which is taller: the lamp or the piano?” some set of cognitive processes in your brain can tap the trove of visuospatial information and compute that the lamp is taller, a simple relational proposition abstracted from the data set. Similarly, you may compute that the couch is to the left of the chair, another relational proposition abstracted from the data set. These verbalized reports represent a tiny fraction of the information present in the visual data set. It is no use trying to verbalize all the information in the data set. It can’t be