Consciousness and the Social Brain

onto something. An agent directs awareness at a target. The awareness itself has a physical structure. It has a location. It is a substance like ectoplasm that applies a subtle pressure or heat to the inside of the head, that emanates from the head, that flows through space, that can sometimes physically touch or push on things. Awareness is a fictionalized sketch of attention. It is an effective way to keep track of the essentials.
    Let us use the term
substance A
to refer to the physically impossible entity that is described by the information set
A
. Substance A has a strong resemblance to
res cogitans
, the fluid substance of the soul that Descartes described. It is ectoplasm. It is spirit. It is the stuff that angels, ghosts, and gods are made of. It is the stuff that, in most cultures and most religions, is supposed to survive the death of the body.
    I am not proposing that the brain contains spirit. I am proposing that the brain constructs an informational model and the information describes spirit more or less as people have intuitively understood it for millennia.
    I noted in a previous chapter that, before Newton, people intuitively understood white to be “pure” or lacking all color. Most of us still tend to think of white in that fashion even though we know better intellectually. The reason for the universality and persistence of this belief is that the visual system naturally encodes it in that manner. The signal channel that represents luminance is at a high setting, and the signal channels that represent colors are set low. The brain constructs an informational model of a physically impossible pure, colorless luminance that we call white. In a similar way, in the present hypothesis, people intuitively understand consciousness to be spirit-like because the informational representation in the brain encodes it in that manner. In this view the spirit concept—the diaphanous invisible stuff that thinks and perceives and flows plasma-like through space and time, that can take impressions from the outside world, that can sometimes push on real objects, that normally inhabits the human body but can sometimes flow outside of it, and that therefore ought to be able to survive the death of the body—this myth so ubiquitous in human culture is not a mistaken belief, a naïve theory, or the result of superstitious ignorance, as many scientists would claim. It is instead a verbalization of a naturally occurring informational model in the human brain.
    In this view, the mystery surrounding consciousness stems in part from a logical contradiction. Consciousness is composed of information that says, in effect, “This information is not information.” In describing itself as something else, as a fluidic substance, as an experience, as sentience, it is declaring itself not to be information. It is self-contradictory information. It says, “I am not me,” or, “
P
is not
P
.” No wonder so much logical confusion ensues. On introspection, that is to say on scanning the relevant internal data, the brain finds no basis whatsoever for concluding that awareness is merely information because the information does not describe itself that way.
    Most scientists who study consciousness tend to pick and choose among intuitions. The intuition that consciousness is a substance inside of me, or that it can flow outside of me, or that it can directly touch another person and alert him or her is dismissed as obviously scientifically impossible. That is magic. That is ghost material. Modern scientists are emancipated from ghost mythology. But the intuition that consciousness is subjective, private, an inner experience, a feeling, an intelligence that takes in information, is often accepted as a fundamental assumption, a mystery to be explained. I am suggesting here that all of these introspected attributes of consciousness, whether they seem reasonable or seem magical, are equally based on a cognitive access to and a summary of a deeper data set in the brain. The brain has constructed a model of something, a picture painted in the medium of information. The model is not terribly accurate. At least, the biophysics of neurons and signals are nowhere described in that model. But the model is nonetheless useful because it keeps track of the essential dynamics and the behavioral consequences of attention.

7
Social Attention

    The theory that awareness is a model of attention has a certain advantage. The human brain is known to