Consciousness and the Social Brain

as constructing someone else’s awareness. When you look at a green apple you experience a vivid consciousness of green. When John looks at a green apple and you are observing him, you may note that he is aware of the apple, you may even get the impression of an awareness emanating from him, but you do not reconstruct his vivid consciousness of green in the same way that you construct your own. You do not feel privy to John’s experience.
    Here I offer five speculations to explain the difference in constructing your own awareness and attributing awareness to someone else. All five of these speculations are extrapolations from, applications of, or interpretations of, the attention schema theory. They are not rival explanations. All five might contribute. They are, however, speculations and should be taken with some reasonable skepticism.
Richer and More Continuous Information about Yourself

    In the present theory, you construct a model of your own awareness and a model of John’s awareness. Your model of your own awareness, let us call it
A1
, is based on a rich set of internally accessible information that is continuously present. Your model of John’s awareness, let us call it
A2
, is based on limited observation and relies on imperfect cues such as gaze direction, facial expression, and body posture. It may be, therefore, that
A1
is simply a more robust, more detailed, or more strongly activated representation than
A2
, much as, for example, the sound of your own voice is inevitably more resonant and richer than the sound of someone else’s voice.
Interaction with Somatosensory Processing

    In Chapter 6 I discussed the possible link between awareness and somatosensory processing. Mentally focusing on a part of the body can prime the sense of touch, in effect making you more sensitive in that body part. 1 The assignment of
A1
, your model of your own awareness, to a location inside your own body could cause this type of priming. It could subtly activate the processing of body-related sensory signals. That added component may contribute to making
A1
more “vivid” or “present” than
A2. A1
might come with a subtle enhancement of touch or pressure, whereas
A2
, assigned to a distant location, does not.
Awareness of Someone Else’s Awareness

    In the present theory, you can construct a model of someone else’s attentional state (assigning awareness to someone else), and you can also construct a model of your own attentional state (assigningawareness to yourself). The two models may depend on similar neuronal machinery, but they are two different chunks of information. If you construct a model of someone else’s attentional state, then in no sense are you yourself aware of it. You have assigned the property of awareness to the other person, not to yourself. In the present hypothesis, to process someone else’s attentional state, thus to assign awareness to someone else, and at the same time to be aware that you are doing it requires an extra layer. It requires a model of how your own attentional state is focused on someone else’s attentional state. It requires the compound, bound set of information:
    [I] [am aware] [John is aware].

    By the logic of the attention schema theory, much of the attribution of awareness to other people may well occur outside of one’s own consciousness. The attention schema theory makes a distinction between constructing your own awareness, constructing a model of someone else’s awareness, and constructing your own awareness that someone else is aware.
The Importance of Personal Perspective

    You and John are both looking at an apple. Your brain contains three relevant chunks of information. The first is information that represents your own awareness,
A1
. The second is your reconstruction of John’s awareness,
A2
. The third is visual information,
V
, that represents the apple. Which of these chunks of information will be bound together into a single, larger representation? Will you construct
A1
+
V
, or
A2
+
V
?
    The difficulty with
A2
+
V
is that it contains incompatible spatial information.
A2
, your model of John’s awareness, contains a spatial structure in which awareness has a source inside John. The visual information,
V
, however, is perspective specific. It is information about theapple as seen from your spatial perspective. The two chunks of information,
A2
and
V
, are not compatible with each other.
    You would not normally perceive a red house to be yellow