Consciousness and the Social Brain

just because a yellow car is nearby. Your visual system would not normally bind together features that mismatch in location. In the same manner, in the present speculation, you would not bind together
A2
and
V
because of the mismatch in spatial structure. In contrast, the two chunks of information
A1
and
V
are mutually compatible.
A1
is a model of awareness attributed to your own location, and V is visual information about an apple as seen from your own spatial location. The natural conjunction to construct would be
A1
+
V
.
    As a result, in this speculation, your brain constructs two representations. One is a larger, bound representation,
A1
+
V
, the representation that defines your conscious experience of the green apple. When you introspect, that is, make decisions about the properties of that data set, you are able to report that you are looking at an apple and that it has a set of properties attached to it including color, shape, location in space, and your awareness of it. The awareness, the experienceness, is bound to the visual information. It acts like color. It acts like a perceptual feature bound to the other features that define the apple.
    The second representation is
A2
, a representation that is not bound to specific visual properties. This second representation describes a somewhat ethereal, invisible stuff of intelligence or of mental energy or of experience that is inside John and that is emanating out of him toward the apple.
    In this speculation, your brain constructs your own awareness (a model of your own attentional state) just as it constructs an awareness for John (a model of John’s attentional state). The two models are similar in nature. They are both models of intelligent, attentive processing. They both depend on the same underlying neuronal machinery. The difference between them is that the awareness that you construct for yourself is tightly bound to the sensory information about the apple, whereas the awareness that you construct for John is not.
Resonance

    If the present theory is correct, then awareness is the brain’s way to represent attention. But attention is the process of enhancing a representation. The consequence is a resonance loop. Your own awareness, in this theory, is locked in a positive feedback loop with your own attention. The two boost each other. One affects the other; the other affects the one. The brain’s representation of something and the something that is being represented blend together.
    In contrast, in constructing a model of someone else’s attentional state, no such resonance exists. The loop is open rather than closed. You may construct a model of John’s attention, but that model in your brain will have no direct effect on his attention, and his attention will not directly operate on your brain’s models.
    In the attention schema theory, this property of resonance may be the most profound difference between constructing your own awareness and constructing an awareness that you attribute to someone else. The two processes may be similar and may rely on similar mechanisms in the brain, but they should not be equated with each other. In this theory, constructing your own awareness necessarily has a different dynamic.
Failures of the System: Group Consciousness

    If the speculations above are correct, if distinguishing your awareness from John’s awareness is a matter of the subtleties of computation, then errors in those computations should occur at least some of the time. Earlier in this chapter, I gave the example of a yellow car next to a red house. You would not normally perceive the house to be yellow. But the fact is that, occasionally, the visual system makes mistakes of exactly this sort—false conjunctions. If you glance at the scene and pay it little attention, you are prone to make that type of error. Similarly, in the social domain, in the process of constructingmodels of minds, a brain might make false conjunctions. For example, it should be possible on occasion to construct the false conjunction of
A1
+
A2
, joining your model of your own awareness with your model of John’s awareness. In that case, you are constructing a false informational model in which a single awareness is shared by you and someone else. This false conjunction is tantamount to a consciousness illusion.
    Consider again the case of you and John looking at an apple. The visual information about the apple is perspective specific. It is consistent with your own