Consciousness and the Social Brain

perspective and inconsistent with John’s perspective. You see the apple from the perspective of your own gaze and your own location in the world and so bind it to a model of your own mind, not to a model of John’s mind. But now consider a different item: an emotion (
E
) such as embarrassment or joy. An emotion does not have a specific visual perspective. It does not have the same spatial or directional clues that clearly associate it with your particular location in the world. If the present speculations are correct, then you should tend more often to confuse who exactly is experiencing the emotion. When feeling joyful, you might tend incorrectly to attribute joyfulness to others nearby. When watching someone make an embarrassing gaff, you might not know precisely who is more embarrassed, you or the other person. If you incorrectly bind
A1
+
E
and, at the same time,
A2
+
E
, attributing the same emotional feature to two models of awareness, then you have in effect constructed the compound and nonsensical representation of
A1
+
A2
+
E
. You have bound
A1
and
A2
into the same larger representation.
    That false conjunction is tantamount to group consciousness—the illusion that you are joined to other people’s awareness, that you share a single awareness with the company around you, with a mob like the famous shared-consciousness party crowd at Woodstock, with a spouse you’ve come to know so well that you feel as though you are sharing his or her thoughts, or with a good friend, a comrade who has passed through intense emotional experiences with you. This sort of nonstandard consciousness, the joining of awareness, comes straight from theworld of alternative spirituality and pseudoscience and makes no sense in traditional views of consciousness. If consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, if it is a feeling generated by the information in your brain, then how can two people share it? How can the consciousness from your brain merge with the consciousness from John’s brain? The claim must be myth or silliness. People must be making it up. There is no mechanism for people to experience consciousness in that way.
    Yet, in the attention schema theory, although you cannot literally share someone else’s awareness, you can have the illusion. Because awareness is
described
by the brain rather than produced, because it is a chunk of information constructed by the brain, it is always possible for the brain to construct a nonstandard or dysfunctional model. Experiences that may seem scientifically anathema, such as the experience of a shared consciousness, or an out-of-body experience in which one’s consciousness seems to float free of the body, or multiple personality disorder in which many conscious agents seem to exist in the same head—all of these experiences are extremely hard to explain if consciousness is truly an ethereal feeling that emerges from the brain in the traditional view. But they are easy to explain if consciousness is computed information—if it is a rich, complex description constructed by the brain. Altered states of consciousness are simply altered versions of the descriptive model.
Failures of the System: Multiple Personalities

    The multiple personality disorder, or the dissociative identity disorder as it is officially called, is characterized by a set of different conscious minds, each with its own personality, present in the same brain. 2 Some patients have only two identities and others have many. There is considerable disagreement about whether it is a real disorder that arises naturally or whether it is the result of therapists inadvertently conveying expectations and convincing their patients to act in that manner.
    To have different personalities in the same brain is normal. We all have that condition. At home, in one context, with my five-year-old son, I act one way. At work, in another context, I behave in a different way. A forty-year-old man visits his high school buddies and slips into an adolescent personality. A woman switches from a motherly personality to a tough business personality.
    The dissociative identity disorder is different from normal social behavior in two key ways. One is that the different personalities have separate memories. When Fred is expressed, he can’t remember events or has a hazy memory of events that took place when George was in control.
    A second characteristic is that the personalities switch in sudden phase transitions. The transition