Consciousness and the Social Brain

is rapid; two personalities do not generally overlap in their control. These switches are not always under the voluntary will of the patient. Somehow one personality wins out and pops to the top, and then, after a while, another personality wins.
    The symptomology is so sensational that it has rather strained the credulity of many scientists, clinicians, and trial juries. Patients are often simply not believed. The condition probably occurs at a higher rate than is reported, given how stigmatized it is and how often it is disregarded as made-up nonsense or as a convenient excuse for bad behavior.
    One probable reason for the skepticism is that, although our culture has a mix of many different views on consciousness, most of these views are incompatible with having more than one consciousness in the same head. In religious views of consciousness, a spirit occupies the space inside us; in which case suddenly developing more than one spirit is nonsensical or perhaps even heretical. For people who have naturalistic views of consciousness, the typical view is that consciousness arises from the functioning of the brain; in which case, again, it is difficult to understand how two inner feelings can arise from the functioning of the same brain, or why the two experiences would take turns controlling the body. Multiple personality disorder is simply inconsistent with most commonly held theories of consciousness.
    But what about the attention schema theory? Does it at least allow for the theoretical possibility of multiple personalities? If awareness itself is a model constructed by the brain, then the possibility of several models competing with each other, alternating in phase transitions, is not only theoretically possible but also predicted. That condition should occur at least sometimes in some people.
    The notion that two perceptual models might compete and alternate with each other is well accepted. Examples abound. In the famous Necker cube, for example, as you look at a wire frame cube, sometimes one surface seems to be in front and sometimes the other seems to be. The image itself is consistent with both perceptions, thus the two perceptions switch in what is called a bistable manner. The brain can construct two different models to account for the visual data, the two models are incompatible with each other, and therefore the two compete. In that competition, sometimes one model wins and suppresses its rival, sometimes the other pops to the top. You can partly influence the phase transitions by staring at one part of the image or another, but the transitions occur somewhat randomly.
    The phase transitions in the dissociative personality disorder are so suspiciously like the phase transitions of bistable perception that they provide rather suggestive evidence that awareness is a constructed, perception-like model.
    I am not certain that I want to go on record as championing the dissociative identity disorder. Perhaps many cases are faked, or mistaken, or misdiagnosed. But I do suggest that the disorder is not nonsensical. It
ought
to happen, at least sometimes, at least to some people. If the present theory of consciousness is correct, then a brain should be able to construct two competing awarenesses, two models, each with its own associations, memories, and emotional traits that are linked to it, and the models should compete with each other, resulting in phase transitions in which one or the other pops to the top and takes over.

9
Some Useful Complexities

    When a person says, “I am aware of
X
,” that statement is of course a verbal summary. It is an abstraction. It is shorthand for a much richer set of information that lies deeper in the brain. Each word has so much meaning behind it that it is like a flag that stands for an entire country. In this final chapter of Part 1 , I explore some of the detail and complexity. Just how many separable components make up the construct, “I am aware of
X
,” and which components are essential for awareness itself?
    The information “I am aware of
X
” could be labeled as
C
, the information set that encompasses my conscious mind at the moment. Moment by moment,
C
changes as new items enter or fade from my consciousness.
    C
can be broken into three large, complicated chunks of information.
    One chunk is information on the nature of “I.” Many theories of consciousness have focused on this understanding of oneself as an entity, proposing essentially that