Consciousness and the Social Brain

answer might be that awareness, awareness itself, the pure essence of it, is specifically the component
MA
. It is the representation of experienceness. It is the brain’s depiction of the relationship between the knower and the known.
    Either approach might do—the more holistic or the more dissected—but I find the more precise, dissected definition to be particularly useful. It refers to the essential part of the larger phenomenon.
    Consider a thought experiment. Imagine removing chunks of information from consciousness one by one. Of the long string of proposed components,
PS
+
MS
+
RS
+
PA
+
MA
+
X
, what would happen as each component is erased? At what point would awareness itself disappear?
    Is
X
necessary? Is it necessary to be aware of any specific information in order to be aware? Can you be aware, simply aware, without any target of the awareness? I have had conversations with colleagues, especially those who study visual consciousness, who scratch their heads and say, “What does that state even mean? I am aware of a color. I am aware of a shape. I am aware of a movement. But without any target of the awareness, how can I have any awareness? It’s nonsensical.” Speaking entirely subjectively, however, I think it is a common occurrence for me. I reach a state in which I seem to be aware, my brain must have constructed that particular feature, but I do not seem to have any specific item about which I am aware. I am simply an aware being. Maybe this state corresponds to my brain constructing
S
+
A
. I have constructed a model of myself as a being with an awareness, but the model is temporarily incomplete because it is not linked to any specific object of the awareness. It may seem nonsensical to be aware without being aware of something, but the brain can certainly construct an informational description that is nonsensical or incomplete.
    What about
MS
, information about my mental self? When I am aware of something, does that awareness necessarily always imply anunderstanding that there is a mental “I” that is aware, complete with its own emotions, ideas, and beliefs? Undoubtedly, we humans fall into lapses when the brain simply does not compute much about the inner life. I would guess that yes, even failing for a moment to process that I am a mental or psychological agent, that I am
me
, I can still be aware of the world around me. Indeed, I would say much of my waking experience falls into this category: a simple, immediate, “animal” awareness of things and events around me. In that case, perhaps my system has constructed mainly
A
+
X
, without much of the
S
component represented.
    It has been suggested that people have two modes of thinking, one in which awareness is inwardly focused and the other in which awareness is outwardly focused. Introspective awareness tends to activate its own distinct network of brain areas, the “default-mode network” as it is called. 1 , 2 Outwardly focused awareness tends to activate a greater range of brain regions. In the present theory, both modes of thinking involve an attention schema. Both involve awareness. But the two modes differ in the extent to which the attention schema,
A
, is linked to information about the self or information about external events. Inwardly focused awareness may be mostly a construction of
S
+
A
, and outwardly focused awareness may be mostly a construction of
A
+
X
.
    What about
RS
, the recalled memories about myself? Suppose I suffer a Hollywood-style amnesia and have no memory of who I am or where I came from. Some essential part of my personhood, my consciousness, is gone. I am wiped clean. Many of my colleagues equate memory with consciousness. I don’t deny the importance of autobiographical memories. They help define the sense of self. They help make me
me
. But I would argue that they are not strictly necessary for awareness. Even if my memories were wiped, if I lost
RS
, I would still be
aware
. I would still be a conscious being, even if I no longer knew precisely who I was or how I came to be where I was.
    What about
PS
, the representation of my physical self? Can I be conscious if, due to some processing lapse or brain trauma, I am unable to compute a body schema? Suppose I no longer understandthat my limbs and torso are here, hinged and shaped this way and that way, or that these limbs belong to me personally. What does it mean to be aware of something, such as a thought, a sound, or a nearby object, and not