Consciousness and the Social Brain

into place. At that moment, it is no longer possible to have awareness free floating, unattached to its subject or its object. The associations form and you become a specific agent aware of a specific set of objects or thoughts or emotions. In the attention schema theory, when you introspect to examine your own consciousness in an attentive, focused manner, you should get one type of picture. But if you let consciousness gather by itself, outside of attentive focus, you should obtain a different picture of it. Consciousness is something murky, complicated, contradictory, always changing. It may be that the attention schema theory has enough subtlety to account for so amorphous and mysterious a phenomenon.
    The first half of this book explained the basic concepts of the attention schema theory. The theory is easily summarized. The brain uses a data-handling method, a common way in which signals interact, a process that neuroscientists call attention. The brain also constructs a constantly updated sketch, a schema, a rough model to describe that process of attention. That model is awareness. Because it is information, it is reportable. We can say that we have it. We can introspect and decide that we have it. The theory is rational, mechanistic, straightforward. Yet it also has emergent complexities. I’ve briefly outlined some of these complexities, including strange loops, resonance, and a great variety of altered states of consciousness. The underlying concepts may be simple, but the theory is not simplistic. The consciousness described by the theory sounds a great deal like the real thing.
    So far I’ve said very little about how the attention schema theory might be implemented in specific regions of the brain. I’ve also said little about how the theory might mesh or conflict with previous theories of consciousness. The second half of the book addresses these topics.

10
Social Theories of Consciousness

    The number and range of theories of consciousness that have been proposed—religious, philosophical, quantum mechanical, mystical, cellular, electrical, magnetic, computer-programmable, neuronal, psychological, social, cosmic, and metacosmic—is dizzying and inspires some degree of awe for human ingenuity. These theories tend to fall into categories, so that reviewing and discussing them is not an entirely hopeless task. However, I will leave that type of broad overview to other texts. For example, for an excellent summary of the consciousness literature, see Blackmore’s account. 1
    In this second part of the book I take a selective look at the literature. I discuss previous theories and results that have a clear conceptual relevance to the attention schema theory. My interest lies in integrating the previous work with the present theory. I am not so much motivated to knock down previous views as to understand how they relate to each other and to the attention schema theory.
    Despite this narrow filter on the literature, a very large range of perspectives and results are still covered here. These previous perspectives on consciousness include the relationship between consciousness and social intelligence, the relationship between consciousness and integrated information in the brain, the attempt to find neuronal circuits or responses in the brain that correlate with consciousness, the study of the partial loss of consciousness insevere brain damage, and the search for the neuronal machinery that allows humans to model and simulate other people’s mind states. Within these broad categories, about twenty specific perspectives on consciousness are discussed and many more are mentioned.
    I begin with two general approaches to consciousness. The attention schema theory shares strong similarities with both of these previous lines of thought. One approach is that consciousness is a product of our social capability. The second is that consciousness occurs when the information in the brain becomes highly interconnected.
    These two approaches, the social approach and the integrated information approach, have little resemblance to each other. In some ways they are rivals. Each one has its advantages and its weaknesses. Yet in many ways they are both precursors to the present theory. The attention schema theory could be viewed as a way of drawing on the strengths of these two previous hypotheses while avoiding their weaknesses. In this chapter I discuss the social approach to consciousness, and in the next chapter I