Consciousness and the Social Brain

the point even more obvious with an analogy, the foot evolved mainly for walking. But when I’m notwalking, I still have a foot. I don’t exactly lose it by virtue of sitting down. I can still use it for tapping a rhythm. Likewise, the machinery in my brain for understanding minds is present and remains present whether I’m at a party, sitting alone in my office, or languishing in solitary confinement. That brain machinery is always there and can always be used to construct an understanding of my own mind.
Why Are Autistic People Conscious?

    Social theories of consciousness inevitably encounter a particular challenge. If consciousness is a result of social intelligence, then people with impaired social intelligence should have impaired consciousness. The most thoroughly studied impairment in social capability is autism. 14 , 15 At the extreme end, people with severe autism can fail to develop any normal social ability, including language. At the more subtle end of the spectrum, people with a high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome have some difficulty reading the thoughts and emotions of others. Their condition is more of a personality type than a disorder. Are people on the autistic spectrum less conscious in any way?
    The question is difficult to approach, for ethical reasons. To claim that autistic children are less conscious than normal children smacks of dehumanizing the group. Moreover, it is not clear how to measure level of consciousness, especially in a severely autistic child who doesn’t talk or engage with other people. How would anyone know? Compounding the problem, especially if the attention schema theory is correct, we humans have a built-in tendency to attribute consciousness to others. Even supposing an autistic person were somehow less conscious than normal, even if that were true, if you spend enough time with that person, you are likely to develop a strong impression of consciousness in that person. You would easily convince yourself that the person was conscious, regardless of the truth of the matter.
    At least one study suggests that autistic people are less aware of their own emotions. 16 But autistic people are not necessarily less aware all around. Perhaps autism affects a person’s ability to understand emotions. Awareness of the visual world, of auditory experience, of touch and smell seems unimpaired as far as anyone knows, though such things are difficult to measure. The evidence, such as it is, does not obviously support the social theories of consciousness, which predict that autistic people should be all around less aware.
    Autism is only one specific example. If consciousness is a construct of the social machinery, then social disabilities and awareness disabilities should correlate. Yet the classical syndromes of social impairment, including autism, social anxiety disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and a sociopathic personality type, are not generally associated with a derangement of conscious experience. At least, that symptom is not emphasized in the classical descriptions.
    People who live in forced isolation, Robinson Crusoe style, and who therefore don’t practice their social skills show no particular evidence of losing the capacity for conscious experience. People are sometimes born and raised in almost complete social isolation. 17 – 20 When rescued and studied, such people may show severe disabilities in language and social interaction, but I am not aware of any reports of a general loss of sentience in these cases. If social impairments are associated with a general impairment of consciousness, the relationship is evidently a weak one. There may be a relationship (the question is largely unexplored and is hard to test anyway), but since it has gone unnoticed, it is evidently not black and white or absolute. Since socially impaired people appear to be conscious and can report that they are conscious in much the same way that anyone else does, the evidence is against the theory that social capacity is the source of consciousness.
    The fundamental difficulty here is that the social theories of consciousness are too general. They imply that awareness arises from any and all social thinking. They predict a sweeping correlation between all social ability and awareness. The attention schema theory ofconsciousness avoids this difficulty because it does not suffer from overgenerality. It is much more specific. In it, awareness depends on one specific function, an