Consciousness and the Social Brain

ability to reconstruct, describe, or model the process of attention. It is not the “social schema” theory but specifically the “attention schema” theory.
    A person could be socially impaired in half a dozen ways and have no loss of awareness. A difficulty in recognizing faces, in reading people’s expressions, in judging emotions, in reconstructing someone else’s thoughts or beliefs, in empathy, in following social norms, in feeling comfortable in a crowd—none of these difficulties should have any particular relationship to a reduction in awareness. In the attention schema theory, there is no reason to suppose that autistic people, or schizoid people, or shy people, or Robinson Crusoe people, or psychopathic malefactors, or any other people with social disabilities are any less conscious than the rest of us. In the attention schema theory, it is at least theoretically possible to have a perfectly functioning attention schema applied to yourself, constructing the feature of awareness and attributing it to yourself, while at the same time, due to a disruption in other aspects of social thinking, be totally unable to attribute awareness to anyone else. You might have no social capacity at all and sit in a huddle walled in your own mental world, and you might never look at anyone else or say a word to anyone else, and yet you would still qualify as conscious in the present theory. In this theory, awareness and social perception are related but not equated. Damage to the attention schema should disrupt one’s own awareness and disrupt a specific part of social intelligence, the ability to track or understand other people’s attention.
The Knower and the Known

    The social theories of consciousness have sometimes been criticized for confusing the knower with the known. They deal in theself-narrative, the information that you think you know about yourself, but they do not explain who the “you” is who knows it. How do you become aware of the information?
    In an intuitive view of consciousness, a distinction is made between the information processed in the brain (the known) and the awareness itself (the knower). The two are not considered to be the same type of stuff, however close their relationship may be. Any description of information in the brain addresses Chalmers’s easy problem, 21 describing the stuff of which you are aware without addressing the hard problem of how you got to be aware of it.
    Social theories of consciousness suffer from precisely this failing. In these theories, the brain constructs information about the self. Your brain invents a narrative in which you are feeling this emotion, your reasons are that, your beliefs are the other. But how do you become aware of that information? Granted that you develop narratives to explain your own behavior, how do you become aware of the information contained in those narratives?
    I believe that most scholars have a deep-seated bias in the way they think about consciousness. The bias is pervasive and subtle. In it, awareness and information are distinct from each other. Awareness might be an emanation from information, or a special state of information, or an operation performed on information, or a thing that receives information like a receptacle. When a metal burner on a stove becomes hot, the heat is an emanation from the metal or, more accurately, a state of motion of the metal atoms that can be transmitted to other atoms. The heat is obviously not itself made out of metal. When you cut a banana with a knife, the knife operates on the banana. It makes no sense to postulate that the knife is made out of a banana. A strongbox is something in which treasure can be stored. The strongbox is not itself made out of treasure. Similarly, when you become aware of information in the brain, it is because awareness is a heat-like emanation from information, or a knife-like operation that acts on information, or a receptacle that takes in information. It makes no sense to postulate that awareness itself is made out of information.
    This alternative point of view is a true antithesis to the present theory. On the one side lies intuition: awareness can’t
be
information, because we become aware
of
information. On the other side lie objectivity and inference: the only thing we know about awareness for certain is that we can at least sometimes decide that we have it and report that we have it. Only information can provide grist to the machinery of