Consciousness and the Social Brain

decision-making and reporting. Therefore, logically, awareness is information.
    How should we resolve this dilemma?
    Or, to frame the question differently: suppose for the moment that I am right. Suppose that awareness is information, as I am suggesting. Then why do we have such a strong introspective intuition to the contrary? Why do we find it so natural, so obvious, that awareness operates
on
information and therefore can’t itself
be
information?
    The attention schema theory provides a neat explanation. The brain contains the process of attention. Attention is a data-handling method. Attention actually does operate on information; it enhances some informational representations in the brain while inhibiting others. Attention actually is an emergent property; it emerges from the competition among signals in the brain. Attention is a state into which information can enter; select information gets into the focus of attention. Attention is not itself information. It is something that
happens to
information. Attention may be a mechanistic process, it may be something programmable into a computer, but its relationship to information is suspiciously like the intuitive relationship between awareness and information.
    In the present theory, the brain constructs an informational model to usefully represent the process of attention. By introspecting, by accessing that model and examining its properties, we cannot escape the intuition that we become aware
of
information, that awareness emerges
from
information, that awareness operates
on
information, or that awareness is a state into which information enters. The informational model depicts those particular properties because it is depicting attention and attention actually has those properties.
Cart and Horse: Which Came First, Personal Consciousness or Attributing Consciousness to Someone Else?

    Social theories of consciousness are sometimes criticized for putting the cart before the horse. In the social theories of consciousness, humans developed an ability to understand other people’s minds. Once having gained that special machinery, we then evolved or learned the ability to turn it on ourselves, and in that way gained self-understanding. This order of development seems backward to some thinkers. A more common intuition is that we understand ourselves first, and with that self-familiarity as a basis we use empathy to understand others. We somehow have an ability to “see” inside our own minds and directly experience our own emotions, thoughts, and sensory impressions. Given this ability, we are able to understand other people by imagining ourselves in their shoes. In this more common view, self-knowledge precedes knowledge of others. Consciousness precedes social perception.
    Which came first, the ability to understand other people’s minds, or the ability to understand one’s own mind?
    The attention schema theory is agnostic on the question of which came first. It escapes any horse-and-cart issue entirely. The question remains open: in evolution, did we develop our own awareness first, or did we attribute awareness to other people first? Consider the evolutionary possibilities.
Possibility 1: Awareness of Self Came First and Attributing Awareness to Others Followed

    Modeling one’s own attention is of great use in predicting one’s own behavior. Predicting one’s own behavior is of great use in planning one’s own actions. Therefore (in Possibility 1), the brain evolved a mechanism for modeling its attentional state. Once such a mechanism existed, it could be elaborated and extended toother uses. For example, modeling one’s own attention is merely the beginning of building a complex model of one’s mind state in general. Constructing a model of one’s own mind state can be adapted to the task of modeling the mind states of others. In this way a possible evolutionary path can be traced, from the simpler initial task of monitoring one’s own attention ultimately to the vastly more elaborated task, greatly expanded in humans, of social intelligence.
    Consciousness first; social perception second.
    In this speculation, awareness, a continuous model of one’s own attentional state, is evolutionarily old, existing in at least some simple form in almost all animals with brains, as long as they have brains capable of the process of attention. If a brain can use attention to sort its signals and shape its behavior, then it can usefully model attention to