Consciousness and the Social Brain

better understand and predict its own behavior; thus awareness, or the attention schema, becomes an adaptive trait. In contrast, a high level of social intelligence is a recent evolutionary product elaborated mainly in a few mammalian and avian species. Consciousness must be widespread in the animal kingdom, even though social capability is not.
Possibility 2: Attributing Awareness to Others Came First and Personal Awareness Followed

    The cerebral cortex of monkeys contains a set of brain areas, a processing stream, that uses visual information to recognize objects. 22 In this processing stream, each successive brain region is better able to extract information such as color, shape, texture, and ultimately the identity of an object. At the highest levels of this processing stream, neurons respond to socially relevant cues, including visual images of faces, gaze direction, and body gestures. 23 – 29
    These findings on the visual system suggest, at least as a speculation, that animals first evolved the ability to process sensory information. They then evolved a special ability to process the nuanced,complex sensory information that indicates the behavior of other animals. From there the machinery evolved to compute inferences about the mental states of other animals. Once the circuitry was capable of attributing mental states to others, it could then be used to attribute mental states to oneself, leading to consciousness. In this account, social perception evolved over a long span of time as an outgrowth of sensory processing, but consciousness arose quite recently in evolution.
    I do not know which of these two evolutionary possibilities is correct. Perhaps awareness is evolutionarily old and is widespread in the animal kingdom. Perhaps it is new and is limited to a few, highly social and intelligent species. Perhaps both evolutionary paths contributed and different aspects of consciousness emerged gradually at different times. (That combination is my current best guess.) My reason for explicitly laying out the alternate possibilities is to make the point that they are all compatible with the present theory. There is no cart-and-horse difficulty here. Whichever came first, whether attributing consciousness to oneself or to others, the attention schema theory remains unchallenged by this particular issue. Only more data will enable us to determine whether something like an attention schema exists at all, whether it exists in a range of animals, or whether it is limited to those with an elaborated social processing machinery.
Improving on the Social Theories of Consciousness

    In this chapter I described a common, recurring hypothesis: consciousness is the result of social intelligence, our ability to understand the minds of other people, turned inward on ourselves. That general approach has many variants but they all involve a core idea: we invent a plausible, after-the-fact story to account for our actions, just as we do to account for the actions of the people around us.
    The general hypothesis has some validity to it. But this type of theory does a poor job of explaining consciousness. It explains a type of knowledge while saying nothing about awareness itself. It is limited to self-knowledge and says nothing about knowledge of external information such as color or sound. It fails to explain why socially impaired people, such as autistic people, are apparently just as aware as the rest of us. Pet owners should be skeptical of the social approach to consciousness. It implies that pets and other animals with limited social cognition are not truly conscious.
    The theory proposed in this book, the attention schema theory, is related to the social theories of consciousness. Yet the attention schema theory avoids the standard pitfalls. Its strength lies in its specificity. It is not a theory that equates any and all social capacity with one’s own private awareness. Instead, the theory focuses on one attribute: how do we understand that person Y is attending to thing X? How do we understand the attentional state of another person? How do we understand our own attentional state? The theory posits a specific construct, a model or a schema that is constantly updated and recomputed, a chunk of information that represents attention. Awareness is that attention schema.
    The theory is not merely about self-knowledge but about awareness itself. It is about the knower, not just the known. It explains why we attribute a