Consciousness and the Social Brain

there. In that case, if you weren’t actually angry, the mirroring process should make you become so as a side product. If you were already angry, perhaps you become more so.
    Suppose your self model includes the self prediction that you might reach out and pick up a cup of juice. To enrich that model through simulation, the machinery that constructs the model contacts and uses your motor machinery to simulate the action, thereby priming the action and making you more likely to actually do it.
    In each case, what the self model depicts becomes more likely to pass. The self model is not merely an after-the-fact reconstruction but also has the power to control the system. The reason is that the self model uses the system as an extension of itself. The self model and the self that is being modeled are intertwined.
    In this hypothesis, a fundamental difference exists between constructing a model of someone else’s mind and constructing a model of your own mind. In constructing a model of someone else’s mind, there is no direct mechanism for that model to alter the other person’s mind. The loop is open, not closed. There is no resonance. But in constructing a model of your own mind, the model alters the thing that it depicts. The model is both a perceptual representation and an executive controller. It is a description and an actor. It is like the mission statement of a company that, by describing the company, makes it so.
    I have not gone beyond the attention schema theory of consciousness proposed in the earlier chapters of the book. Awareness is proposed to be an informational model of attention. The theory remains mechanistic. In principle, it could be built into an electronic circuit. It contains no magic. And yet by considering more and more of the implementation details, and more and more of the recursive complexities that might result from that implementation, the theoretical description of a conscious mind begins to sound more like the intuitive notion that we all have based on introspection. Consciousness is both an observer of the world in us and around us, and also a controller.

17
Some Spiritual Matters

    If a scientist discovers a bird or a monkey in the wild behaving irrationally and doing so persistently, the light of enthusiasm will enter that scientist’s eye. How can we understand the creature’s irrational behavior? Can we study it from an evolutionary, a biological, a neuroscientific point of view? What environmental forces led to that behavior pattern? Does the behavior, after all, have a hidden use? Even if it is costly to the animal, would rewiring or relearning be even more costly?
    When a scientist observes humans behaving irrationally, especially if the irrationality has anything to do with religion, suddenly the science goes out the window. The desire to understand a natural phenomenon is gone. The reaction is one of derision and contempt. It reeks of moral superiority, as though the scientist, failing utterly in even the most basic modicum of self-awareness, were proclaiming, “Myself, I have no irrationalities to speak of. The rest of the world should, for its own sake, be as rational as I am.”
    I was brought up in the scientific and atheistic fold and still consider myself a scientist first and an atheist second. The one leads to the other. Perhaps I can be forgiven for providing some gentle criticism to my own kind. Science is about gaining insight into the world. Neuroscience is about gaining insight into the brain and how it guides behavior. And spirituality and religion are nonignorable largecomponents of human behavior. How can we, as scientists, turn our backs on these phenomena? If they are irrational, they are also ubiquitous and must have some scientific or naturalistic explanation. We will never truly understand this side of human behavior if, in studying it, we set ourselves the agenda of belittling it.
    The past ten years have seen a rapid growth in the cognitive science of religion, the study of religion as a natural phenomenon that can be understood from the point of view of psychology, neuroscience, and especially evolution. Among those who have contributed to this field are Dennett, 1 Boyer, 2 Barrett, 3 Atran, 4 Sosis and colleagues, 5 and many others. This area of study finally takes religion seriously as a biological phenomenon worth studying at a mechanistic level.
    Lately, when I give scientific talks at academic departments, I find that I run myself into