Consciousness and the Social Brain

popular, deep, philosophical questions and see what answers arise. I cannot pretend to answer these questions definitively. I do not know the answers. But I can reason from my proposed theory of consciousness and see where it leads me.
    In this chapter I apply the attention schema theory to several frequently asked, fundamental questions.
Free Will

    Do humans have free will?
    I confess to a certain cringe reflex when encountering that trite old question. I will say nothing about Newtonian determinism, quantum mechanical uncertainty, compatibilists and incompatibilists, or any other common approach. Instead, I am going to focus on one question: according to the attention schema theory, does consciousness have any control over our behavior?
    One view of consciousness is that it is an epiphenomenon. It is a side product of the brain, just like heat is a side product of thehardware in a computer. Consciousness rides on top of the neural computations, but it has no physical capacity to impact behavior. In other words, consciousness
is
but doesn’t
do
. In this view, consciousness thinks it has free will but is mistaken. Conscious control, conscious decision, conscious intention, are all illusion.
    In a closely related view, consciousness is a story that we invent to make sense of our behavior after the fact. This “after-the-fact” hypothesis harks back at least to Gazzaniga’s interpreter, 6 the hypothetical brain system in each of us that invents a personal narrative. Nisbett and Wilson 7 made a similar proposal in which consciousness is the brain’s often wrong reconstruction of what it is doing and why. Perhaps the best known example of this type of hypothesis comes from Libet and colleagues, 8 who claimed that when people perform an action, the plan to move is generated first and the conscious intention to act is generated shortly thereafter. Libet and colleagues suggested that conscious intention does not actually cause people to perform an action; instead, it is a way to make sense of the action after the fact.
    In this after-the-fact hypothesis, consciousness does have some impact on behavior. It provides a person with information on the self (albeit information that is reconstructed and sometimes inaccurate). That information can be used to shape future behavior. At the very least, that information can help us talk our way out of trouble, explaining our bad behavior afterward. However, the impact of consciousness on behavior is secondary. Consciousness does not directly cause most of our actions but instead rationalizes them. In that view, free will plays a minor role, if any. We are machines, we act according to unconscious computations, and conscious thought is a cleverly invented narrative to make excuses for the behavior of the machine.
    The epiphenomenon hypothesis of consciousness and the after-the-fact hypothesis are both essentially contrarian views. They violate conventional intuition. In conventional intuition, consciousness has two broad properties. First, we have an awareness, or anunderstanding, or a vivid description, of ourselves and the world around us. Consciousness takes in information. It is an observer. Second, consciousness can also make choices and control our behavior. It is an actor. In the contrarian views, however, intuition is wrong, introspection is naïve, and consciousness has at best only the first property and not the second. It may be a vivid and distorted description of oneself and the world, but it lacks the ability to make choices and control behavior. It is passive perception rather than active control.
    The theory of consciousness proposed in this book, once its implications are thought through, ends up standing on the side of conventional intuition and against the contrarian views. Awareness is an informational model, a description, a picture; but the depiction directly alters the thing that it depicts. It has the capacity to shape the processing in the brain and to control behavior. In an earlier chapter I suggested that awareness was something like the mission statement of a business. It is a description that also makes it so. The attention schema theory allows awareness to serve both as a descriptive model and as a controller, and that double function lies at the philosophical heart of the theory, just as it lies at the heart of the human intuitive understanding of consciousness.
    Do we often rationalize our behavior after the fact? Yes. Indeed, one’s