Consciousness and the Social Brain

them her soul was still present.
    Her husband, with the backing of the legal system, wanted to end the patient’s care, remove the feeding tube, and let her pass away. In his claim, his wife had no mind or consciousness left. There was no possibility of any functioning machinery for the production of consciousness. After seven years of legal wrangling that reached all levels of the legal system and even involved President George W. Bush signing a law specifically to keep her alive, the husband won the case and her life support was withdrawn. Medical evidence after the fact indicated that, with an almost total loss of cortical pyramidal cells, theneurons that allow for communication among cortical regions, she probably had insufficient machinery in her brain for any conscious life. The evidence strongly suggested that she had no consciousness type A. She had no capacity to construct a perceptual model of consciousness and attribute it to herself.
    In a sense, the wrenching emotional fight over Terri Schiavo was an unintentional confusion between two meanings, between consciousness B (which Terri had, as attested by her parents) and consciousness A (which, on available evidence, she probably did not have).
    I suspect most people, on thinking through this and other similar examples, would conclude that consciousness type B, the consciousness that people attribute to other people, is not real. It is a guess about someone else that might or might not be correct. Consciousness type A, the consciousness that a brain constructs for itself, is the real stuff. In the attention schema theory, however, this common intuition is wrong. Consciousness can be attributed to oneself or to others. Despite the differences in detail and in dynamics, consciousness A and consciousness B are essentially the same material. One is no more or less real than the other.
    To get at this idea more clearly I would like to return to an example that I briefly discussed in Chapter 7 . This example is less fraught with emotion than a comatose medical case and thus perhaps is easier to dissect intellectually. Consider ventriloquism. Most people think of ventriloquism as an illusion of hearing and seeing. You hear the performer’s words and see the puppet’s mouth move at the same time, and therefore the sound seems to come from the puppet. But ventriloquism is more than a sensory illusion. The sensory illusion is actually quite incidental. If you watch ventriloquism on TV or on YouTube, the sound comes from the same speaker location anyway, regardless of whether the puppet or the performer is speaking. The visual-capture illusion is the same in both cases—a voice seems to come from a moving mouth, even though the sound is actually coming from a different source—yet you are entranced by the puppetspeaking and not by the performer speaking. Why? The charm of ventriloquism really depends on a social illusion. Your brain constructs a model of a conscious mind and attributes it to the puppet.
    Ventriloquism is not a cognitive error. You do not mistakenly believe the puppet to be conscious. You know cognitively that there is no brain in the puppet’s head. But perceptually, you fall for the illusion. That is what makes ventriloquism fun. You can’t help feeling as though awareness were emanating from the puppet as it looks around the room and comments on its surroundings. In fact, your social machinery builds two models of minds, one that you project onto the performer and the other that you project onto the puppet. Ventriloquists have worked out a set of tricks to enhance this illusion of two separate minds. That is why the puppet always has a different tone of voice and usually argues with the performer. At this point in the stage version of my scientific story, I normally reach into a bag and take out Kevin, a hairy two-foot-tall orangutan puppet, and carry on a conversation with him. I try to be polite and stick to the science, but he cracks jokes and offends the audience with comments about my hand up his backside. I am a passable ventriloquist. I am not superb, but it doesn’t matter because the social illusion is so powerful that it works anyway. Kevin the orangutan projects his own consciousness and his own distinct personality.
    He has consciousness type B.
    It seems crazy to insist that the puppet’s consciousness is real. And yet, I argue that it is. The puppet’s consciousness is a real informational model that is constructed inside the