Consciousness and the Social Brain

Where does the fur come from? Where do the claws, the tail, and the beady little eyes come from? How does all that rich complex squirrel stuff emerge? Now that is a very hard problem indeed. It seems physically impossible. No known process can lead from neuronal circuitry to squirrel. What is the magic?
    If we all shared that man’s delusion, if it were a ubiquitous fixture of the human brain, if it were evolutionarily built into us, we would be scientifically stumped by that hard problem. We would introspect, find the squirrel in us with all its special properties, be certain of its existence, describe it to each other, and agree collectively that we each have it. And yet we would have no idea how to explain the jump from neuronal circuitry to squirrel. We would have no idea how to explain the mysterious disappearance of the squirrel on autopsy. Confronted with a philosophical, existential conundrum, we would be forced into the dualist position that the brain is somehow both a neuronal machine and, at the same time, on a higher plane, a squirrel.
    Of course, there is no hard problem because there is no actual squirrel. The man’s brain contains a description of a squirrel, not an actual squirrel. When you consider it, an actual squirrel would be an extremely poor explanation for his beliefs and behavior. There is noobvious mechanism to get from a squirrel somehow inserted into his head to his decision, belief, certainty, insistence, and report about it. Postulating that there is an actual squirrel does not help explain anything. I suppose in a philosophical sense you could say the squirrel exists, but it exists as information. It exists as a description.
    I suggest that when the word
squirrel
is replaced with the word
awareness
, the logic remains the same. We think it is inside us. We have direct access to it. We are certain we have it. We agree on its basic properties. But where does the inner feeling come from? How can neurons possibly create it? How can we explain the jump from physical brain to ethereal awareness? How can we solve the hard problem?
    The answer may be that there is no hard problem. The properties of conscious experience—the tail, claws, and eyeballs of it so to speak; the feeling, the vividness, the raw
experienceness
, and the ethereal nature of it, its ghostly presence inside our bodies and especially inside our heads—these properties may be explainable as components of a descriptive model. The brain does not contain these things: it contains a
description
of these things. Brains are good at constructing descriptions of things. At least in principle it is easy to understand how a brain might construct information, how it might construct a detailed, rich description of having a conscious experience, of possessing awareness, how it might assign a high degree of certainty to that described state, and how it might scan that information and thereby insist that it has that state.
    In the case of the man who thought he had a squirrel in his head, one can dismiss his certainty as a delusion. The delusion serves no adaptive function. It is harmful. It impedes normal everyday functioning. Thank goodness few of us have that delusion. I am decidedly
not
suggesting that awareness is a delusion. In the attention schema theory, awareness is not a harmful error but instead an adaptive, useful, internal model. But like the squirrel in the head, it is a
description
of a thing, not the thing itself. The challenge of the theory is to explain why a brain should expend the energy on constructing such an elaborate description. What is its use? Why construct information that describes such a particular collection of properties? Whyan inner essence? Why an inner feeling? Why that specific ethereal relationship between me and a thing of which I am aware? If the brain is to construct descriptions of itself, why construct that idiosyncratic one, and why is it so efficacious as to be ready-built into the brains of almost all people? The attention schema theory is a proposed answer to those questions.
Arrow B

    FIGURE 2.2
A traditional view in which awareness emerges from the processing of information in the brain (Arrow A). Awareness must also affect the brain’s information processing (Arrow B), or we would be unable to say that we are aware.

    Figure 2.2 shows one way to depict the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Almost all scientific work on consciousness focuses on Arrow A: how does the brain