Consciousness and the Social Brain

perception is probably widespread in the animal kingdom. Few species have a full-blown, human-like ability for reading other creatures’ minds with great subtlety, though the question of theory of mind in nonhuman animals is still in debate. 22 – 26
    In the present theory, awareness does not depend on social perception in general but instead on one specific aspect of it, the reconstruction of attention. In this hypothesis, any animal that can construct a rich model of another’s attentional state knows what awareness is; and any animal that maintains a model of its own attentional state is aware. Whether a particular species has these abilities is an empirical question, but the bar is lower than for advanced social cognition. Humans may (or may not) have the most complex and sophisticated social intelligence on earth, but other animals should have awareness.
    Without direct empirical evidence on how animals construct models of attention, it is hard to know which animals might be conscious according to the present theory. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that most mammals and most birds probably construct something like awareness as we understand it. They almost certainly have attentional processes similar to ours and therefore could make use of an attention schema. In one study, an analysis of the way dogs play with each other suggested that they have an acute perception of each other’s state of attention. 24 When dog A sends a signal to engage dog B in play, dog A seems to evaluate the direction and extent of dog B’s attention. If dog B’s attention is already directed at dog A, then dog A employs a subtle gesture, maybe a wiggle or a look. If dog B’s attention is directed away from dog A, then dog A employs a more forceful gesture to engage dog B, maybe a bark. This observation, neatly documented, may seem like a demonstration of the obvious, at least to any dog owner. But it is particularly interestingin the present discussion because it directly tests the ability of dogs to construct a model or schema of another dog’s attention. If the attention schema theory is correct, then this observation by itself indicates that dogs probably have awareness.
    I have less of a sense of the possibilities in nonmammalian and nonavian animals. I do not know of any studies testing whether lizards use the data-handling method of attention as it is understood in mammals or construct models of attentional state.
    One of the least intuitive implications of the present theory is that awareness is a specialized, quirky, limited faculty, a weird product of evolution, not a measure of general intelligence. Super-intelligent aliens from outer space, if such things exist, might have cities and technologies and yet lack anything like sentience. In the same way, they might lack fingers, or ears, or a spleen. If we met them, however, and if they behaved in complex and intelligent ways, we would probably attribute consciousness to them. They would have consciousness B, meaning that we would be able to perceive consciousness in them. We might have an intuitive impression of consciousness in them or convince ourselves that they have it. We might treat them as though they do. But to know whether they have consciousness A, whether they have an ability to construct informational models of awareness and attribute those models to others and to themselves, we would have to do neurophysiology experiments on them and study their machinery for social perception and for attention. We would have to figure out whether the alien brain supports the process of attention and contains an attention schema. If so, then by the present theory, that alien brain would be conscious.
Computer Consciousness

    While I am on the subject of the consciousness of space aliens, I might as well turn to another favorite topic of the science fiction crowd: the consciousness of computers.
    Turing, in his famous paper from 1950, 27 asked whether a computing machine can think. That paper has tended to be interpreted selectively over the years, and therefore it is worth summarizing the original remarkable version here. Turing never asks about awareness or consciousness. He asks whether a computer can think like a human. He proposes a game that involves three human players who communicate only by typed words. Each person has a specific goal. Person 1 tries to guess the gender of the other two, person 2 tries to communicate his or her gender accurately to the