Consciousness and the Social Brain

product of evolution, like wings, or like eyebrows, or like navels. It is constructed by a brain and attributed to something. Like beauty, another construct of the brain, consciousness is in the eye of the beholder. A brain can behold consciousness in others (consciousness type B as I have called it) or behold consciousness in itself (consciousness type A as I have called it). These two types of consciousness have clear differences but are essentially two flavors of the same thing.
    The universe has consciousness type B. That consciousness is an informational model constructed in the brains of many (though not all) people and attributed to the collection of all events that are otherwise inexplicable. The cosmos is conscious in much the same way that anything else is. Its consciousness is made of the same stuff as our own consciousness—information instantiated in the hardware platform of the brain. The universe is conscious in the same sense that it is beautiful. It is conscious because brains attribute consciousness to it, and that is the only way that anything is ever conscious.
    The universe almost certainly lacks consciousness type A. It lacks any mechanism to construct its own informational models of minds and attribute them to others or to itself.
    Does God exist?
    In the attention schema theory the question is moot. Or at least, the answer is more no than yes, but not entirely one or the other. In the present theory of consciousness, no conscious intentionality preceded the universe. Consciousness is a construct of the brain and thus emerged only with the evolution of the brain. Consciousness is probably only a few hundred million years old at most, in a universe that is, by the latest estimate I’ve heard, about 13.75 billion years old. There is no God of a traditional form, no being made of pure thought or will or spirit that created the universe. Consciousness cannot exist without a hardware system to support the computations. Consciousness by itself does not have the physical capability to move or create matter. That’s not what consciousness is. Most people would consider this description to be strictly atheistic. And it is.
    And yet there is another side to the story. According to the theory, the statement “
X
is conscious” means “a brain (or other computational device) constructed an informational model of consciousness and attributed it to
X
.” In this theory, a universal, deistic consciousness does actually exist. It is as real as any other consciousness. If brains attribute consciousness to
X
, then
X
is conscious, in the only way that anything is conscious. If we can say the universe is beautiful and find no difficulty with that claim, even knowing thatit is beautiful only as a result of intelligent, emotional, and aesthetic beings perceiving it that way, even knowing that before any complex beings existed the beauty of the universe was undefined, then likewise, the universe has an encompassing God-style consciousness, and it does so as a result of intelligent biological beings constructing it that way, because all consciousness is attribution.
    The attention schema theory may possibly be the only known scientific theory that is both atheistic and deistic.
    My point in this theological section is not to try to twist science until it can justify religion. I am not attempting to shore up deistic thinking. I am also not trying to knock down religion. In the context of this book at least, I have no social or political agenda. The brain is what it is; people are the biological things we are. My interest here is narrowly scientific. The attention schema theory is my best scientific attempt to understand the biological phenomenon of consciousness. When I try to put aside the rationalizations, spin, agendas, and culture wars, when I try to apply the theory to some of the deepest human questions, questions about philosophy and culture and religion, the resulting answers are weird and fit no expected form. They do not entirely vindicate either side of the standard debates. They disturb everyone all around. The conscious mind is a mechanistic computation but it also has a type of free will. The spirit world exists but only as information instantiated on the hardware of the brain. It has a perceptual reality that is hard to ignore, if not a literal reality. In the same way, the deistic consciousness does and doesn’t exist. A ventriloquist puppet is and isn’t conscious. Spirits are and aren’t