Consciousness and the Social Brain

present. Consciousness can and can’t survive the death of the body.
    The strangeness and nuance of the answers should not be surprising. The standard questions were formulated long ago from a position of relative human ignorance. They were formulated without any specific theory of brain or consciousness. The age-old questions are simply not well aligned to a theory in which consciousness is an attribution instead of a possession.

18
Explaining the Magic Trick

    At the beginning of this book I described a little boy who was trying to explain an amazing magic trick to his father.
    The boy’s explanation?
    “It’s easy. The magician makes it happen.”
    The explanation, of course, explains nothing. To the uncritical mind it might sound good, but it contains an oh-so-minor gap in the logic. The same nonexplanatory explanation could stand in for almost every attempt to date to explain consciousness. Whether scientific, philosophical, or theological, theories of consciousness tend to point to a magician rather than construct an explanation.
    What causes consciousness? According to Hippocrates and every neuroscientist since, the brain does. That is probably true, but is not an explanation. According to Descartes, it is a magic fluid in the brain. According to Kant, it is divinely supplied. It is something he called an “a priori form,” a term he seemed to use as a euphemism for “inexplicably present.” According to various modern theories, it is caused by a vibration or oscillation in neuronal activity. Or it is caused by feedback of information from higher to lower areas in the brain. Or it is caused by complexity. Or it is caused by the massive integration of information in the brain. Throughout this book, I’ve noted and described about thirty hypotheses or variants of hypotheses. Many more hypotheses exist. Yet most of them sharean inconvenient attribute. In each case, they point to a magician. Exactly how you get from the particular magician to the property of awareness, by what logic awareness itself occurs, remains obscure. Theories of consciousness tend to contain, buried in them somewhere, a gap in the logic between the proposed mechanism and the magic.
    It seems fair at this point to evaluate whether the attention schema theory contains the same gap. Does it merely point to a magician, or does it provide a possible explanation?
    Note that two distinct questions can be asked about the theory. One is whether the theory is
correct
. That is a tall order. No scientist should stand under the mission accomplished sign. I think the theory is
plausible
. I think it is logical. I think it aligns with a great deal of existing data. I am enthusiastic about it and grateful to have had the chance to lay it out in this book. But only future experiments, probably a great diversity of them over many decades, can convince the scientific community.
    A second question, easier to answer, is whether the theory provides any explanation at all, or whether it leaves the traditional gap between the mechanism and awareness itself.
    Obviously, I believe the theory provides an explanation.
    In the attention schema theory, awareness is information. Not only are we aware
of
information, but the awareness itself
is
information. It is specific information computed by a specific system in the brain.
    When a data-processing device such as the brain introspects, that is to say consults internal data, and on that basis concludes, assigns a high degree of certainty to the conclusion, and reports that it has physically unexplainable magic inside of it, the simplest scientific explanation is that its information is not precisely accurate. That information may be useful. It may provide a quick sketch of something real that is helpful to monitor. But the sketch is not precisely accurate. That internal data set describes an experienceness, an inner feeling, a mind apprehending sensations and emotions and ideas. The data set describes an awareness like energy or plasma, invisibleand yet palpable. The machine, relying on its inner data, concludes that it experiences the blueness of blue, or the coldness of cold, the intensity of joy, the
X
-ness of
X
. It concludes that a real awareness is present, and it assigns a high degree of certainty to the conclusion. It can’t help that conclusion because the data available to it provide that information.
    Nothing in the brain’s internal data describes awareness as a mere informational description,