God Soul Mind Brain

information from visual perception (box 2). This flow of information is necessary. Much of our perception of another person’s mind comes directly from vision, from watching someone’s face and body language. Visual information must therefore flow into social perception.

    There is a second, equally important reason why the box for social perception needs information from visual perception. One of the functions of social perception is to reconstruct which objects are and are not in the awareness of another person. Is Fred aware of the apple on the table? Is he aware of me? Is he aware of the cat creeping up behind him? To construct a proper model of Fred’s mental condition requires linking it with models of apples, cats—any and all items of which Fred might or might not be aware. The box for social perception therefore needs to be informed of all other perception. Social perception requires a massive convergence of information from many sources.

    When we query this brain, asking if it is consciously aware of X, the answer comes from boxes 1 and 3: social perception and social cognition. Those are the only two boxes that are equipped to understand the query. They are experts at making that decision; they do it all the time; it is what they are wired for. They make this decision with respect to other people and can also make it with respect to the brain in which they are embedded. They construct a self-model of the brain. The model is a fusion of goals, agendas, intentionality, items within awareness. This self-model is maintained and continuously updated, continuously adjusted. When you ask the brain, “Are you aware of yourself?” box 1 and box 3 consult the self-model and make a decision: “Yes, I am aware of myself.” I would guess that the model is mainly in box 1, in the province of perception, and the decision integrator is mainly in box 3, in the province of cognition, but that both depend on the mutual exchange of information.

    Consider a different brain system, the one that normally computes the muscles to pick up a coffee cup. The task is extremely difficult, much more so than people generally realize. (Most of my scientific publications are on this topic of movement control, so I have had to learn about the complexity of the task.) The fine adjustments on dozens of muscles, the exact timing of muscle contractions, are all under the radar so to speak. Most people are not even aware of how many muscles they have in their hands, let alone which muscles are contracting at any one time. Some of the information on motor control probably leaks back to boxes 1 and 3, reaching perceptual consciousness, but the elaborate computations contained within the motor machinery are removed from conscious awareness. The control system is an expert at its task, but has no capacity for answering questions about awareness or consciousness. You cannot even ask it the question. It would be like asking your microwave whether pigs fly. It doesn’t compute that type of proposition.

    Consider the case of color perception, which belongs in box 2. As I described in Chapter 2, color is an invention of the brain. Based on a comparison across the entire visual scene, the visual circuits assign colors to different locations. Red here, green there. People report that they are not conscious of making those computations. They are conscious of the result, the color that is assigned to this or that object, the output of the color system, but not of the elaborate comparisons and decisions that are required to assign the colors. Why? Because the machinery that computes color is not built to process questions about consciousness or awareness. It cannot compute those propositions. It is built to take in a great variety of visual information and, on that basis, assign colors to objects. That is the limit of its capacity. If you ask the color-computing machinery, “Are you aware?” it does not answer. It does not even receive the question. Only its output, the color information that is sent from box 2 and received by box 1 and box 3, can enter any conscious report, because only box 1 and box 3 process and answer questions about consciousness.

Visual awareness

    Much of the modern work on consciousness has focused on box 2 (visual perception). Francis Crick (one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix) and Christof Koch have written extensively about visual consciousness. Why is it interesting to study consciousness by investigating