God Soul Mind Brain

anything. Eyeballs are not aware. Spinal cords are not aware. If Betsy is aware of X, that does not mean simply that Betsy’s brain contains information on X. Indeed her brain contains a great deal of information of which she is unaware. Instead, it means that her brain contains specialized circuitry for social perception; that circuitry has constructed a model of her own mind; and that model contains the proposition “Betsy is aware of X.” If you ask her, “Are you aware of X?” then her machinery for social cognition examines the perceptual model of her mind and decides whether or not it includes the requested information.

    The study of consciousness, whether you are casually asking yourself about your own consciousness or performing formal experiments in a laboratory, comes down to signal detection. You decide whether or not there is a detectable amount of the “awareness” signal being generated by the brain circuits that normally compute it.

Aura or information?

    Speculation 1 is one example of a general way to think about conscious awareness. In that general approach, awareness is caused by information processing. Not only does your mind contain information (there is a sandwich, there is a person, this object is red, that object is cold), but you are also aware of the information, in the sense that you have a subjective feeling that comes along with, or radiates from, or surrounds, the information. How the awareness is generated by the information is not known. This way of thinking distinguishes the information in your mind from the feeling of being aware of it. The information belongs to the concrete world of signals passing through a computer-like machine; the awareness belongs to the spirit world of subjective experience.

    Speculation 2 is an example of an entirely different general approach, in which awareness is itself a part of the information present in your mind. Just as your mind might contain the information “X is red,” or “X is tall,” so it can also contain the information “I am aware of X.”

    Logically speaking, the second approach must be correct. In the first approach, you can be as marvelously aware as you like, but if awareness itself is not information, then you would never be able to report on it. It would just hang out in never-never land doing nothing. The fact that you can look inside yourself, detect the presence of subjective experiences, and report that you have them, implies that the subjectiveness itself, the experienceness, is information to which your mind has access. When we talk about our own awareness we are by necessity talking only about awareness that is codable and accessible information that can flow through the system and result in speech.

    One of the underlying assumptions in brain science is that information in the mind is computed by neurons. If we are to have a brain-based model of the mind, we will need to hypothesize that just as neurons compute redness and brightness, cold, and 2+2=4, they must also compute the properties of awareness, intent, desire, goal, experience, feeling, consciousness. It turns out that there are areas of the brain that may specialize in computing exactly this type of information.

Part 2

    Brain

Chapter 6

    The basics of the brain

    In every chapter so far, I referred to the “circuitry for social perception.” Just as the circuitry for visual perception computes models of objects, complete with color, shape, and location in space—models that stand in for the reality around us—so the circuitry for social perception computes models of the brains around us, complete with intentionality, agenda, emotion, and awareness. The significance of this circuitry, in terms of the study of human consciousness, is that it is built to understand the concept of consciousness. When the brain is asked about its own awareness, its own intentionality, its own conscious experience, the circuitry for social perception is equipped to process those questions and compute the answers. Other circuits in the brain cannot even process the questions and therefore do not answer.

    But where are these circuits for social perception located in the brain? How do they make their computations?

    Very little of the brain is understood. What is known may fill shelves and hard-drives, but for all that, most of the brain is still a mystery. In the case of color perception, for example, the basic neural structures have been identified. The exact circuit