Consciousness and the Social Brain Read Free Page A

manifestations of the same underlying process. The spirit world and its varied denizens may be constructs of the social machinery in the human brain, models of minds attributed to the objects and spaces around us.
    In this book I will touch on all of these topics, from the science of specific brain areas to the more philosophical questions of mind and spirit. The emphasis of the book, however, is on the theory itself—the attention schema theory of how a brain produces awareness. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an initial description of the theory.
Consciousness and Awareness

    One of the biggest obstacles to discussing consciousness is the great many definitions of it. I find that conversations go in circles because of terminological confusion. The first order of business is to define my use of two key terms. In my experience, people have personal, quirky definitions of the term
consciousness
, whereas everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the term
awareness
. In this section, for clarity, I draw a distinction between consciousness and awareness. Many such distinctions have been made in the past, and here I describe one way to parcel out the concepts.

    FIGURE 2.1
One way to define consciousness and awareness. Consciousness is inclusive, and awareness is a specific act applied to the information that is in consciousness.

    Figure 2.1 diagrams the proposed relationship between the terms. The scheme has two components. The first component is the information about which I am aware. I am aware of the room around me, the sound of traffic from the street outside, my own body, my own thoughts and emotions, the memories brought up in my mind at the moment. All of these items are encoded in my brain as chunks of information. I am aware of a great diversity of information. The second component shown in the diagram is the act of being aware of the information. That, of course, is the mystery. Not all informationin the brain has awareness attached to it. Indeed, most of it does not. Some extra thing or process must be required to make me aware of a specific chunk of information in my brain at a particular time.
    As shown in the same diagram, I use the term
consciousness
inclusively. It refers both to the information about which I am aware and to the process of being aware of it. In this scheme,
consciousness
is the more general term and
awareness
the more specific. Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness applies only to one part, the act of experiencing. I acknowledge, however, that other people may have alternative definitions.
    I hope the present definitions will help to avoid certain types of confusion. For example, some thinkers have insisted to me, “To explain consciousness, you must explain how I experience color, touch, temperature, the raw sensory feel of the world.” Others have insisted, “To explain consciousness, you must explain how I know who I am, how I know that I am here, how I know that I am a person distinct from the rest of the world.” Yet others have said, “To explain consciousness, you must explain memory, because calling up memories gives me my self-identity.”
    Each of these suggestions involves an awareness of a specific type of knowledge. Explaining self-knowledge, for example, is in principle easy. A computer also “knows” what it is. It has an information file on its own specifications. It has a memory of its prior states. Self-knowledge is merely another category of knowledge. How knowledge can be encoded in the brain is not fundamentally mysterious, but how we become
aware
of the information is. Whether I am aware of myself as a person, or aware of the feel of a cool breeze, or aware of a color, or aware of an emotion, the awareness itself is the mystery to be explained, not the specific knowledge about which I am aware.
    The purpose of this book is not to explain the content of consciousness. It is not to explain the