Consciousness and the Social Brain Read Free Page B

knowledge that generally composes consciousness. It is not to explain memories or self-understanding or emotion or vision or touch. The purpose of the book is to presenta theory of awareness. How can we become aware of any information at all? What is added to produce awareness? I will argue that the added ingredient is, itself, information. It is information of a specific type that serves a specific function. The following sections begin with the relationship between awareness and information, and gradually build to the attention schema theory.
A Squirrel in the Head

    In this section, I use an unusual example to illustrate the idea that awareness might be information instantiated in the brain.
    I had a friend who was a clinical psychologist. He once told me about a patient of his. The patient was delusional and thought that he had a squirrel inside his head. He was certain of it. No argument could convince him otherwise. He might agree that the condition was physically impossible or illogical, but his squirrelness transcended physics or logic. You could ask him why he was so convinced, and he would report that the squirrel had nothing to do with him being convinced or not. You could ask him if he felt fur and claws on the inside of his skull, and he would say, although the squirrel did have fur and claws, his belief had nothing to do with sensing those features. The squirrel was simply there. He knew it. He had direct access to his squirrelness. Instead of Descartes’s famous phrase, “Cogito ergo sum,” this man’s slogan could have been, “Squirrel ergo squirrel.” Or, to be technical, “Sciurida ergo sciurida.”
    The squirrel in the man’s head poses two intellectual problems. We might call them the easy problem and the hard problem.
    The easy problem is to figure out how a brain might arrive at that conclusion with such certainty. The brain is an information-processing device. Not all the information available to it and not all its internal processes are perfect. When a person introspects, his or her brain is accessing internal data. If the internal data is wrong or unrealistic, the brain will arrive at a wrong or unrealistic conclusion. Notonly might the conclusion be wrong, but the brain might incorrectly assign a high degree of certainty to it. Level of certainty is after all a computation that, like all computations, can go awry. People have been known to be dead certain of patently ridiculous and false information. All of these errors in computation are understandable, at least in general terms. The man’s brain had evidently constructed a description of a squirrel in his head, complete with bushy tail, claws, and beady eyes. His cognitive machinery accessed that description, incorrectly assigned a high certainty of reality to it, and reported it. So much for the easy problem.
    But then there is the hard problem. How can a brain, a mere assemblage of neurons, result in an actual squirrel inside the man’s head? How is the squirrel produced? Where does the fur come from? Where do the claws, the tail, and the beady little eyes come from? How does all that rich complex squirrel stuff emerge? Now that is a very hard problem indeed. It seems physically impossible. No known process can lead from neuronal circuitry to squirrel. What is the magic?
    If we all shared that man’s delusion, if it were a ubiquitous fixture of the human brain, if it were evolutionarily built into us, we would be scientifically stumped by that hard problem. We would introspect, find the squirrel in us with all its special properties, be certain of its existence, describe it to each other, and agree collectively that we each have it. And yet we would have no idea how to explain the jump from neuronal circuitry to squirrel. We would have no idea how to explain the mysterious disappearance of the squirrel on autopsy. Confronted with a philosophical, existential conundrum, we would be forced into the dualist position that the brain is