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Consciousness and the Social Brain
What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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June 6, 2021
Consciousness And The Social Brain Notes.
This is an interesting book. The author Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist and (apparently out of necessity) a pretty dang good philosopher too. That dual neuroscience/philosophy skill set seems to be par for the course if you're working in the field of consciousness studies these days.
Graziano begins the book with a brief discussion about how Darwin's simple but "dangerous" idea (evolution via natural selection) organizes the otherwise incomprehensible field of biology.
Theodosius Dobzhansky pretty much said it all when he quipped "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" with the only possible addendum being "and human behavior (including all that mental stuff) is part of biology too".
Graziano's dangerous idea is the Attention Schema Theory (more about it in a sec). Graziano posits that the Attention Schema Theory, if properly understood (a BIG if), may have an equivalent game changing, reorganizing effect on the field of consciousness studies. And that ladies and gents is what you call a pretty awesomely ballsy claim. Let's see how he does.
To begin. Graziano deconstructs David Chalmers's soggy old standard, the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness via the the following metaphor:
A crazy guy thinks he has a squirrel in his head.
The Easy Problem: explaining how neuronal and neuro-chemical activity enables the linguistic thought "there's a squirrel in my head", the image image of said squirrel, the feeling of the squirrel in my head, and how all of it can be bound together in to one cohesive experience.
The Hard Problem: explaining how the subject's brain made an actual squirrel in his head.
Get it? There's no squirrel. It's just mental images, feelings, self talk i.e. information. So explaining how the actual squirrel got in the head is going to be a hard problem indeed.
The point being, the hard problem is hard because it's based on a false premiss that consciousness is something "really real", i.e. that something other than neuronal representation is going on in regards to consciousness.
If we assume that the sense of consciousness (sentience or the such ness of being etc.) is simply an informational representation, just like any other sensory experience, then the hard problem takes a hard dump. And personally speaking, if that means jettisoning Chalmers's really, actually dangerous ideas to the bone heap of historical footnotes, than I'm all for it.
In a nutshell, Graziano is positing that the entirety of human awareness is simply layers of information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. That creamy cold deliciousness of chocolate chip mint ice cream..... information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. That deep sense of "I am-ness"....... information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. The gush and pang of young love...... it's all information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system.
Basically, Grazianos's fundamental position is that consciousness is "in the meat", a wholly physical (bio-informational) phenomena, in the same way that heat is a very physical phenomena that emerges from burning stuff and friction etc.
For some of us, this is a huge "no duh". If this is you, there's more so hold on. For others, consciousness is a sacred magical essence, a non physical, ephemera, the unknowable by conventional means spiritual core of the self. Asserting that consciousness is strictly a property of the brain is an outrageous affront. If this is you, there's more so hold on.
The author ends the book with an attempt at reconciliation between the rational materialists and the intuitive spiritualists. An integration if you will. And it's much less offensive than it may sound at present.
Graziano recently blogged: "Theories of consciousness are always a difficult sell because the topic is fraught with religious and spiritual issues. Almost all people who think about the question, whether they approach it from a religious perspective or consider themselves to be scientists and atheists, start from a profoundly anti-rationalist assumption of magic. In that assumption we have a non-physical internal experience, qualia, magic, awareness, sentience, whatever you call it. We have subjective feeling. How does it get there? Does the brain produce it? If so, how can a physical brain produce a non-physical feeling? [The] scientific question is not: "How did it produce magic?" but instead: "How, and for what use, does it construct that description of itself?"
Qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. Examples of qualia are; the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky etc.
Daniel Dennett writes, qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us:the ways things seem to us."
According to some, even some scientists, qualia will never be explainable in scientific rational materialist terms.
Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: "The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so".
Well Erwin....why exactly not?
Sounds kinds like magic to me.
Graziano's point is that if you believe qualia is on principal, some how outside of the scope of scientific inquiry, than you believe in magic. Instead of throwing in the towel and enrolling at Hog Warts Academy (which I'm certain all of us would do if it were an option), Graziano takes a step back and posits the following hypothesis:
When we experience an apple, our visual system perceives roundness, redness, shininess etc. Our tactile system perceives smoothness etc. Our taste buds perceive tartness, sweetness etc. Go down the list. All of these signals get bound together (under usual circumstances) as a representation of an apple in your brain and nervous system. These signals are not "real", you don't actually have an apple in you nervous system, you have a representation. A less than accurate "rough sketch".
Graziano blogs: "Brains construct descriptions of things. Whether it's sensory information about the outside world or information about the movement of one's own limbs, brains construct fast, cartoonish descriptions of things external and internal".
I'd say, so far, this is all plausible. Eyes detect light and stuff, the brain constructs a "useful" (not necessarily accurate) image, ears detect sound, the brain constructs a "useful" (not necessarily accurate) image, etc. The brain "weaves" all these streams of information together to form a representation of X. So far it's all brain and body stuff. No magic necessary.
In cognitive psychology, a "schema" is a schema a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information. We have a "body schema" that is more or less a complex map like representation of your body. When we use a golf club or ware a hat or even drive a car, these objects get incorporated into our body schema and essentially become "extensions" of our body.
So if you're still with me. Check this out. Graziano posits that the felt sense of awareness. The phenomenological experience of being, is another big one of those. i.e. awareness is just another neuronal informational "representation", awareness is a schema.
He calls this idea Attention Schema Theory.
Graziano blogs: "In the attention schema theory, awareness is a description, one might say a model or a simulation, constructed by specialized systems in the brain. It is a cartoonish, somewhat inaccurate model of something real".
So there ya have it. There is much more to it. But that's at least a start.
Read this thing. It's not 100% satisfying as an explanation of consciousness. But Graziano is definitely raising some tremendously interesting questions and coming up with a few dangerous answers.
This is an interesting book. The author Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist and (apparently out of necessity) a pretty dang good philosopher too. That dual neuroscience/philosophy skill set seems to be par for the course if you're working in the field of consciousness studies these days.
Graziano begins the book with a brief discussion about how Darwin's simple but "dangerous" idea (evolution via natural selection) organizes the otherwise incomprehensible field of biology.
Theodosius Dobzhansky pretty much said it all when he quipped "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" with the only possible addendum being "and human behavior (including all that mental stuff) is part of biology too".
Graziano's dangerous idea is the Attention Schema Theory (more about it in a sec). Graziano posits that the Attention Schema Theory, if properly understood (a BIG if), may have an equivalent game changing, reorganizing effect on the field of consciousness studies. And that ladies and gents is what you call a pretty awesomely ballsy claim. Let's see how he does.
To begin. Graziano deconstructs David Chalmers's soggy old standard, the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness via the the following metaphor:
A crazy guy thinks he has a squirrel in his head.
The Easy Problem: explaining how neuronal and neuro-chemical activity enables the linguistic thought "there's a squirrel in my head", the image image of said squirrel, the feeling of the squirrel in my head, and how all of it can be bound together in to one cohesive experience.
The Hard Problem: explaining how the subject's brain made an actual squirrel in his head.
Get it? There's no squirrel. It's just mental images, feelings, self talk i.e. information. So explaining how the actual squirrel got in the head is going to be a hard problem indeed.
The point being, the hard problem is hard because it's based on a false premiss that consciousness is something "really real", i.e. that something other than neuronal representation is going on in regards to consciousness.
If we assume that the sense of consciousness (sentience or the such ness of being etc.) is simply an informational representation, just like any other sensory experience, then the hard problem takes a hard dump. And personally speaking, if that means jettisoning Chalmers's really, actually dangerous ideas to the bone heap of historical footnotes, than I'm all for it.
In a nutshell, Graziano is positing that the entirety of human awareness is simply layers of information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. That creamy cold deliciousness of chocolate chip mint ice cream..... information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. That deep sense of "I am-ness"....... information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system. The gush and pang of young love...... it's all information, gathered, processed and rendered by your brain and extended nervous system.
Basically, Grazianos's fundamental position is that consciousness is "in the meat", a wholly physical (bio-informational) phenomena, in the same way that heat is a very physical phenomena that emerges from burning stuff and friction etc.
For some of us, this is a huge "no duh". If this is you, there's more so hold on. For others, consciousness is a sacred magical essence, a non physical, ephemera, the unknowable by conventional means spiritual core of the self. Asserting that consciousness is strictly a property of the brain is an outrageous affront. If this is you, there's more so hold on.
The author ends the book with an attempt at reconciliation between the rational materialists and the intuitive spiritualists. An integration if you will. And it's much less offensive than it may sound at present.
Graziano recently blogged: "Theories of consciousness are always a difficult sell because the topic is fraught with religious and spiritual issues. Almost all people who think about the question, whether they approach it from a religious perspective or consider themselves to be scientists and atheists, start from a profoundly anti-rationalist assumption of magic. In that assumption we have a non-physical internal experience, qualia, magic, awareness, sentience, whatever you call it. We have subjective feeling. How does it get there? Does the brain produce it? If so, how can a physical brain produce a non-physical feeling? [The] scientific question is not: "How did it produce magic?" but instead: "How, and for what use, does it construct that description of itself?"
Qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. Examples of qualia are; the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky etc.
Daniel Dennett writes, qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us:the ways things seem to us."
According to some, even some scientists, qualia will never be explainable in scientific rational materialist terms.
Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: "The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so".
Well Erwin....why exactly not?
Sounds kinds like magic to me.
Graziano's point is that if you believe qualia is on principal, some how outside of the scope of scientific inquiry, than you believe in magic. Instead of throwing in the towel and enrolling at Hog Warts Academy (which I'm certain all of us would do if it were an option), Graziano takes a step back and posits the following hypothesis:
When we experience an apple, our visual system perceives roundness, redness, shininess etc. Our tactile system perceives smoothness etc. Our taste buds perceive tartness, sweetness etc. Go down the list. All of these signals get bound together (under usual circumstances) as a representation of an apple in your brain and nervous system. These signals are not "real", you don't actually have an apple in you nervous system, you have a representation. A less than accurate "rough sketch".
Graziano blogs: "Brains construct descriptions of things. Whether it's sensory information about the outside world or information about the movement of one's own limbs, brains construct fast, cartoonish descriptions of things external and internal".
I'd say, so far, this is all plausible. Eyes detect light and stuff, the brain constructs a "useful" (not necessarily accurate) image, ears detect sound, the brain constructs a "useful" (not necessarily accurate) image, etc. The brain "weaves" all these streams of information together to form a representation of X. So far it's all brain and body stuff. No magic necessary.
In cognitive psychology, a "schema" is a schema a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information. We have a "body schema" that is more or less a complex map like representation of your body. When we use a golf club or ware a hat or even drive a car, these objects get incorporated into our body schema and essentially become "extensions" of our body.
So if you're still with me. Check this out. Graziano posits that the felt sense of awareness. The phenomenological experience of being, is another big one of those. i.e. awareness is just another neuronal informational "representation", awareness is a schema.
He calls this idea Attention Schema Theory.
Graziano blogs: "In the attention schema theory, awareness is a description, one might say a model or a simulation, constructed by specialized systems in the brain. It is a cartoonish, somewhat inaccurate model of something real".
So there ya have it. There is much more to it. But that's at least a start.
Read this thing. It's not 100% satisfying as an explanation of consciousness. But Graziano is definitely raising some tremendously interesting questions and coming up with a few dangerous answers.
April 15, 2019
Update, spring 2019.
One of the more famous books on cognition in recent years was Thinking, Fast and Slow, by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. I was reading about attentional theory and found some interesting connections, although this is only going to be interesting for geeks attuned to issues of cognition or consciousness. Chapter 5 of The Neurology of Consciousness is The Relationship Between Consciousness and Top-Down Attention (available separately here if you have access rights), has a subsection titled “Relationship To Other Conceptual Frameworks For Top-Down Attention And Consciousness”, wherein I found that other models exist besides the “System 1/System 2” model (made famous by Kahneman, albeit coined by Stanovich), including at least two tripartite models. But the connection to this book is that Graziano’s model of attention drew quite a bit of commentary when it was first published in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience. The commentaries are about half of the 37 pages of that article, and make for fascinating reading. Some are supportive, others not so much, including one by Christof Koch, co-author of the Chapter I mentioned above. I linked to the original Graziano/Kastner paper in the discussion I had with Erik in his review (see below), but that Chapter 5 by Tsuchiya/Koch also deserves attention.
Update, autumn 2018. My GR friend Erik has reviewed this and extracted some very intriguing insights. Please check it out!
I just accidentally realized I hadn’t reviewed this back when I finished it. Now that I think about it, I came down with a very nasty two-week-long cold the day I discussed it with a book group, and then the holidays hit, so that’s understandable.
But this is an interesting and important book, so I’m backtracking to tell y’all to read the thing. I read three “cognition” books in 2014, and this one came in second! Okay, that doesn’t sound so good.
The best one was Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, which was fascinating as well as timely and important (read my review for more).
Consciousness and the Social Brain is also fascinating, but doesn’t directly impact how we live our lives. (Unless you are researching consciousness, or have some strong interest in the topic, due to — for example — an unreasoning fear of the spontaneous emergence of a hostile superintelligence.)
What Graziano has come up with is an innovative theory of consciousness which answers questions that (as far as I’m aware) hadn’t previously been adequately addressed.
Also impressive is that this is a testable hypothesis. He provides some examples, showing how the various neurological diseases are explicable, given how neurological damage could interfere with the brain’s calculation of its own consciousness, creating some bizarre symptoms. For example, he goes into detail with respect to hemispatial neglect, among others, which has to be one of the freakiest things that can go wrong with the human brain, up there with somatoparaphrenia or Capgras delusion.
The “social” in his title is actually unfortunate, since he’s probably lost a lot of potential readers who will think of “social media” and walk away in annoyance. But this has nothing to do with Twitter or Facebook.
The “social” aspect has to do with how consciousness evolved.
Here’s a very, very simplified version of the narrative (although other explanations could also work and might be more faithful to Graziano):
Step one. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, almost certainly), some critter evolved the ability to pay attention. That probably sounds strange, and it is. Very primitive organisms don’t pick and choose which stimuli they’ll ignore and which they’ll attend to; they simply respond to everything. Their response might not be trivial and deterministic, but their brains aren’t capable of “tuning out” stuff that doesn’t matter and thereby spending more cognitive effort on that which does. This innovation was a winner, and slowly spread.
Step two. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, probably), some predator — which was able to pay attention already — evolved the ability to pay attention to what its prey was paying attention to. Imagine a lion sneaking up on a gazelle. If the gazelle is clearly engrossed in the tasty plant it’s nibbling on, the lion should continue with the approach. If the gazelle is occasionally glancing at the lion (“Dude, I can see you sneaking up on me”), then the gig is up, and the lion should stop wasting energy. That’s pretty clever, so evolution gives the predatora cookie more offspring and the ability spreads.
Step three. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, probably), some predator happened to be hunting the same target as a sibling, mate, offspring, or other partner. But it was able to use the “pay attention” skill to realize this coincidence, and choose to hunt in a way that was complementary. This was a big win for some predators, leading to hunting in packs — the beginnings of one form of social behavior. (Did herd behavior among prey evolve along similar lines? Not necessarily, I think — this might just be more of a stimulus/response adaptation that left weaker members of the herd as outliers, and didn’t really require individuals to pay attention to what other members of the herd were attending to. But alarm signaling among social animals would have been an analogous development.)
Step four. This ability to pay attention, and subsequently pay attention to what others are paying attention to, spreads far and wide. Many, many millions of years ago (tens? hundreds?), some critter stumbles on the ability to pay attention to what it, itself, was paying attention to.
Wait, what?
This isn’t just: “Oh, hey! I'm the alpha of my pack, and I'm seeing a big, tough, younger member of the pack nosing around my females; that might be important”. It is: “As the alpha of my pack, I’ve just noticed I’m watching a big, tough, younger member of my pack nosing around my females. Perhaps I should pretend not to notice, so when I rip his throat out he’s completely surprised. Heh heh heh.”
(And thus began politics.)
Step five. That stuff in step four is pretty complex social behavior, so probably doesn’t exist in too many species. But it doesn’t seem to be limited to hominids, since there are quite a few other critters out there we think of as tricky — corvids [1], [2], or coyotes, for example. So either it happened multiple times, or happened once and spread quite widely (and thus in either case began a very long time ago). Anyway, eventually this stuff that was happening in the brain (i.e., the calculations of paying attention to what one is paying attention to) becomes yet another thing the brain might pay attention to, and thus respond to.
And that’s it. No more story. Our consciousness is nothing more than the rather simple fact that we are aware of what we are paying attention to, an attentional feedback loop. That’s all there is to the little voice inside your head that is “you”. That we can thus reflexively manage what we’re paying attention to is the essence of “free will”. This ability to monitor what we're thinking is critical to human cognition, but isn’t the whole thing, since when our subconscious acts on “our” behalf, that’s still “us”.
That our subconscious mind does many things which we are consciously aware of is trivial to understand: at no point has that aspect been important enough, evolutionarily, to be included “in the loop” — i.e., one of the things our species’ history has shoved into the attentional feedback system. Annoying, but comprehensible.
Is this going to change your life? No, probably not. Unless you’re a hospital ethicist, perhaps, and suddenly are confronted with a new criteria of what it means to be conscious, but even that seems rather far-fetched.
But it is drop-dead fascinating.
Update, autumn 2018. My GR friend Erik has reviewed this and extracted some very intriguing insights. Please check it out!
I just accidentally realized I hadn’t reviewed this back when I finished it. Now that I think about it, I came down with a very nasty two-week-long cold the day I discussed it with a book group, and then the holidays hit, so that’s understandable.
But this is an interesting and important book, so I’m backtracking to tell y’all to read the thing. I read three “cognition” books in 2014, and this one came in second! Okay, that doesn’t sound so good.
The best one was Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, which was fascinating as well as timely and important (read my review for more).
Consciousness and the Social Brain is also fascinating, but doesn’t directly impact how we live our lives. (Unless you are researching consciousness, or have some strong interest in the topic, due to — for example — an unreasoning fear of the spontaneous emergence of a hostile superintelligence.)
What Graziano has come up with is an innovative theory of consciousness which answers questions that (as far as I’m aware) hadn’t previously been adequately addressed.
Also impressive is that this is a testable hypothesis. He provides some examples, showing how the various neurological diseases are explicable, given how neurological damage could interfere with the brain’s calculation of its own consciousness, creating some bizarre symptoms. For example, he goes into detail with respect to hemispatial neglect, among others, which has to be one of the freakiest things that can go wrong with the human brain, up there with somatoparaphrenia or Capgras delusion.
The “social” in his title is actually unfortunate, since he’s probably lost a lot of potential readers who will think of “social media” and walk away in annoyance. But this has nothing to do with Twitter or Facebook.
The “social” aspect has to do with how consciousness evolved.
Here’s a very, very simplified version of the narrative (although other explanations could also work and might be more faithful to Graziano):
Step one. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, almost certainly), some critter evolved the ability to pay attention. That probably sounds strange, and it is. Very primitive organisms don’t pick and choose which stimuli they’ll ignore and which they’ll attend to; they simply respond to everything. Their response might not be trivial and deterministic, but their brains aren’t capable of “tuning out” stuff that doesn’t matter and thereby spending more cognitive effort on that which does. This innovation was a winner, and slowly spread.
Step two. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, probably), some predator — which was able to pay attention already — evolved the ability to pay attention to what its prey was paying attention to. Imagine a lion sneaking up on a gazelle. If the gazelle is clearly engrossed in the tasty plant it’s nibbling on, the lion should continue with the approach. If the gazelle is occasionally glancing at the lion (“Dude, I can see you sneaking up on me”), then the gig is up, and the lion should stop wasting energy. That’s pretty clever, so evolution gives the predator
Step three. Many, many millions of years ago (hundreds, probably), some predator happened to be hunting the same target as a sibling, mate, offspring, or other partner. But it was able to use the “pay attention” skill to realize this coincidence, and choose to hunt in a way that was complementary. This was a big win for some predators, leading to hunting in packs — the beginnings of one form of social behavior. (Did herd behavior among prey evolve along similar lines? Not necessarily, I think — this might just be more of a stimulus/response adaptation that left weaker members of the herd as outliers, and didn’t really require individuals to pay attention to what other members of the herd were attending to. But alarm signaling among social animals would have been an analogous development.)
Step four. This ability to pay attention, and subsequently pay attention to what others are paying attention to, spreads far and wide. Many, many millions of years ago (tens? hundreds?), some critter stumbles on the ability to pay attention to what it, itself, was paying attention to.
Wait, what?
This isn’t just: “Oh, hey! I'm the alpha of my pack, and I'm seeing a big, tough, younger member of the pack nosing around my females; that might be important”. It is: “As the alpha of my pack, I’ve just noticed I’m watching a big, tough, younger member of my pack nosing around my females. Perhaps I should pretend not to notice, so when I rip his throat out he’s completely surprised. Heh heh heh.”
(And thus began politics.)
Step five. That stuff in step four is pretty complex social behavior, so probably doesn’t exist in too many species. But it doesn’t seem to be limited to hominids, since there are quite a few other critters out there we think of as tricky — corvids [1], [2], or coyotes, for example. So either it happened multiple times, or happened once and spread quite widely (and thus in either case began a very long time ago). Anyway, eventually this stuff that was happening in the brain (i.e., the calculations of paying attention to what one is paying attention to) becomes yet another thing the brain might pay attention to, and thus respond to.
And that’s it. No more story. Our consciousness is nothing more than the rather simple fact that we are aware of what we are paying attention to, an attentional feedback loop. That’s all there is to the little voice inside your head that is “you”. That we can thus reflexively manage what we’re paying attention to is the essence of “free will”. This ability to monitor what we're thinking is critical to human cognition, but isn’t the whole thing, since when our subconscious acts on “our” behalf, that’s still “us”.
That our subconscious mind does many things which we are consciously aware of is trivial to understand: at no point has that aspect been important enough, evolutionarily, to be included “in the loop” — i.e., one of the things our species’ history has shoved into the attentional feedback system. Annoying, but comprehensible.
Is this going to change your life? No, probably not. Unless you’re a hospital ethicist, perhaps, and suddenly are confronted with a new criteria of what it means to be conscious, but even that seems rather far-fetched.
But it is drop-dead fascinating.
September 11, 2021
Brain is always such a captivating subject to read about. Even today, it's not fully clear how it works. Consciousness is another mystery - from philosophers to neuroscientists, everyone tried at some point to define and understand it, given it is such a fascinating subject.
This book presents a new theory on consciousness, which, on short, is this:
"According to the attention schema theory, consciousness is information. It is information of a specific type constructed in the brain. It is a quirky, weird product of evolution, like wings, or like eyebrows, or like navels. It is constructed by a brain and attributed to something. Like beauty, another construct of the brain, consciousness is in the eye of the beholder. A brain can behold consciousness in others (consciousness type B as I have called it) or behold consciousness in itself (consciousness type A as I have called it). These two types of consciousness have clear differences but are essentialy two flavors of the same thing."
I have found the theory to be very interesting and plausible, and easy to understand. However, for a layman such as I, it was not a very agreeable reading, mainly because of the endless and repetitive explanations of the theory, and examples provided which I think are quite bland.
I like reading about different scientific topics, but given that I'm not a scientist, I enjoy more books about popularizing science than technical ones such as this. It's not the book's fault, it is written very well and clear.
To help you decide if it's on your taste, the author's TEDx talk is a great intoduction to the book; he's charming as a speaker, in writing I didn't feel his enthusiasm, but here is present, which makes the talk more enjoyable.
This book presents a new theory on consciousness, which, on short, is this:
"According to the attention schema theory, consciousness is information. It is information of a specific type constructed in the brain. It is a quirky, weird product of evolution, like wings, or like eyebrows, or like navels. It is constructed by a brain and attributed to something. Like beauty, another construct of the brain, consciousness is in the eye of the beholder. A brain can behold consciousness in others (consciousness type B as I have called it) or behold consciousness in itself (consciousness type A as I have called it). These two types of consciousness have clear differences but are essentialy two flavors of the same thing."
I have found the theory to be very interesting and plausible, and easy to understand. However, for a layman such as I, it was not a very agreeable reading, mainly because of the endless and repetitive explanations of the theory, and examples provided which I think are quite bland.
I like reading about different scientific topics, but given that I'm not a scientist, I enjoy more books about popularizing science than technical ones such as this. It's not the book's fault, it is written very well and clear.
To help you decide if it's on your taste, the author's TEDx talk is a great intoduction to the book; he's charming as a speaker, in writing I didn't feel his enthusiasm, but here is present, which makes the talk more enjoyable.
October 18, 2018
Before I can talk about this book, I need to establish some context. Also I have a bone to pick. So gird thy loins and fortify thy intestines, it’s… PHILOSOPHY TIME!
Prussian philosopher and punctual perambulator Immanuel Kant believed there were two types of faith; for simplicity sake, I’ll call them bad faith and good faith.
Bad faith is when you hold a belief whose truth can be tested (in Kantian, it belongs “to the human world of experience”). For example, a primitive tribe on Volcano Island might have faith that their volcano is controlled by Vulcan, God of Volcanoes, and they can stave off eruption by throwing people into it to appease Vulcan. Because – and you probably already know this – human flesh is a delicacy to deities.
This is bad faith because this claim can actually be tested. You could keep track of human sacrifices and volcano eruptions and discover there is no correlation between them. Or you could create a theory of plate tectonics to actually provide a causal mechanism for volcano eruptions.
On the other hand, good faith is when you hold a belief whose truth is beyond knowing (it exists outside the “human world of experience” or is “supersensible”). Do we have free will? Do we have a soul? Does God exist? Kant would have answered yes to all of these questions, even though he believed it was impossible to know anything about them.
When I first encountered this idea, I was shocked, utterly shocked, that so illustrious, so prestigious a philosopher, could create a dichotomy that was so, well, useless.
Here’s the issue: It’s also impossible to separate *current* mysteries into “sensible” and “supersensible” or between “eventually knowable” and “never knowable.”
Let’s go back to Volcano Island. With our current knowledge, it’s obvious the tribe’s belief in Vulcan and human sacrifice was unwarranted. It was bad faith. But let’s remove our current knowledge, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Vulcanite. Well, if they have shoes. They probably don’t. So let’s put ourselves into the, um, the feet of a Vulcanite? Hrm. Just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, how could we possibly have known whether or not the truth was discoverable? If we had never heard of record keeping or statistics or plate tectonics, how could we know these tools could be used to prove or disprove our belief in the vulca-inhibitory efficacy of human sacrifice?
Do you see the issue? It’s all well and good to claim the unknowability of God or the soul or the composition of distant stars. They’re supersensible. Their existence and traits are unknowa—HUH? WHAT’S THAT, YOU SAY? We DO know the composition of distant stars?! So you mean French philosopher Auguste Comte was wrong when he wrote in 1842, “We can never learn [stars’] internal constitution… or anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure”? Whoops. Oh and Einstein was wrong in 1934 when he wrote that we will ever know how to harness nuclear energy? Whoops. And ad nauseam, all the way back to some cave man who figured no one can know why we feel hot or cold or what makes fire work. Nothing to it but to freeze.
That’s the issue with ever claiming something is supersensible/unknowable. HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?! By definition, we must know NOTHING about a thing ‘beyond human experience.’ That includes even knowing whether that thing is ‘beyond human experience’ or not.
Now I’m not trying to make the point that Kant is wrong. The soul and God and free will might truly be beyond the human experience. Rather, I would suggest there are practical reasons to oppose such a viewpoint. If our goal in life is to uncover truths about the world and ourselves, so that we might arm ourselves to do battle against chaos and entropy and death, we must confront every mystery as if it is solvable. If we were to simply throw up our hands in surrender, call a thing ‘beyond human experience’, then we would get nowhere.
Now, what does this have to do with this book? Well to many people, consciousness belongs right up there with God and the soul and the like. But the author would very much be on my side (he address Kant several times throughout, and always with dismissive scorn). Indeed, the very purpose of the book is to provide a theory for taking consciousness out of the realm of the “supersensible” and into the realm of human experience.
Philosophers often talk about the ‘hard problem’ and ‘easy problem’ of consciousness. I struggle to even explain the hard problem because it’s so vague it feels like it was formulated by an angsty teenager. Like, bro, nobody gets me. My soul is just different, man. It’s like my soul is blue and everyone else’s is green. It’s like when I see a rainbow, I see the universe. And everyone else just sees some colors. Why is that, huh? Explain me that! But I’ll try.
The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is the difficulty of explaining why physical processing creates an inner sensation of an experience or a feeling or ‘qualia.’ Why is it that when some photons of a certain wavelength strike my eye, creating an electric impulse along my retina, leading to a cascade of neurons firing somewhere in my brain… why does this create a conscious experience of the color green? Why is it when, say, a light detector goes through similar physical processing, it has no such ‘feeling’ of the color green?
This is in contrast to the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, which involve mechanical abilities of the brain & consciousness, (current) mysteries like how we focus attention, or bind together disparate information into a singular cohesive experience, or how consciousness controls behavior.
Now I’m by no means an expert on consciousness, but I have read a lot and had quite a few discussions with dualists who believe in the hard problem. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this hard/easy problem dichotomy can be better formulated as such: “Even when you explain everything to me about consciousness, I’m still going to claim you haven’t explained it.” In other words, the “hard” problem is really just a classification of consciousness as a supersensible phenomenon. In other words, it’s a largely useless classification. As author Michael S. A. Granziano says, it’s not a “hard” problem, it’s an “impossible” problem.
So the author does spend some words addressing some of these larger philosophical contexts, but for the most part he considers it fruitless to try to tackle an impossible problem. Instead, the book is about him putting forth a mechanistic explanation for consciousness called The Attention Schema Theory. As he says, it’s not hard to explain the theory itself. It can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention. In other words, our awareness (consciousness = awareness + information we aware of) is a way for our brain to tell us what we & other creatures (hence the 'social brain' part of the title) are paying attention to.
Now if the theory only takes a sentence to describe, what else in the book? Well, also as the author says, explaining why it is a good theory, and how it meshes with existing evidence, is much more difficult. And that’s what fills the remainder of the pages.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. For starters, Granziano begins with an approach that’s opposite to the usual tack. Most philosophers / scientists / etc ask the question, How do we became AWARE of sensory information? Sure our eye processes the green photons of the green apple, but how do we become aware of it being green? The author, however, considers the problem from the opposite direction. We know, for certain, that we are able to report awareness: “I am aware of the greenness of the apple.” That action – speech – requires information sent to the speech parts of my brain. Instead of asking, How does information get translated INTO awareness?, the author asks, How does information get translated OUT OF awareness?
From that starting point, he explains his Attention Schema Theory and runs it through the gauntlet of neurological studies and opposing theories of consciousness. What are the issues with current theories and how the attention schema theory fix them? What parts of the brain might calculate this description of attention and how might damage to these parts result in a loss of awareness? He even spends a final chapter titled ‘Spiritual Matters’ to discuss what his theory might say about ghosts, God, the simulation theory, and so on. The chapter has quite a few issues with it – but it was interesting nonetheless.
So the theory’s interesting, at the least. But is it any good? Now, I’m picky about theories of consciousness. I’ve found most of them so lackluster I eventually just constructed my own. Well, the Attention Schema Theory satisfied me. It doesn’t contradict any of the qualities of consciousness that I *know* exist, such as signal amplification, behavioral modification, etc. I don’t think the theory is 100% complete, of course. It’s more like the beginning of a promising path. For example, I’m reasonably certain consciousness involves the existence of long neurons woven throughout the brain, neurons which have been found to exist, about which the author says nothing. And he doesn’t get much into how different sensory inputs get bound into a single unified experience (not surprisingly, then, he fails to mention the claustrum, which has been recently shown to be deeply connected to consciousness). So there’s some gaps. But what he does include makes sense. It’s logical. It’s not contradictory, either to itself or to current neuroscience knowledge – at least that I’m aware of. More importantly, it’s explanatory and testable. Most importantly, tasting the theory, chewing it over, discussing it, provides some insight into important questions about the nature of our experience as human beings.
It is for that final reason, more than any other, that I consider my time reading this book to be time well spent. If you're the type of person who believes Socrates was on to something when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," I imagine you will feel much the same.
*Special thanks to Richard, for recommending the book.
Prussian philosopher and punctual perambulator Immanuel Kant believed there were two types of faith; for simplicity sake, I’ll call them bad faith and good faith.
Bad faith is when you hold a belief whose truth can be tested (in Kantian, it belongs “to the human world of experience”). For example, a primitive tribe on Volcano Island might have faith that their volcano is controlled by Vulcan, God of Volcanoes, and they can stave off eruption by throwing people into it to appease Vulcan. Because – and you probably already know this – human flesh is a delicacy to deities.
This is bad faith because this claim can actually be tested. You could keep track of human sacrifices and volcano eruptions and discover there is no correlation between them. Or you could create a theory of plate tectonics to actually provide a causal mechanism for volcano eruptions.
On the other hand, good faith is when you hold a belief whose truth is beyond knowing (it exists outside the “human world of experience” or is “supersensible”). Do we have free will? Do we have a soul? Does God exist? Kant would have answered yes to all of these questions, even though he believed it was impossible to know anything about them.
When I first encountered this idea, I was shocked, utterly shocked, that so illustrious, so prestigious a philosopher, could create a dichotomy that was so, well, useless.
Here’s the issue: It’s also impossible to separate *current* mysteries into “sensible” and “supersensible” or between “eventually knowable” and “never knowable.”
Let’s go back to Volcano Island. With our current knowledge, it’s obvious the tribe’s belief in Vulcan and human sacrifice was unwarranted. It was bad faith. But let’s remove our current knowledge, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Vulcanite. Well, if they have shoes. They probably don’t. So let’s put ourselves into the, um, the feet of a Vulcanite? Hrm. Just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, how could we possibly have known whether or not the truth was discoverable? If we had never heard of record keeping or statistics or plate tectonics, how could we know these tools could be used to prove or disprove our belief in the vulca-inhibitory efficacy of human sacrifice?
Do you see the issue? It’s all well and good to claim the unknowability of God or the soul or the composition of distant stars. They’re supersensible. Their existence and traits are unknowa—HUH? WHAT’S THAT, YOU SAY? We DO know the composition of distant stars?! So you mean French philosopher Auguste Comte was wrong when he wrote in 1842, “We can never learn [stars’] internal constitution… or anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure”? Whoops. Oh and Einstein was wrong in 1934 when he wrote that we will ever know how to harness nuclear energy? Whoops. And ad nauseam, all the way back to some cave man who figured no one can know why we feel hot or cold or what makes fire work. Nothing to it but to freeze.
That’s the issue with ever claiming something is supersensible/unknowable. HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?! By definition, we must know NOTHING about a thing ‘beyond human experience.’ That includes even knowing whether that thing is ‘beyond human experience’ or not.
Now I’m not trying to make the point that Kant is wrong. The soul and God and free will might truly be beyond the human experience. Rather, I would suggest there are practical reasons to oppose such a viewpoint. If our goal in life is to uncover truths about the world and ourselves, so that we might arm ourselves to do battle against chaos and entropy and death, we must confront every mystery as if it is solvable. If we were to simply throw up our hands in surrender, call a thing ‘beyond human experience’, then we would get nowhere.
Now, what does this have to do with this book? Well to many people, consciousness belongs right up there with God and the soul and the like. But the author would very much be on my side (he address Kant several times throughout, and always with dismissive scorn). Indeed, the very purpose of the book is to provide a theory for taking consciousness out of the realm of the “supersensible” and into the realm of human experience.
Philosophers often talk about the ‘hard problem’ and ‘easy problem’ of consciousness. I struggle to even explain the hard problem because it’s so vague it feels like it was formulated by an angsty teenager. Like, bro, nobody gets me. My soul is just different, man. It’s like my soul is blue and everyone else’s is green. It’s like when I see a rainbow, I see the universe. And everyone else just sees some colors. Why is that, huh? Explain me that! But I’ll try.
The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is the difficulty of explaining why physical processing creates an inner sensation of an experience or a feeling or ‘qualia.’ Why is it that when some photons of a certain wavelength strike my eye, creating an electric impulse along my retina, leading to a cascade of neurons firing somewhere in my brain… why does this create a conscious experience of the color green? Why is it when, say, a light detector goes through similar physical processing, it has no such ‘feeling’ of the color green?
This is in contrast to the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, which involve mechanical abilities of the brain & consciousness, (current) mysteries like how we focus attention, or bind together disparate information into a singular cohesive experience, or how consciousness controls behavior.
Now I’m by no means an expert on consciousness, but I have read a lot and had quite a few discussions with dualists who believe in the hard problem. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this hard/easy problem dichotomy can be better formulated as such: “Even when you explain everything to me about consciousness, I’m still going to claim you haven’t explained it.” In other words, the “hard” problem is really just a classification of consciousness as a supersensible phenomenon. In other words, it’s a largely useless classification. As author Michael S. A. Granziano says, it’s not a “hard” problem, it’s an “impossible” problem.
So the author does spend some words addressing some of these larger philosophical contexts, but for the most part he considers it fruitless to try to tackle an impossible problem. Instead, the book is about him putting forth a mechanistic explanation for consciousness called The Attention Schema Theory. As he says, it’s not hard to explain the theory itself. It can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention. In other words, our awareness (consciousness = awareness + information we aware of) is a way for our brain to tell us what we & other creatures (hence the 'social brain' part of the title) are paying attention to.
Now if the theory only takes a sentence to describe, what else in the book? Well, also as the author says, explaining why it is a good theory, and how it meshes with existing evidence, is much more difficult. And that’s what fills the remainder of the pages.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. For starters, Granziano begins with an approach that’s opposite to the usual tack. Most philosophers / scientists / etc ask the question, How do we became AWARE of sensory information? Sure our eye processes the green photons of the green apple, but how do we become aware of it being green? The author, however, considers the problem from the opposite direction. We know, for certain, that we are able to report awareness: “I am aware of the greenness of the apple.” That action – speech – requires information sent to the speech parts of my brain. Instead of asking, How does information get translated INTO awareness?, the author asks, How does information get translated OUT OF awareness?
From that starting point, he explains his Attention Schema Theory and runs it through the gauntlet of neurological studies and opposing theories of consciousness. What are the issues with current theories and how the attention schema theory fix them? What parts of the brain might calculate this description of attention and how might damage to these parts result in a loss of awareness? He even spends a final chapter titled ‘Spiritual Matters’ to discuss what his theory might say about ghosts, God, the simulation theory, and so on. The chapter has quite a few issues with it – but it was interesting nonetheless.
So the theory’s interesting, at the least. But is it any good? Now, I’m picky about theories of consciousness. I’ve found most of them so lackluster I eventually just constructed my own. Well, the Attention Schema Theory satisfied me. It doesn’t contradict any of the qualities of consciousness that I *know* exist, such as signal amplification, behavioral modification, etc. I don’t think the theory is 100% complete, of course. It’s more like the beginning of a promising path. For example, I’m reasonably certain consciousness involves the existence of long neurons woven throughout the brain, neurons which have been found to exist, about which the author says nothing. And he doesn’t get much into how different sensory inputs get bound into a single unified experience (not surprisingly, then, he fails to mention the claustrum, which has been recently shown to be deeply connected to consciousness). So there’s some gaps. But what he does include makes sense. It’s logical. It’s not contradictory, either to itself or to current neuroscience knowledge – at least that I’m aware of. More importantly, it’s explanatory and testable. Most importantly, tasting the theory, chewing it over, discussing it, provides some insight into important questions about the nature of our experience as human beings.
It is for that final reason, more than any other, that I consider my time reading this book to be time well spent. If you're the type of person who believes Socrates was on to something when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," I imagine you will feel much the same.
*Special thanks to Richard, for recommending the book.
November 12, 2014
The best book on consciousness I've read in quite a long time. The "Attention Schema" theory is the first one that actually goes some way toward being a useful theory of consciousness, in the sense that it actually seems to make sense of the phenomenon, and allows specific answers to questions that could be testable.
August 15, 2022
Very, very interesting theory on how consciousness and awareness happens in the brain. I don't know enough (or actually anything at all) about neuroscience to know how viable this theory is but the author seems to have the credentials (professor at Princeton) & to the layman in me, the theory sounds very, very plausible. I'm now interested in going down the rabbit hole of reading books on alternate theories of consciousness.
December 15, 2013
The concept of consciousness presented in this book is a simple one, described in a straight forward manner without getting bogged down in dense language or philosophical conundrums. The attention schema theory could be laid out in less than a paragraph, the two hundred page count accounted for by the introduction, discussion of previous theories, the attention schema’s relation to them, possible flaws in the theory and how to address them, and consequence of the theory if it is correct. Some of it feels like filler, but I don’t think it’s an insult to say that the core of the theory (if I understood it correctly) can be laid out in a sentence or two. Once comprehended the idea feels quite intuitive, which I’m sure will only help in its spread.
So far as I understood, the attention schema is a software of sorts that gathers select information from our bodies, brain and environment, to construct a feeling a awareness we experience. This awareness may or may not give is some amount of free will. Simple enough. Of course, I have only given the book three stars, so I do have some issues.
As it is quite an abstract subject I was left with some niggling doubt which I’m sure wouldn’t be an uncommon reaction. The author seems to be aware that he doesn’t have a full proof concept to present, constantly referring to colleagues’ doubts and the need for empirical evidence, which he hopes will be forthcoming over the next decade. On top of this, I two other issues.
My first issue. In describing the attention schema, a model which creates awareness of self, he also talks about another form of awareness, the consciousness of another person you experience when observing them. He refers to this as consciousness type B, and claims that it is no less ‘real’ than consciousness type A. In the language he uses he is probably correct, however, I feel that consciousness type B, while no less real, is drastically inaccurate and lacking in depth, and in the interest of philosophical discussion deserves a label to reflect so. Saying that it is no less real is leaving a vast territory for pseudoscience and Zen masters to push their way into the discussion and bring all kinds of confusion.
My second issue. There is an old concept that if we were to transfer our minds into a computer we would be able to live forever. It frustrates me that many scientists are able to dance around the fact that you are in fact committing suicide in this process, and the version of you living on in the computer is just a clone. If you lived along side it then it would be a completely separate entity experiencing a reality which would make it grow further and further apart from you with each passing second, and yet they call it immortality. It’s a remedial flaw in the idea and the fact that he trips over it in this book does make the niggling doubt with his idea somewhat of a larger one.
These may sound like small complaints, but it’s a small book, and when I’m taking the whole thing into account, they inevitably play on my mind.
The attention schema theory is an interesting one and I hope, as I’m sure the author does, there will be plenty of interesting research into it in the future. I don’t think I’d recommend the book to friend, but I would be happy to give them the gist of the theory.
So far as I understood, the attention schema is a software of sorts that gathers select information from our bodies, brain and environment, to construct a feeling a awareness we experience. This awareness may or may not give is some amount of free will. Simple enough. Of course, I have only given the book three stars, so I do have some issues.
As it is quite an abstract subject I was left with some niggling doubt which I’m sure wouldn’t be an uncommon reaction. The author seems to be aware that he doesn’t have a full proof concept to present, constantly referring to colleagues’ doubts and the need for empirical evidence, which he hopes will be forthcoming over the next decade. On top of this, I two other issues.
My first issue. In describing the attention schema, a model which creates awareness of self, he also talks about another form of awareness, the consciousness of another person you experience when observing them. He refers to this as consciousness type B, and claims that it is no less ‘real’ than consciousness type A. In the language he uses he is probably correct, however, I feel that consciousness type B, while no less real, is drastically inaccurate and lacking in depth, and in the interest of philosophical discussion deserves a label to reflect so. Saying that it is no less real is leaving a vast territory for pseudoscience and Zen masters to push their way into the discussion and bring all kinds of confusion.
My second issue. There is an old concept that if we were to transfer our minds into a computer we would be able to live forever. It frustrates me that many scientists are able to dance around the fact that you are in fact committing suicide in this process, and the version of you living on in the computer is just a clone. If you lived along side it then it would be a completely separate entity experiencing a reality which would make it grow further and further apart from you with each passing second, and yet they call it immortality. It’s a remedial flaw in the idea and the fact that he trips over it in this book does make the niggling doubt with his idea somewhat of a larger one.
These may sound like small complaints, but it’s a small book, and when I’m taking the whole thing into account, they inevitably play on my mind.
The attention schema theory is an interesting one and I hope, as I’m sure the author does, there will be plenty of interesting research into it in the future. I don’t think I’d recommend the book to friend, but I would be happy to give them the gist of the theory.
October 7, 2018
"Nailed it!"
I was never sure it would happen in my lifetime (Chalmer's hard problem) and spent a lot of time pondering how consciousness could arise spontaneously from complex information etc. But this theory is so simple, logical and post hoc obvious that Graziano deserves a Nobel, if you ask me.
I first found it in this article and got convinced already https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
And in this book he explains it all in detail, and from various angles. The arguments are all there (if you ask me).
This quote should be in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"Note that two distinct questions can be asked about 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."
One caveat: we could, after accepting this theory on the human/mammalian/animal flavour of consciousness, decide that there is a possibility of other kinds of consciousness that also deserve the title (octopuses, anyone?) but that does nothing to detract from the strength of this theory.
Now, off to build some conscious AI. The recipe is now clear.
I was never sure it would happen in my lifetime (Chalmer's hard problem) and spent a lot of time pondering how consciousness could arise spontaneously from complex information etc. But this theory is so simple, logical and post hoc obvious that Graziano deserves a Nobel, if you ask me.
I first found it in this article and got convinced already https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
And in this book he explains it all in detail, and from various angles. The arguments are all there (if you ask me).
This quote should be in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"Note that two distinct questions can be asked about 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."
One caveat: we could, after accepting this theory on the human/mammalian/animal flavour of consciousness, decide that there is a possibility of other kinds of consciousness that also deserve the title (octopuses, anyone?) but that does nothing to detract from the strength of this theory.
Now, off to build some conscious AI. The recipe is now clear.
January 20, 2014
Highly recommended.
Perhaps start with this article: http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/h...
and/or this talk: Consciousness Talk With Ventriloquism.
Perhaps start with this article: http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/h...
and/or this talk: Consciousness Talk With Ventriloquism.
January 9, 2014
This book offers a new compelling theory about how the brain generates awareness. Building on the well-accepted idea of the body schema Graziano suggests that the brain also generates something he calls the "attention schema," which models whether one is aware particular content, be it sensory or otherwise. He suggests that this ability might be an outgrowth of our ability to attribute attention/consciousness to others.
I probably haven't done a very good job of describing the theory off the top of my head since I finished reading this book several weeks ago, but I do hope to interview Dr. Graziano for the Brain Science Podcast in 2014.
I probably haven't done a very good job of describing the theory off the top of my head since I finished reading this book several weeks ago, but I do hope to interview Dr. Graziano for the Brain Science Podcast in 2014.
February 10, 2015
Whereas attention is the brain’s information-handling process that singles out a given stimulus within the sensory field for deeper information processing, awareness is the brain’s model of attention. Unlike attention, which is the more primordial of the two, awareness is an informational unit, an encoded attribute. It arises in the first place as a model for what others (of the same or a different species) are attending to in order to facilitate interaction with them. You then turn this model of attention inward and give the attribution of awareness to yourself. This is the “attention schema theory”.
At this point “being aware of something and attending to it feed each other. The two are in a positive feedback loop: they are like two mirrors facing each other. Boost one and you boost the other. Damage one and you deflate the other. Attention cannot work fully without awareness, nor awareness without attention.”
Graziano’s conception of consciousness is this attribution of awareness plus whatever information in the brain that attribution is attached to. Note that given attention’s status as a data-handling process, you cannot tack it on to information in the same way. Attention and awareness are not the same.
The theory itself is interesting and compelling, and the writing for the most part is clear enough to convey the tricky topic, but the continual remarks about what he’s about to discuss and what he’s just discussed get a little tedious. In one case the concluding paragraphs of one chapter start with something along the lines of, “In this chapter I’ve suggested…,” where the very next chapter begins, “In the previous chapter I suggested…”. Somewhat more problematically for comprehension, the book is continually restating what a schema is and what the attention schema theory is. “The theory can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention.” But it is put into this same sentence over and over again, making the reader wonder whether the sentence is adding a new dimension to the theory or whether it’s there as a helpful refresher of what the reader is already familiar with in order to then proceed to the new part. Don’t go flipping back to previous sections like I did; these are just refresher statements. Not that the writing is continually so flagrant as that. The argument itself expands nicely. But these sort of things can annoy certain readers.
Now considering his theory’s implications for consciousness, Graziano feels obliged in the final chapter to run it through the gamut of free will, AI, animal consciousness, whether or not God exists, etc.
Any weight the chapter’s findings carry hinges on the distinction between what Graziano designates consciousness A and consciousness B; consciousness A being what we attribute to ourselves and consciousness B what we attribute to something else. While this labeling scheme highlights the part of the theory that stipulates that the consciousness I attribute to myself and the consciousness I attribute to you both stem from my brain’s attention schema, the part of the theory with the most sway when it comes to explaining consciousness is the resonance loop formed between the information-handling process of attention and the informational unit I use to attribute awareness to myself. The consciousness I attribute to you will helps me anticipate your actions and facilitates interaction, but where consciousness is concerned the B-type really doesn’t do anything. Graziano makes various statements spelling out how A and B aren’t functionally equivalent, but then he goes ahead and exploits all the “explanatory power” that the semantic conflation permits.
And so “consciousness” is attributed willy-nilly to anything in the universe—including the universe itself. Whereas employing a terminology that makes clear and separates the functionality removes the need for any qualifying statements later on and makes a swath of misconception a lot less viable.
Graziano wants to make the point that the social machinery that attributes consciousness—to oneself or to other—is hard-wired. He likens it to the Müller-Lyer illusion where you understand that the lines are of equal length yet can’t help perceiving one being shorter than the other. He says it’s the same with consciousness, using ventriloquism as his example. You can’t help but attributing consciousness to the dummy even though the dummy doesn’t have the ability to attribute consciousness to itself. When I was little I reached the point where I asked my dad plainly if Santa Clause really existed. The answer was, “He exists if you believe he does.” From that moment on Santa Clause no longer existed. I find the same holds for ventriloquism. I don’t find myself attributing consciousness to the dummy. I understand enough about the dynamics of ventriloquism so that the dummy’s consciousness is not an illusion that I can’t help but perceive. Instead I find myself imagining the ventriloquist’s fingers up the dummy’s back, speculating about how one gets into ventriloquism and plotting the ventriloquist’s motivations on the spectrum of Walt Disney to Catholic priest. It’s a ventriloquism metanarrative that arises and precludes not just the idea but the perception that the dummy is conscious. If consciousness is an informational attribute, isn’t the same true for its negation? Can we not schematize this too?
Although he’s forthcoming about his atheism, Graziano seems eager not to be thrown in with the killjoy crusading atheist camp—and who can blame him—or to be the one to otherwise strip humanity down to some other “merely”. Killing God is okay, but he’s careful not to exterminate whimsy and wonder in the same stroke (Graziano also writes children’s books and at least dabbles in ventriloquism himself). It’s possible he’s put a false cap on human intelligence in order to freeze us in that stage.
He does have a brief but nice speculative argument about his theory’s potentially fruitful application to AI research, but its exploration is not for this book. Along the same lines as the ventriloquist’s dummy, when I have a conversation with an automated phone system I’m not falling into the trap of perceiving consciousness. I’m more thinking about how I can disrupt the system to speak to a human as quickly as possible. I’m also pondering the chosen voice inflections and so on of the automated voice. But I can imagine soon crossing that line of perceiving consciousness on the other end of the line. Is there in fact a threshold of factors in play before we attribute awareness? It would be interesting to see Graziano tackle the “uncanny valley”. Maybe for the next book.
The part of the theory most interesting to the application of philosophical inquiry is the attention-awareness resonance loop. It’s unfortunate that consciousness B garnered so much attention, but really the majority of this write-up is now focusing on the final thirty pages. Graziano’s attention schema theory has a good bit of merit, and as Graziano and other reviewers have noted, it’s testable and refutable. The book handles its introduction well.
At this point “being aware of something and attending to it feed each other. The two are in a positive feedback loop: they are like two mirrors facing each other. Boost one and you boost the other. Damage one and you deflate the other. Attention cannot work fully without awareness, nor awareness without attention.”
Graziano’s conception of consciousness is this attribution of awareness plus whatever information in the brain that attribution is attached to. Note that given attention’s status as a data-handling process, you cannot tack it on to information in the same way. Attention and awareness are not the same.
The theory itself is interesting and compelling, and the writing for the most part is clear enough to convey the tricky topic, but the continual remarks about what he’s about to discuss and what he’s just discussed get a little tedious. In one case the concluding paragraphs of one chapter start with something along the lines of, “In this chapter I’ve suggested…,” where the very next chapter begins, “In the previous chapter I suggested…”. Somewhat more problematically for comprehension, the book is continually restating what a schema is and what the attention schema theory is. “The theory can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention.” But it is put into this same sentence over and over again, making the reader wonder whether the sentence is adding a new dimension to the theory or whether it’s there as a helpful refresher of what the reader is already familiar with in order to then proceed to the new part. Don’t go flipping back to previous sections like I did; these are just refresher statements. Not that the writing is continually so flagrant as that. The argument itself expands nicely. But these sort of things can annoy certain readers.
Now considering his theory’s implications for consciousness, Graziano feels obliged in the final chapter to run it through the gamut of free will, AI, animal consciousness, whether or not God exists, etc.
Any weight the chapter’s findings carry hinges on the distinction between what Graziano designates consciousness A and consciousness B; consciousness A being what we attribute to ourselves and consciousness B what we attribute to something else. While this labeling scheme highlights the part of the theory that stipulates that the consciousness I attribute to myself and the consciousness I attribute to you both stem from my brain’s attention schema, the part of the theory with the most sway when it comes to explaining consciousness is the resonance loop formed between the information-handling process of attention and the informational unit I use to attribute awareness to myself. The consciousness I attribute to you will helps me anticipate your actions and facilitates interaction, but where consciousness is concerned the B-type really doesn’t do anything. Graziano makes various statements spelling out how A and B aren’t functionally equivalent, but then he goes ahead and exploits all the “explanatory power” that the semantic conflation permits.
And so “consciousness” is attributed willy-nilly to anything in the universe—including the universe itself. Whereas employing a terminology that makes clear and separates the functionality removes the need for any qualifying statements later on and makes a swath of misconception a lot less viable.
Graziano wants to make the point that the social machinery that attributes consciousness—to oneself or to other—is hard-wired. He likens it to the Müller-Lyer illusion where you understand that the lines are of equal length yet can’t help perceiving one being shorter than the other. He says it’s the same with consciousness, using ventriloquism as his example. You can’t help but attributing consciousness to the dummy even though the dummy doesn’t have the ability to attribute consciousness to itself. When I was little I reached the point where I asked my dad plainly if Santa Clause really existed. The answer was, “He exists if you believe he does.” From that moment on Santa Clause no longer existed. I find the same holds for ventriloquism. I don’t find myself attributing consciousness to the dummy. I understand enough about the dynamics of ventriloquism so that the dummy’s consciousness is not an illusion that I can’t help but perceive. Instead I find myself imagining the ventriloquist’s fingers up the dummy’s back, speculating about how one gets into ventriloquism and plotting the ventriloquist’s motivations on the spectrum of Walt Disney to Catholic priest. It’s a ventriloquism metanarrative that arises and precludes not just the idea but the perception that the dummy is conscious. If consciousness is an informational attribute, isn’t the same true for its negation? Can we not schematize this too?
Although he’s forthcoming about his atheism, Graziano seems eager not to be thrown in with the killjoy crusading atheist camp—and who can blame him—or to be the one to otherwise strip humanity down to some other “merely”. Killing God is okay, but he’s careful not to exterminate whimsy and wonder in the same stroke (Graziano also writes children’s books and at least dabbles in ventriloquism himself). It’s possible he’s put a false cap on human intelligence in order to freeze us in that stage.
He does have a brief but nice speculative argument about his theory’s potentially fruitful application to AI research, but its exploration is not for this book. Along the same lines as the ventriloquist’s dummy, when I have a conversation with an automated phone system I’m not falling into the trap of perceiving consciousness. I’m more thinking about how I can disrupt the system to speak to a human as quickly as possible. I’m also pondering the chosen voice inflections and so on of the automated voice. But I can imagine soon crossing that line of perceiving consciousness on the other end of the line. Is there in fact a threshold of factors in play before we attribute awareness? It would be interesting to see Graziano tackle the “uncanny valley”. Maybe for the next book.
The part of the theory most interesting to the application of philosophical inquiry is the attention-awareness resonance loop. It’s unfortunate that consciousness B garnered so much attention, but really the majority of this write-up is now focusing on the final thirty pages. Graziano’s attention schema theory has a good bit of merit, and as Graziano and other reviewers have noted, it’s testable and refutable. The book handles its introduction well.
July 30, 2023
This was the first non-fiction novel I've read in probably... ever. Reading this has now made me look exclusively at the non-fiction section of the library and focus my attention on topics and ideas that I've forgotten I once enjoyed.
This book proposed that consciousness is mechanistic system in the brain, or rather that awareness of oneself, others, and objects, is an attention schema. This hypothesis was exciting and was able to introduce other existing theories to support his claim. He was able to bring insight on what consciousness may be tangibly and explain the nuanced topics of spirituality, social disorders, and many other key topics that arise when talking about consciousness.
This book was formatted for people without previous knowledge to also understand the point he was making, and thus would get a little repetitive. I learned lots of new things about the brain and what research has been done in regard to social thinking and how these theories can be enhanced with his attention schema. The vocabulary does get confusing, however, the author is able to add some clarity with his distinction of awareness and attention. I do wish I had more knowledge on this topic personally as I took everything I read at face value and trusted almost all of his claims, although this book is ten years old.
This was a great first book for my introduction into non-fiction and I am excited to find new topics that interest me and the ways I can become more knowledgeable about the people and world around me!
This book proposed that consciousness is mechanistic system in the brain, or rather that awareness of oneself, others, and objects, is an attention schema. This hypothesis was exciting and was able to introduce other existing theories to support his claim. He was able to bring insight on what consciousness may be tangibly and explain the nuanced topics of spirituality, social disorders, and many other key topics that arise when talking about consciousness.
This book was formatted for people without previous knowledge to also understand the point he was making, and thus would get a little repetitive. I learned lots of new things about the brain and what research has been done in regard to social thinking and how these theories can be enhanced with his attention schema. The vocabulary does get confusing, however, the author is able to add some clarity with his distinction of awareness and attention. I do wish I had more knowledge on this topic personally as I took everything I read at face value and trusted almost all of his claims, although this book is ten years old.
This was a great first book for my introduction into non-fiction and I am excited to find new topics that interest me and the ways I can become more knowledgeable about the people and world around me!
February 5, 2019
Every man and his dog these days is looking to invent a new theory, a new model; maybe thinking that something will be named after them.
But in this case the author really does seem to be on to something special.
The question is: what is consciousness (and how does it work).
Intuition tells us it is something primal, that is there right from birth (if not before!), and that mental qualities, character, experience, memory etc. gets added with experience.
But another view of consciousness says that it is something that arises from a working brain, rather than existing prior to it. The emphasis here is on 'working' - only when the brain puts together functions is it conscious.
Graziano falls into the second camp. He presents a very appreciable model with a precise definition of 2 key factors: awareness and attention. The relationship between these is a "Strange Loop".
It would be very helpful though, to have read the (fabulous) book "I Am A Strange Loop" since it is a key part of Graziano's model, and one he spends very little time explaining. It is also helpful to know Graziano has a background in the Gestalt (perception, not therapy) approach to science - looking at what is actually presented to experience, rather than positing nice theories that can only be intuited, not observed.
Putting this together we get a very clear picture of what exactly are the two mirrors in the Strange Loop.
Give this book a chance. I read it twice, and I find it holds up very strongly.
But in this case the author really does seem to be on to something special.
The question is: what is consciousness (and how does it work).
Intuition tells us it is something primal, that is there right from birth (if not before!), and that mental qualities, character, experience, memory etc. gets added with experience.
But another view of consciousness says that it is something that arises from a working brain, rather than existing prior to it. The emphasis here is on 'working' - only when the brain puts together functions is it conscious.
Graziano falls into the second camp. He presents a very appreciable model with a precise definition of 2 key factors: awareness and attention. The relationship between these is a "Strange Loop".
It would be very helpful though, to have read the (fabulous) book "I Am A Strange Loop" since it is a key part of Graziano's model, and one he spends very little time explaining. It is also helpful to know Graziano has a background in the Gestalt (perception, not therapy) approach to science - looking at what is actually presented to experience, rather than positing nice theories that can only be intuited, not observed.
Putting this together we get a very clear picture of what exactly are the two mirrors in the Strange Loop.
Give this book a chance. I read it twice, and I find it holds up very strongly.
March 12, 2019
Provides a plausible and fairly satisfying theory on what consciousness is, how it is constructed in the brain, and how the 'magic' can be explained. The writing style is odd: it reads very grandiose and has a feel of something we'll chuckle at in 30 years - but it's the only complete theory on this I've seen (not that I've reviewed the lit).
It dovetails nicely with Harrari's collective subjective, as well, if you have recently read Sapiens or Homo Deus.
It dovetails nicely with Harrari's collective subjective, as well, if you have recently read Sapiens or Homo Deus.
May 31, 2016
This book was a great conversation starter at Devo's wedding, but now that I'm done, I'm hungry for something more meaty. It was good, but also at risk of being ponderous.
Things get explained, and then explained again. It’s needful though because sometimes when something new is discovered or imagined, the old words just won’t do. Our language is inadequate to describing it for a while, while new jargon is invented and solidified. Graziano may have this problem, and additionally the problem of meta-cognition wherein we’re thinking about thinking; it’s all potentially disasterously recursive!
The author MG starts by making the point that it’s useful to have a currently updated, descriptive and predictive model of someone else’s awareness. That sounds true and matches my own internal observation: yes, I do think I have some idea of your attention and intents. So far, so good. The next step is to say that reflexive use of this capacity, turing the predictive model on one’s own mind’s activity, is consciousness.
Both of these are described by MG as data sets. Oddly, he tends to ignore the structure of the brain as a potential participant, except for location. I’m more inclined to think of stimulus as data, and structure as program, with many possible functions elicited as appropriate by the current (data) situation.
Here are two musings on this basic premise, one clarifying and another, a more serious complaint.
First I would like to substitute “simulation” for a somewhat ponderous phrase about predictive modeling, continuously updated, described as schema. Let’s just use simulation for that instead, because, for many of us, Simulation is a familiar bit of jargon, ripe with meaning and I think it hits the nail on the head in this case. I personally would go a step farther and say LQE (i.e. Kalman Filter) because I enjoy the many very close parallels. More on that later. For now, we’ve clarified the thesis to: Consciousness is a simulation of one’s own awareness.
Next, here is a critique; that the whole thesis may be just a semantic shell game. MG makes careful use of two words, so I will capitalize them to identify jargon: Awareness and Attention. He speaks confidently and claims technical turf in the area of Attention, defining that as the preeminent thought and or sensor data under consideration. Data, often visual data as a quintessential example, compete in our mind to entrain mental resources and become the object of attention. This is described as a mechanistic, self reinforcing process but one which may stop short of reaching salience, the level of conscious regard. You can attend to things without even being conscious of them. MG draws this distinction and I suggest we should stipulate it. In saying “consciousness is a simulation of our own Attention” though, he has dodged the bullet. There’s no significant difference between Awareness and Consciousness. He defines consciousness to include awareness, plus the data under consideration, so Awareness is the slightly more specific, data-free object, and we focus on it, but the mystical bits are included in both terms. We can approximately exchange those two terms with little semantic risk. Not so Attention and Awareness, the first of wiich is the mere, effable process of forming a (possibly subconscious) idea. Well aware of the pitfall of a circular definition, MG is always careful to say consciousness (or rather, Awareness) is a reflexive simulation of our own Attention.
Here then is a hopefully clarified restatement of the theory: I’ll introduce the familiar term empathy as simulation of someone’s Attention, while Consciousness is simulation of our own. Am I just parsing and re-parsing? Remember Attention is the potentially subliminal content of your mental field of regard, and Consciousness is the descriptive (interpreter’s?) model of that process. It’s all semantically sound (according to me, anyway) I’m just not sure anything has been added.
Is this a good c program: void main {(;;)}; //nice, eh?
Correct semantics without content can parse, but without utility.
More random thoughts:
It seems obvious our brain communicates like ARINC-429, one-to-many links, transmit only, carrying special purpose messages of limited scope to special purpose processors expecting just those data. That is, Not a databus where you can send anything you want on a link. I just thought that was neat.
The brain is like an analog computer, changing slowly when you edit the connections or gains, simulating the consequences of new data quickly with new results, storing the essence of self in its structure, even when powered down.
Sometimes you do things first, and your conscious mind rationalizes them later. Lots of neat experiments in this arena. This is Gazzaniga’s epiphenomenal interpreter. That’s just a good phrase to come up with in a coffee shop.
Things get explained, and then explained again. It’s needful though because sometimes when something new is discovered or imagined, the old words just won’t do. Our language is inadequate to describing it for a while, while new jargon is invented and solidified. Graziano may have this problem, and additionally the problem of meta-cognition wherein we’re thinking about thinking; it’s all potentially disasterously recursive!
The author MG starts by making the point that it’s useful to have a currently updated, descriptive and predictive model of someone else’s awareness. That sounds true and matches my own internal observation: yes, I do think I have some idea of your attention and intents. So far, so good. The next step is to say that reflexive use of this capacity, turing the predictive model on one’s own mind’s activity, is consciousness.
Both of these are described by MG as data sets. Oddly, he tends to ignore the structure of the brain as a potential participant, except for location. I’m more inclined to think of stimulus as data, and structure as program, with many possible functions elicited as appropriate by the current (data) situation.
Here are two musings on this basic premise, one clarifying and another, a more serious complaint.
First I would like to substitute “simulation” for a somewhat ponderous phrase about predictive modeling, continuously updated, described as schema. Let’s just use simulation for that instead, because, for many of us, Simulation is a familiar bit of jargon, ripe with meaning and I think it hits the nail on the head in this case. I personally would go a step farther and say LQE (i.e. Kalman Filter) because I enjoy the many very close parallels. More on that later. For now, we’ve clarified the thesis to: Consciousness is a simulation of one’s own awareness.
Next, here is a critique; that the whole thesis may be just a semantic shell game. MG makes careful use of two words, so I will capitalize them to identify jargon: Awareness and Attention. He speaks confidently and claims technical turf in the area of Attention, defining that as the preeminent thought and or sensor data under consideration. Data, often visual data as a quintessential example, compete in our mind to entrain mental resources and become the object of attention. This is described as a mechanistic, self reinforcing process but one which may stop short of reaching salience, the level of conscious regard. You can attend to things without even being conscious of them. MG draws this distinction and I suggest we should stipulate it. In saying “consciousness is a simulation of our own Attention” though, he has dodged the bullet. There’s no significant difference between Awareness and Consciousness. He defines consciousness to include awareness, plus the data under consideration, so Awareness is the slightly more specific, data-free object, and we focus on it, but the mystical bits are included in both terms. We can approximately exchange those two terms with little semantic risk. Not so Attention and Awareness, the first of wiich is the mere, effable process of forming a (possibly subconscious) idea. Well aware of the pitfall of a circular definition, MG is always careful to say consciousness (or rather, Awareness) is a reflexive simulation of our own Attention.
Here then is a hopefully clarified restatement of the theory: I’ll introduce the familiar term empathy as simulation of someone’s Attention, while Consciousness is simulation of our own. Am I just parsing and re-parsing? Remember Attention is the potentially subliminal content of your mental field of regard, and Consciousness is the descriptive (interpreter’s?) model of that process. It’s all semantically sound (according to me, anyway) I’m just not sure anything has been added.
Is this a good c program: void main {(;;)}; //nice, eh?
Correct semantics without content can parse, but without utility.
More random thoughts:
It seems obvious our brain communicates like ARINC-429, one-to-many links, transmit only, carrying special purpose messages of limited scope to special purpose processors expecting just those data. That is, Not a databus where you can send anything you want on a link. I just thought that was neat.
The brain is like an analog computer, changing slowly when you edit the connections or gains, simulating the consequences of new data quickly with new results, storing the essence of self in its structure, even when powered down.
Sometimes you do things first, and your conscious mind rationalizes them later. Lots of neat experiments in this arena. This is Gazzaniga’s epiphenomenal interpreter. That’s just a good phrase to come up with in a coffee shop.
October 19, 2017
Computational model, attention scheme, ok, just expected something more. Not being a scientist I have thought long ago about attention as the only thing that controls the creation of our own reality. I.e., my "what you believe is what you get." Although, it was interesting, but didn't revolutionzied understanding like Dnnett's Consciousness explained. Probably what I wanted is how exactly which social environment changes the "self". I know it's possible, more than just through memes, as people, being information gravitation center functions, can not only output something from this center, but also be more actively "inputed".
May 1, 2020
Garziano says most theories of consciousness boil down to pointing at the magician as the source of the magic trick rather than actually explaining the trick. His explanation for going beyond the magician I think is best described by referencing the body schema.
Humans have a schema or mental model around the space our body takes up and how it is connected. Various simple experiments can show how mutable this is (as in we start to believe that something is part of our body that is not) and that this schema is an approximation of our body, not our body itself.
Garziano argues that consciousness is merely a schema or mental model built around attention as in the attention others are pay to their environment and to us. Similar to the body schema this is an imperfect match to actual attention, but forms the basis of our model of social interaction and through this model we infer our inner self.
I started off completely convinced, and he makes a good case for this model living alongside other models of consciousness, but I feel like it fails to explain the evolutionary advantage behind the inner model that humans have vs. the social model for attention which is present in various other species.
Humans have a schema or mental model around the space our body takes up and how it is connected. Various simple experiments can show how mutable this is (as in we start to believe that something is part of our body that is not) and that this schema is an approximation of our body, not our body itself.
Garziano argues that consciousness is merely a schema or mental model built around attention as in the attention others are pay to their environment and to us. Similar to the body schema this is an imperfect match to actual attention, but forms the basis of our model of social interaction and through this model we infer our inner self.
I started off completely convinced, and he makes a good case for this model living alongside other models of consciousness, but I feel like it fails to explain the evolutionary advantage behind the inner model that humans have vs. the social model for attention which is present in various other species.
May 31, 2015
Liked this book, what I can understand of it, but I had some mixed feelings. Graziano says he will explain how the brain produces consciousness -- a tall order, of course. I don't think he really explained it, at least not in a way I could grasp it. I feel like what he was really explaining was a theory that covers part of consciousness, not the whole thing. But he certainly had some good ideas that I could understand, and he made some points that resonated. One of the points he made early on, that I really liked, is how the traditional diagram showing a brain and a cloudy shape labelled "consciousness" usually features an arrow from the brain towards consciousness -- ie the brain "creates" consciousness. His point is that the diagram is true, but that it is incomplete: there must also be an arrow from consciousness back to the brain. Consciousness doesn't just float out there, because it can't do anything unless it can guide the brain into taking actions like talking or running or eating or reading.
Also I really liked the second-to-last chapter in the book about religion and spirituality.
Also I really liked the second-to-last chapter in the book about religion and spirituality.
August 14, 2017
Graziano fails to actually discuss consciousness. Instead he just explores awareness, which is just one aspect of consciousness, while dismissing all other aspects of consciousness. I suspect his publisher wanted to sell books and therefore labeled it with a juicy book-selling word like consciousness. I doubt many people would have read a book called Awareness and the Social Brain: A Feeble Nascent Theory, which would have been a much more precise description.
July 30, 2017
Made me see things in interesting new light
Interesting, scary, ludicrous, brilliant....This made me run a gambit of those emotions and more. Still not sure how I feel about it, but well written and researched. Liked and recommend.
Interesting, scary, ludicrous, brilliant....This made me run a gambit of those emotions and more. Still not sure how I feel about it, but well written and researched. Liked and recommend.
August 20, 2015
By far the most logical, internally and externally consistent, intellectually satisfying explanation of consciousness that I've come across with.
December 28, 2014
The absolute most sensible account in explaining consciousness.
December 10, 2018
The author opens with a story of a boy explaining a complex magic trick to his dad. When his dad asks how it happens, the boy says "by magic." In the same vein, when asked what produces consciousness in ourselves, we say "the brain." That's not an explanation, but this author has put forward a hypothesis.
In humans, he believes a few areas of the brain responsible for social awareness also help to produce the feeling of consciousness. In the book, he discusses his theory with lots of examples of how the social parts of the brain can affect our consciousness.
Did you know that we can induce out of body experiences by electrically activating parts of the brain? Or that people with damage to a certain part of the brain are not aware of one half of their visual field?
The book is a little dry at times but has so much great information and tons of citations for those wanting to learn more.
In humans, he believes a few areas of the brain responsible for social awareness also help to produce the feeling of consciousness. In the book, he discusses his theory with lots of examples of how the social parts of the brain can affect our consciousness.
Did you know that we can induce out of body experiences by electrically activating parts of the brain? Or that people with damage to a certain part of the brain are not aware of one half of their visual field?
The book is a little dry at times but has so much great information and tons of citations for those wanting to learn more.
April 21, 2021
Although it had a few interesting points, it was not what I was hoping for. Too much on the philosophical concept of consciousness and the brain, which didn't offer more than other works on the subject, and the "social brain" part was lacking huge, important parts of the social institutions of modern humans, from language to government, instead focusing almost entirely on the fact that we have some kind of model of the state of mind of other humans and the difference that makes to consciousness.
The limitations mean that a lot of importantly relevant aspects are not considered and that the more important issue ― how consciousness plays in our social relations ― isn't even mentioned. I know that isn't his topic but not only does that diminish the importance of the book, it is surely an important clue to his main topic because the two co-evolved and almost certainly have mutual impact.
The limitations mean that a lot of importantly relevant aspects are not considered and that the more important issue ― how consciousness plays in our social relations ― isn't even mentioned. I know that isn't his topic but not only does that diminish the importance of the book, it is surely an important clue to his main topic because the two co-evolved and almost certainly have mutual impact.
May 21, 2020
May this theory describe the true source of consciousness? I would agree. Clearly we need experimental confirmation, but the theory described matches many events related to consciousness. I am not sure that consciousness is simply information. I did not find a compelling argument to rule out that it is not information plus the specific processing of information which the brain on the basis of a neutral network allows.
Although in terms of reading style the book could improve, this is a great read for anyone curious on what I considered one of the most interesting questions, what is this voice that I, and seemingly al other human beings, have.
Although in terms of reading style the book could improve, this is a great read for anyone curious on what I considered one of the most interesting questions, what is this voice that I, and seemingly al other human beings, have.
August 31, 2025
It's great when somebody pays a scientist to write a book to explain an unproven theory. It's even better when that somebody essentially becomes a patron because there's not a lot of support in the community for the theory.
The best is when the author spends most of the book talking about the theory but not explaining it in detail, breadth, or supplying an evidentiary trail.
So this is a good book if you're in to that kind of thing.
Otherwise, not.
The best is when the author spends most of the book talking about the theory but not explaining it in detail, breadth, or supplying an evidentiary trail.
So this is a good book if you're in to that kind of thing.
Otherwise, not.
August 22, 2022
A persuasive and accessible theory that does a commendable job addressing many of the significant points of conflict in contemporary consciousness studies without resorting to polarizing stereotypes or overly broad swipes at those who might challenge or disagree with the author's conclusions. This seems like a book worth revisiting in the future.
September 18, 2024
So far the best book on consciousness I have ever read. Provides interesting and coherent explanations. The book draws heavily from science and research yet is not too constrained by complicated mathematical models. After reading it I joined tej club of propagonists of Grazianos theory of consciousness.
April 5, 2020
2016.07.13–2016.07.13
Contents
Graziano MSA (2013) (07:39) Consciousness and the Social Brain
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Theory
01. The Magic Trick
02. Introducing the Theory
• Consciousness and Awareness
• Figure 2.1. One way to define consciousness and awareness.
• A Squirrel in the Head
• Arrow B
• Figure 2.2. A traditional view in which awareness emerges from the processing of information in the brain (Arrow A).
• Figure 2.3. Awareness as information instantiated in the brain.
• The Awareness Feature
• Figure 2.4. Awareness as a computed feature.
• Awareness as a Sketch of Attention
• Figure 2.5. Attention as a data-handling method.
• How Awareness Relates to Other Components of the Conscious Mind
• Awareness and Social Perception
• Figure 2.6. The attention schema, the hypothesized model of attentional state and attentional dynamics, relies on information from many sources.
• Figure 2.7. Two areas of the human brain that might be relevant to social intelligence.
• Strange Loops
03. Awareness as Information
• The Report of Awareness
• The Decision on Which the Report Is Based
• The Representation on Which the Decision Is Based
• The Real Item on Which the Representation Is Based
04. Being Aware versus Knowing that You Are Aware
05. The Attention Schema
• What Is Attention and Why Is It Useful to Model?
• Comparison of the Attention Schema to the Body Schema
• Figure 5.1. Comparison of the body schema and the attention schema.
06. Illusions and Myths
• The Out-of-Body Illusion
• The Feeling of Being Stared At
• The Extromission Myth of Vision
• Mesmerism
• The Myth of Psychokinesis
• My Head Hurts from Thinking Too Much
• The Physical Properties Attributed to Awareness
07. Social Attention
• Figure 7.1. Which horizontal line is longer?
• Perceiving Awareness in Someone Else and in Oneself
• Figure 7.2. Awareness as a model of attention.
• Tracking Someone Else's Eyes
• Figure 7.3. Testing visual attention with the Posner task.
• Does the Attention Schema Theory Equate Awareness with an Eye Tracker?
• Probing the Attention Schema with a Picuture
• Figure 7.4. A cartoon to help demonstrate the attention schema.
08. How Do I Distinguish My Awareness from Yours?
• Richer and More Continuous Information about Yourself
• Interaction with Somatosensory Processing
• Awareness of Someone Else's Awareness
• The Importance of Personal Perspective
• Resonance
• Failures of the System: Group Consciousness
• Failure's of the System: Multiple Personalities
09. Some Useful Complexities
Part II: Comparison to Previous Theories and Results
10. Social Theories of Consciousness
• The Self-Narrative
• Self-Awareness versus Awareness in General
• Consciousness in the Absence of Other People
• Why Are Autistic People Conscious?
• The Knower and the Known
• Cart and Horse: Which Came First, Personal Consciousness or Attributing Consciousness to Someone Else?
• • Possibility 1: Awareness of Self Came First and Attributing Awareness to Others Followed
• • Possibility 2: Attributing Awareness to Others Came First and Personal Awareness Followed
• Improving on the Social Theories of Consciousness
11. Consciousness as Integrated Information
• Integrated Information Theories
• Integrated Information Is Not Always Conscious
• The Difficulties of Testing the Integrated Information Theory
• Explaining the Reportability of Consciousness
12. Neural Correlates of Consciousness
• Binocular Rivalry
• Blindsight
• Looking Outside Visual Cortex for Visual Awareness
13. Awareness and the Machinery for Social Perception
• Initial Discoveries in Social Neuroscience
• Figure 13.1. Some areas of the monkey brain relevant to social intelligence.
• Figure 13.2. Some areas of the human brain relevant to social intelligence and to the control of attention.
• Brain Areas Recruited During Social Cognition
• Which Areas Might Contribute to an Attention Schema?
14. The Neglect Syndrome
• Brain Areas Associated with Clinical Neglect
• Challenge 1: Loss of Awareness Is Not the Only Symptom of Clinical Neglect
• Challenge 2: Why Don't People with Neglect Also Have a Disability in Social Perception?
• Challenge 3: Why Does Neglect Affect Only One Side of Space?
15. Multiple Interlocking Functions of the Brain Area TPJ
• The Ventral Attention System
• Autobiographical Memory and the TPJ
• The Out-of-Body Experience
• Overview of the Many Interlocking Functions
16. Simulating Other Minds
• Mirror Neurons
• Difficulties with the Mirror-Neuron Story
• • Difficulty 1: No Clear Labeling of Individuals
• • Difficulty 2: Circularity
• A Hybrid System: Combining Mirror Neurons with the Expert System
• • Difficulty 1: Solving the Labeling of Individuals
• • Difficulty 2: Solving Circularity
• Simulation of One's Own Mind: The Resonance Loop
17. Some Spiritual Matters
• Free Will
• Consciousness A and Consciousness B
• Awareness and Evolution: What's It Good for?
• The Consciousness of Nonhuman Animals?
• Computer Consciousness
• Can Consciousness Survive the Death of the Brain?
• Does God Exist?
18. Explaining the Magic Trick
Notes
Index
Contents
Graziano MSA (2013) (07:39) Consciousness and the Social Brain
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Theory
01. The Magic Trick
02. Introducing the Theory
• Consciousness and Awareness
• Figure 2.1. One way to define consciousness and awareness.
• A Squirrel in the Head
• Arrow B
• Figure 2.2. A traditional view in which awareness emerges from the processing of information in the brain (Arrow A).
• Figure 2.3. Awareness as information instantiated in the brain.
• The Awareness Feature
• Figure 2.4. Awareness as a computed feature.
• Awareness as a Sketch of Attention
• Figure 2.5. Attention as a data-handling method.
• How Awareness Relates to Other Components of the Conscious Mind
• Awareness and Social Perception
• Figure 2.6. The attention schema, the hypothesized model of attentional state and attentional dynamics, relies on information from many sources.
• Figure 2.7. Two areas of the human brain that might be relevant to social intelligence.
• Strange Loops
03. Awareness as Information
• The Report of Awareness
• The Decision on Which the Report Is Based
• The Representation on Which the Decision Is Based
• The Real Item on Which the Representation Is Based
04. Being Aware versus Knowing that You Are Aware
05. The Attention Schema
• What Is Attention and Why Is It Useful to Model?
• Comparison of the Attention Schema to the Body Schema
• Figure 5.1. Comparison of the body schema and the attention schema.
06. Illusions and Myths
• The Out-of-Body Illusion
• The Feeling of Being Stared At
• The Extromission Myth of Vision
• Mesmerism
• The Myth of Psychokinesis
• My Head Hurts from Thinking Too Much
• The Physical Properties Attributed to Awareness
07. Social Attention
• Figure 7.1. Which horizontal line is longer?
• Perceiving Awareness in Someone Else and in Oneself
• Figure 7.2. Awareness as a model of attention.
• Tracking Someone Else's Eyes
• Figure 7.3. Testing visual attention with the Posner task.
• Does the Attention Schema Theory Equate Awareness with an Eye Tracker?
• Probing the Attention Schema with a Picuture
• Figure 7.4. A cartoon to help demonstrate the attention schema.
08. How Do I Distinguish My Awareness from Yours?
• Richer and More Continuous Information about Yourself
• Interaction with Somatosensory Processing
• Awareness of Someone Else's Awareness
• The Importance of Personal Perspective
• Resonance
• Failures of the System: Group Consciousness
• Failure's of the System: Multiple Personalities
09. Some Useful Complexities
Part II: Comparison to Previous Theories and Results
10. Social Theories of Consciousness
• The Self-Narrative
• Self-Awareness versus Awareness in General
• Consciousness in the Absence of Other People
• Why Are Autistic People Conscious?
• The Knower and the Known
• Cart and Horse: Which Came First, Personal Consciousness or Attributing Consciousness to Someone Else?
• • Possibility 1: Awareness of Self Came First and Attributing Awareness to Others Followed
• • Possibility 2: Attributing Awareness to Others Came First and Personal Awareness Followed
• Improving on the Social Theories of Consciousness
11. Consciousness as Integrated Information
• Integrated Information Theories
• Integrated Information Is Not Always Conscious
• The Difficulties of Testing the Integrated Information Theory
• Explaining the Reportability of Consciousness
12. Neural Correlates of Consciousness
• Binocular Rivalry
• Blindsight
• Looking Outside Visual Cortex for Visual Awareness
13. Awareness and the Machinery for Social Perception
• Initial Discoveries in Social Neuroscience
• Figure 13.1. Some areas of the monkey brain relevant to social intelligence.
• Figure 13.2. Some areas of the human brain relevant to social intelligence and to the control of attention.
• Brain Areas Recruited During Social Cognition
• Which Areas Might Contribute to an Attention Schema?
14. The Neglect Syndrome
• Brain Areas Associated with Clinical Neglect
• Challenge 1: Loss of Awareness Is Not the Only Symptom of Clinical Neglect
• Challenge 2: Why Don't People with Neglect Also Have a Disability in Social Perception?
• Challenge 3: Why Does Neglect Affect Only One Side of Space?
15. Multiple Interlocking Functions of the Brain Area TPJ
• The Ventral Attention System
• Autobiographical Memory and the TPJ
• The Out-of-Body Experience
• Overview of the Many Interlocking Functions
16. Simulating Other Minds
• Mirror Neurons
• Difficulties with the Mirror-Neuron Story
• • Difficulty 1: No Clear Labeling of Individuals
• • Difficulty 2: Circularity
• A Hybrid System: Combining Mirror Neurons with the Expert System
• • Difficulty 1: Solving the Labeling of Individuals
• • Difficulty 2: Solving Circularity
• Simulation of One's Own Mind: The Resonance Loop
17. Some Spiritual Matters
• Free Will
• Consciousness A and Consciousness B
• Awareness and Evolution: What's It Good for?
• The Consciousness of Nonhuman Animals?
• Computer Consciousness
• Can Consciousness Survive the Death of the Brain?
• Does God Exist?
18. Explaining the Magic Trick
Notes
Index
August 11, 2019
Complex ideas are simplified enough for an average reader to understand, yet not too simplified for you to feel like a kid. It is a great read filled with facts about the inner working of cognition. Chapters are very well structured and entertaining as hell.
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