God Soul Mind Brain by Michael S. A. Graziano Read Free Book Online

consciousness and therefore would be able to answer questions about consciousness

    Imagine the following Kafkaesque situation. A large room is divided into a hundred cubicles. In each cubicle a person is sitting with a telephone. Each person speaks a different language.

    You are standing outside the building, in contact with it through your cell phone.

    “Is anyone in there?” you say.

    “Yes,” the phone says. “I’m here.”

    “What’s it like in there?” you say. “Is it light? Is it dark? Is it comfortable?”

    Because you are speaking English, only one person inside the building answers. The answers that you get are limited, filtered through the perspective of the particular speaker. If you ask enough questions, you may build up a detailed account of the inside of the building, but of course that account will not be complete and may even be flat-out wrong in some ways. It will be the inside of the building as seen by the English speaker.

    This building with its one English speaker is analogous to the human mind. Imagine that you ask a person, “Are you conscious? Are you aware? Do you have intentionality?” I am suggesting that there is only one set of brain circuits that evolved to compute these concepts of consciousness, awareness, and intentionality. They are the circuits that model the same states in others, the circuits for social perception and social cognition. By default, therefore, this is the only brain system that understands the question and that can report being conscious.

    The brain system proceeds to give you a limited account from its own perspective, within the bounds of its own processing capacity. It has access to some information but not all information in the brain. Some of what it reports is accurate and some is invented. It perceives the brain (in which it is embedded) in the same way that it is built to perceive all things: as an intentional agent, a unified entity moving through life, observing and deciding, choosing to act. Whatever action is performed by the brain, this system constructs an intentional explanation for the action. That intentional explanation is sometimes correct—the system is an expert at finding explanations—but sometimes that explanation is mistaken. No matter. It can’t tell the difference. The report it gives you, the running narrative, is an incomplete, approximate, and sometimes flat-out wrong interpretation of the functioning of that brain. But it is the only stream-of-consciousness narrative you are going to get, because you are talking to the only brain system that understands your questions.

Awareness is a social computation

    Recall the discussion in Chapter 3 about perceiving someone else’s awareness. When you perceive another person, you do not merely construct a model of his personality, his emotions, his interests, his goals. You also model the world as seen by him. You model his awareness of this and that object. The social machinery computes, in effect, “Brain X is aware of thing Y.” This computation is fundamentally in the social domain. By “social” of course I don’t mean cocktail parties. I mean any interaction with another person—I mean reconstructing the mind-state of the other person.

    In a fight I need to know, “John is aware of the stick on the ground; he might pick it up and use it against me.” In a different context I need to know, “John is aware of the delicious aroma of my sandwich and any moment he’s going to come over and ask for half of it.” If I try to explain something complicated to John, I need to detect whether he is aware of my meaning or has missed it. These examples are rather specific. The general point is that when reconstructing the mind-state of another person, it is necessary to analyze whether the person is aware or unaware of potentially anything within the world of objects and ideas.

    When you ask yourself, “Am I consciously aware of the taste of this string bean, the sight of