Free Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S. A. Graziano Page A

room for some philosophical nuance.
    I am reminded of Magritte’s famous painting,
The Treachery of Images
. He painted a pipe with impressive realism and beneath it painted the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This is not a pipe. Technically, it is a representation of a pipe, not a pipe itself. Magritte said, “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it!” 7 If peoplehave trouble agreeing on the existential reality of a pipe beautifully rendered in a painting, think how much harder it is to agree on the existential reality of a beautiful awareness rendered or described by information in the brain. It is real. It isn’t real. The attention schema theory does not even seek to answer the question of its existential reality but instead tries to describe what is constructed by the brain. One could think of awareness as information. One could also think of it as the lovely ghost described by that information.

6
Illusions and Myths

    The theory proposed in this book can be summarized in five words: awareness is an attention schema. A schema is an informational model, constantly recomputed, that represents something worth tracking and predicting. The proposed attention schema is a set of information, call it
A
, that represents attention. But the representation has its own idiosyncratic, even extravagant properties that distinguish it from the mechanistic and complicated item being represented. What is included in the information set
A
? This chapter explores how our intuitions, cultural myths, and illusions concerning awareness might reveal something about the content of the proposed attention schema.
    Neuroscience has spent more than a century studying the information content of representations in the brain. These studied representations include, for example, visual, tactile, auditory, emotional, and entirely abstract representations in various parts of the brain. I could write a multi-volume textbook on the information contained in a visual representation and how that information is computed and transformed in successive stages in the brain. Awareness, however, is a different matter. The information content of awareness is not studied. The reason, of course, is that most scientists and most thinkers on the topic have never considered awareness to be composed of information. Awareness is assumed to be something else, somethingextra, something that emanates from information or that takes in information or that hitches a ride alongside information. That awareness might itself be descriptive information has generally not been considered.
    Here I am suggesting that awareness is indeed a chunk of information constructed in the brain. To be clear, I am not talking about the information that we normally think of as being “in” consciousness. If I ask myself what information is in my consciousness at this particular moment, I might say visual information, sound information, information about myself, my body, my emotions, my thoughts, and so on. I am conscious of all of that content. But in addition to the informational content of consciousness, according to the theory, my brain also constructs a set of information, A, that allows me to conclude that I am aware of the content.
    What is the information that defines awareness itself? What is in the information set
A
? An easy, initial approach to the question is to examine the reports that people typically make when talking about awareness. Our verbal descriptions of it and our cultural mythology about it presumably reflect the contents of that information set as abstracted, summarized, schematized, and slightly garbled through the cognitive machinery of introspection and linguistic embedding. The present chapter examines some of these commonly reported intuitions and myths and on that basis draws some tentative inferences about the informational content of
A
.
The Out-of-Body Illusion

    Intuitively we experience awareness as a thing located inside us or emanating from