When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself
This is either selection fallacy or tautology. How do we know what the brain is paying attention to outside of consciousness? Or is non-conscious attention ruled out by definition?
In fact, my brain pays attention to a great many things that I do not experience. I know this because there are specific examples. One is motor control, which mostly happens inside the brain but outside of consciousness. Touch your finger to your nose. You can do that, but how did you do it?
In the modern study of robotics there is something called control theory, and it teaches us that, if a machine such as a brain is to control something, it helps to have an internal model of that thing.
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It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one’s state of attention.
According to this theory, every model-based controller is conscious. So we've been building artificial consciousnesses for forty years. They even talk to us through their control panels. The Swiss have officially put into law the concept of the dignity of plants; should we add the dignity of machines?
If theories that the cerebellum uses model-based control methods are correct, then it follows from Graziano's view that cerebellums are also conscious. This, however, is not our experience, and experience is what he is supposedly trying to explain.
Now, Graziano is, as usual with explanations of consciousness, not actually trying to explain conscious experience. He starts out claiming to address that, but then makes the standard bait and switch:
Consciousness isn’t a non-physical feeling that emerges. Instead, dedicated systems in the brain compute information. Cognitive machinery can access that information, formulate it as speech, and then report it.
He is explaining why we talk about having conscious experience, while ignoring conscious experience itself.
I think that his theory is that the kinds of activity that the brain can carry on without the "attention modeling" and its consequent "conscious experience"/awareness is what most other animals haven't managed to progress beyond, and that the "attention model" ( of the parietal junction etc ), is what has enabled the massively sustained attention span of humans compared to other animals, and other advanced kinds of cognitive function, a step up in complexity, rather like the M button on a calculator. It has enabled the human b...
I found this theory pretty interesting, and it reminded me of Gary Drescher's explanation of consciousness in Good and Real:
- Princeton neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, writing in Aeon Magazine.