Rethinking Consciousness

What is consciousness? Arguments abound, and there are plenty of competing theories about what consciousness consists of, how it arises, and what it “means.” But what if we’ve overestimated consciousness? What if we’ve imbued the concept with special meaning because we’ve been tricked, essentially, into doing so by our own minds?

Rethinking Consciousness offers a new theory of consciousness that eliminates the mystery or the “hard problem” of consciousness by positing that our sensation of subjective experience—one way of defining what it means to be conscious—arises from an internal model of attention. The attention schema is analogous to the brain’s body schema, a much investigated modeling system that not only makes sense of sensory information about the body but also provides the body with a means of anticipating and planning movements so that it can react to stimuli or accomplish different tasks. Like the body schema, the attention schema does more than correlate inputs; it provides the mind with a way of internalizing and prioritizing various kinds of focus, or, in this case, attention. Graziano sums up the idea succinctly near the end of the book:

“By treating attention as a relational property of the world that is worth modeling, the brain constructs a central connector, the attention schema, to which all other information sets in the range of your attention will necessarily attach.”

And thus:

“The attention schema theory extends gestaltism by adding the ultimate connector. Consciousness pulls features together into a single, integrated whole—me, embedded in the world, at this moment in time.”

Accessible and well-argued, Rethinking Consciousness does a masterful job of steering us clear of those overcomplicated and sometimes circular arguments about consciousness that plague philosophical explorations of the mind (as well as some early books on artificial intelligence), which it accomplishes by focusing on attention as a way of understanding what it means to be conscious. At the same time, the book also skips past a question that potentially undermines its argument, although it does so in a clever way.

What is a thought? What does it mean to think? Graziano seems to be squashing thoughts down into bits, making them into information equivalent, in some ways, to sensory input or to emotions that arise from physical feelings. The idea that consciousness may be a “trick,” the brain’s way of explaining the attention schema to itself, since it cannot understand that such a schema exists even though it is aware of the “feeling” of that awareness, is a very powerful notion until we consider a topic that Graziano never mentions: meditation.

Anyone who has ever meditated knows that meditation is an acquired skill. Why? Because your attention wanders, which seems to support some of what Graziano is saying about the power of attention in the mind. But suppose you do know how to meditate, and after you’ve finished your morning or evening session, with your eyes still closed, a random thought slips into your mind. Your attention has been focused, while you were meditating, on not thinking, on simply Being; but now, here’s this thought, a thought that isn’t connected to the environment around you or to anything you have to do after you’re done meditating. Let’s say it’s a thought connected to someone you haven’t seen in some time, a friend long gone. How is this thought connected to your attention schema? Where did it come from? And what’s more, were you conscious before you had this thought? Suppose you are so good at meditating that you are no longer aware of your breathing, your heartbeat, or of your surroundings at a conscious level when you meditate. Are you still conscious? Do you have consciousness or not if your mind is focused entirely on becoming unfocused?

Suppose the random thought is not “latched onto” by your mind; it fades into the murky depths of your unconscious but rises again just before you go to sleep. This time, you groggily pursue it, taking a trip down memory lane before you drop off, and the attention schema is responsible for this trip, providing a method of linking you to your memories of the person you knew in the past. So was the thought not an aspect of your consciousness when you were not “focused” on it? Most of us would argue that the thought definitely represented some aspect of consciousness or even comprised part of the essence of your consciousness, because the act of thinking does seem inseparable from the idea we have of being conscious beings. But if the attention schema can explain how we can believe that we are conscious—and create the illusion that we have a focused “beam” of consciousness that we can direct toward any internal or external experience—what, then, is thought, and how does it arise?

I do see how the attention schema could explain the subjective experience of being aware, self-referentially, of the thought itself, but by flattening out thoughts until they are merely circuits or patterns of excitation equivalent to the sight of an apple or a pinch on the arm, it does seem as if Graziano is taking the kind of shortcut that AI researchers commonly did in the past, when they were determined to convince us that the brain was simply a complicated computer.

Nonetheless, a short, fun read, especially the last two chapters on artificial consciousness and uploading minds. Recommended.