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Authors: Michael S. A. Graziano
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representation; and
IV
, a verbal ability to report.
The division into four separate items is of course an egregious simplification of what is more like a continuous process, but the simplification helps to get at a deeper insight.
Consider the case of awareness. Suppose that there is a real physical basis for awareness, a mysterious entity that is not itself composed of information. Its composition is totally unknown. It might be a process in the brain, an emergent pattern, an aura, a subjectivity that is shed by information, or something even more exotic. At the moment suppose we know nothing about it. Let us call this thing Item I. Suppose that Item I, whatever it is, leaves information about itself in the brain’s circuitry. Letus call this informational representation Item II. Suppose the informational representation can be accessed by decision machinery (Item III). Having decided that awareness is present, the brain can then encode this information verbally, allowing it to say that it is aware (Item IV). Where in this sequence is awareness? Is it the original stuff, Item I, that is the ultimate basis for the report? Is it the representation of it in the brain, Item II, that is composed of information? Is it the cognitive process, Item III, of accessing that representation and summarizing its properties? Or is it the verbal report, Item IV? Of course, we can arbitrarily define the word
awareness
, assigning it to any of these items. But which item comes closest to the common intuitive understanding of awareness?
Consider Item I. If there is such an entity from which information about awareness is ultimately derived, a real thing on which our reports of awareness are based, and if we could find out what that thing is, we might be surprised by its properties. It might be different from the information that we report on awareness. It might be something quite simple, mechanical, bizarre, or in some other way inconsistent with our intuitions about awareness. We might be baffled by the reality of Item I. We might be outraged by the identification, just as Newton’s contemporaries were outraged when told that the physical reality of white light is a mixture of all colors. There is no reason to suppose that we would recognize Item I as awareness.
The thing to which the brain has cognitive access, and therefore the thing we describe when we report on awareness, is not Item I but rather the brain’s informational depiction of it, Item II. The properties that we attribute to awareness are properties depicted in Item II.
The Real Item on Which the Representation Is Based
One does not need to look far for the Item I, the real item on which the report of awareness is based. Like seeing a rock and then investigating and finding out that what you see is not merely an illusion,that there is indeed a physical object in front of you, so too we can find that awareness is not merely an illusion with no basis but that it has a real, physical item on which the information is based.
Consider again the case of white light. Most of the time that people report the experience of white it is because a broadband mixture of wavelengths is available to the eyes. The match, incidence by incidence, is close. It is not exact because a perceptual model is not perfectly accurate. Sometimes people report seeing white in the absence of the expected physical stimulus. Sometimes the broadband stimulus is present and people report a different color. Visual illusions abound. But by and large, almost all the time, that physical stimulus causes perceptual white. The two are correlated.
Following the same logic, we should look for a physical, objectively measurable item that is almost always present when people report the presence of awareness. There is such an item, a physiological process in the brain, the process of attention. Almost uniformly, when you attend to an item, you report being aware of it. 11 – 14 The match, however, is not perfect. There
IV
, a verbal ability to report.
The division into four separate items is of course an egregious simplification of what is more like a continuous process, but the simplification helps to get at a deeper insight.
Consider the case of awareness. Suppose that there is a real physical basis for awareness, a mysterious entity that is not itself composed of information. Its composition is totally unknown. It might be a process in the brain, an emergent pattern, an aura, a subjectivity that is shed by information, or something even more exotic. At the moment suppose we know nothing about it. Let us call this thing Item I. Suppose that Item I, whatever it is, leaves information about itself in the brain’s circuitry. Letus call this informational representation Item II. Suppose the informational representation can be accessed by decision machinery (Item III). Having decided that awareness is present, the brain can then encode this information verbally, allowing it to say that it is aware (Item IV). Where in this sequence is awareness? Is it the original stuff, Item I, that is the ultimate basis for the report? Is it the representation of it in the brain, Item II, that is composed of information? Is it the cognitive process, Item III, of accessing that representation and summarizing its properties? Or is it the verbal report, Item IV? Of course, we can arbitrarily define the word
awareness
, assigning it to any of these items. But which item comes closest to the common intuitive understanding of awareness?
Consider Item I. If there is such an entity from which information about awareness is ultimately derived, a real thing on which our reports of awareness are based, and if we could find out what that thing is, we might be surprised by its properties. It might be different from the information that we report on awareness. It might be something quite simple, mechanical, bizarre, or in some other way inconsistent with our intuitions about awareness. We might be baffled by the reality of Item I. We might be outraged by the identification, just as Newton’s contemporaries were outraged when told that the physical reality of white light is a mixture of all colors. There is no reason to suppose that we would recognize Item I as awareness.
The thing to which the brain has cognitive access, and therefore the thing we describe when we report on awareness, is not Item I but rather the brain’s informational depiction of it, Item II. The properties that we attribute to awareness are properties depicted in Item II.
The Real Item on Which the Representation Is Based
One does not need to look far for the Item I, the real item on which the report of awareness is based. Like seeing a rock and then investigating and finding out that what you see is not merely an illusion,that there is indeed a physical object in front of you, so too we can find that awareness is not merely an illusion with no basis but that it has a real, physical item on which the information is based.
Consider again the case of white light. Most of the time that people report the experience of white it is because a broadband mixture of wavelengths is available to the eyes. The match, incidence by incidence, is close. It is not exact because a perceptual model is not perfectly accurate. Sometimes people report seeing white in the absence of the expected physical stimulus. Sometimes the broadband stimulus is present and people report a different color. Visual illusions abound. But by and large, almost all the time, that physical stimulus causes perceptual white. The two are correlated.
Following the same logic, we should look for a physical, objectively measurable item that is almost always present when people report the presence of awareness. There is such an item, a physiological process in the brain, the process of attention. Almost uniformly, when you attend to an item, you report being aware of it. 11 – 14 The match, however, is not perfect. There
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