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focuses its processing on a very few items at any one time.
Where do the “items” come from?
internal data
Where does this stuff come from?
the brain produces consciousness,
The brain doesn’t produce consciousness. Just the opposite!
Machinery in your brain,
Where did this go machinery come from?
thing X.
Where did thing X come from?
Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness applies only to one part, the act of experiencing.
The purpose of this book is not to explain the content of consciousness.
How can we become aware of any information at all?
How can we explain the jump from physical brain to ethereal awareness?
The brain does not contain these things: it contains a description of these things.
What is its use?
Purpose?
One of the only truths about awareness that we can know with objective certainty is that we can say that we have it.
First, Arrow A is magical. How awareness emerges from the brain is unexplained. Second, Arrow B is magical. How awareness controls the brain is unexplained.
there is no subjective feeling inside,
Computed by what? Brain machinery?
It must construct an informational description of the apple, an informational description of conscious experience, and bind the two together.
The brain constructs descriptions of real entities in the real world.
Some trick of the neuronal interactions, some oscillation, some feedback, some vibration causes visual awareness to emerge.
the content of consciousness, the stuff in the conscious mind,
The full set of information that is present in consciousness at any one time has been called the “global workspace.”
awareness is a constructed feature. It is a complex chunk of descriptive information,
awareness is a description, a representation, constructed
attention is the process of enhancing representations
awareness is a representation of the process that enhances representations.
Attention cannot work fully without awareness, nor awareness without attention.
idea of a description that also acts
consciousness is not eternal ectoplasm, but instead information instantiated
what awareness is—it is an inner experience
Arrow A could possibly get from Box 1 to Box 2.
Simple, there is no box 1!
what, specifically, awareness can do in the world, what it can affect, what it can physically cause, we gain the leverage of objectivity.
I am not so much motivated to knock down previous views as to understand how they relate to each other and to the attention schema theory.
constructs a verbal narrative to explain behavior.
Wonder how this works without language?
consciousness was essentially a tale that the brain tells itself to explain what it is doing and why it is doing it.
the human brain has no privileged access to its own internal processes.
We tell ourselves a story about ourselves. As a consequence, we routinely and confidently make up incorrect reasons for our own behavior.
focused on conscious choice—our sense of intentionality.
consciousness first decided on how to act, and then having made the decision, directed our bodies to carry out the act.
Purpose and process.
consciousness is a narrative that the brain spins to make sense of what it is doing.
consciousness as a social construct,
consciousness is much larger than my understanding of myself. It is my understanding of the social context,
the social universe in which I live and my own place in that larger context.
They may account for some of the contents of consciousness, especially some aspects of self-knowledge, but other aspects of consciousness are left unaddressed.
humans have a built-in tendency to attribute consciousness to others.
awareness depends on one specific function, an ability to reconstruct, describe, or model the process of attention.
It makes no sense to postulate that awareness itself is made out of information.
Therefore, logically, awareness is information.
????
the brain constructs an informational model to usefully represent the process of attention.
We somehow have an ability to “see” inside our own minds and directly experience our own emotions, thoughts, and sensory impressions. Given this ability, we are able to understand other people by imagining ourselves in their shoes.
Consciousness first; social perception second.
caries
