THERE IS NO point having attention, any kind of attention, whether overt or covert, if you can’t control it. But control is not an easy engineering problem. You need to closely monitor the thing you are controlling. For the first time in this evolutionary story, we will encounter not just cells that can process information, and not just animals that can direct attention, but brain systems that construct an attention schema—a bundle of information, called an internal model, that monitors attention. Our evolutionary story is drawing close to something that resembles consciousness—close, but not
...more
