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Brains construct models, informational models of all kinds of things, in fact it’s one of the things brains do best, make models of the external world and models of things going on inside your body.The theory at heart, the reason why brains attribute the property of awareness to itself, is because the brain is essentially constructing a model to monitor the fact that it is paying attention to that object. So attention is a physically real data-handling method and awareness is the brain’s cartoon sketch that’s used to keep track of what it’s doing. That it can use to keep track of what it’s doing.
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So let’s think about what the physical project of attention is: there’s an agent, a brain, a being that’s focusing its processing power on a particular set of signals that neuroscientists call attention; the signals might pertain to the sandwich you’re holding. There’s an agent and there’s a sandwich, and there’s a relationship between the two: that is, the agent is focusing its resources on the sandwich. That’s attention.So when you build a model of that it will have a large amount of information about the agent—who you are, where you are, your memories, your information about yourselves—that model should contain information about the sandwich, and it should contain information about the relationship between the two. And, crucially, the model will have information about what it means for an agent to focus attention on a thing. What I’m saying is that there is information in the brain, a large dossier with lots of descriptive information that there’s a you, and there’s a sandwich and a specific relationship: you are aware of the sandwich.And there’s some recursion involved. In some sense, awareness of self and awareness of some object are kind of the same thing. The underlying formula is very similar.One thing that I’m surprised by is how similar and useful language is in conceiving these models and structures. Specifically the sentence “I see blue.” Three aspects of this cognitive function are the three essential aspects of the sentence: subject, verb, object. Is that an accident or something hardwired into our brains?
I think there is a deep connection between language and all these other issues. One aspect of this theory is that there’s a constant evolutionary change and what may have started out as a simple model to help control attention then evolved into a way of of keeping track of other people’s state of attention and then evolved into a key part of our social machinery. An outgrowth of our social capability is language capability, and in fact, the main language area of the brain—it’s called the Wernicke's area—is basically an evolutionary outgrowth of the same regions involved in social thinking that we think might be involved in attributing awareness in ourselves and others. So the actual brain mech[anics] of language have a very deep connection to all these issues of consiouness and awareness.
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A robot can do a bunch of things, but it does not have the information to report: “I have experience, I have an inner experience.” It does not have that algorithm. But I think that’s programmable, and it think it’s coming.Here’s another thing I suspect that will happen in 100 years: imagine a device that can scan your brain in enough molecular detail to simulate or recreate that data in artificial hardware. There is a you—your mind and memories that are now copied almost like a file on a computer system. Now you can live in a simulated world of your choice. The reason why I think this is likely [to] happen is that people are obsessed with living as long as possible. This is essentially the invention of [an] electronic afterlife. Another reason I think this will happen is because if there’s one thing people spend the most money on, it's entertainment, and this is like putting yourself in a virtual playground. I think this is an inevitable consequence of understanding awareness. So forget about robots that are aware; imagine putting yourself into a simulated world and have it feel real.This post originally appeared in VICE.More Brain Stuff:War in Our Heads: A Chat with Jonathan MorenoThe Science Behind Tripping BallsReading Brain Waves