Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness4 Analogy to the Body SchemaTo better explain the possible relationship between attention and awareness, I will use the
analogy of the body and the body schema (Graziano and Botvinick 2002; Holmes and Spence
2004; Macaluso and Maravita 2010; Wolpert et al. 1995). Imagine you close your eyes and tell me
about your right arm – not what you know intellectually about arms in general, but what you
can tell about your particular arm, at this particular moment, by introspection. What state is it in?
How is it positioned? How is it moving? What is its size and shape? What is the structure inside?
How many muscles do you have inside your arm and how are they attached to the bones? Can
you describe the proteins that are cross-linking at this moment to stiffen the muscles?
You can answer some of those questions, but not all. General information about the shape
and configuration of your arm is easy to get at, but you can’t report the mechanistic details about
your muscles and proteins. You may even report incorrect information about the exact position
of your arm. The reason for your partial, approximate description is that you are not reporting
on your actual arm. Your cognitive machinery has access to an internal model, a body schema,
that provides incomplete, simplified information about the arm. You can report some of the
information in that arm schema. Your cognition has access to a repository of information, an
arm model, and the arm model is simplified and imperfect.
My point here is to emphasize the specific, quirky relationship between the actual arm and
the arm schema. In AST, the relationship between attention and awareness is similar. Attention
is an actual physical process in the brain, and awareness is the brain’s constantly updated model
of attention.
Suppose you tell me that you are aware of item X – let’s say an apple placed in front of you.
In AST, you make that claim of awareness because you have two closely related internal models.
First, you have an internal model of the apple, which allows you to report the properties of the
apple. You can tell me that it’s round, it’s red, it’s at a specific location, and so on. But that by itself
is not enough for awareness. Second, you have an internal model of attention, which allows you
to report that you have a specific kind of mental relationship to the apple. When you describe
your awareness of the apple – the mental possession, the focus, the non-physical subjective
experience – according to AST, that information comes from your attention schema, a rough,
detail-poor description of your process of attention.
5 Why an Attention Schema Might Cause a Brain to Insist That It Has
Subjective Awareness – and Insist That It Isn’t Just InsistingSuppose you play me for a fool and tell me that you are literally an iguana. In order to make
that claim, you must have access to that information. Something in your brain has constructed
the information, “I am an iguana.” Yet that information has a larger context. It is linked to a
vast net of information to which you have cognitive access. That net of information includes
much that you are not verbalizing to me, including the information, “I’m not really an iguana,”
“I made that up just to mess with him,” “I’m a person,” and so on. Moreover, that net of infor-
mation is layered. Some of it is at a cognitive level, consisting of abstract propositions. Some of it
is at a linguistic level. Much is at a deeper, sensory or perceptual level. You have a body schema
that informs you of your personhood. Your visual system contains sensory information that also
confirms your real identity. You have specific memories of your human past.
But, suppose I am cruelly able to manipulate the information in your brain, and I alter that
vast set of information to render it consistent with the proposition that you are an iguana. Your
body schema is aligned to the proposition. So is the sensory information in your visual system,