AST of consciousness or subject awareness is a neuroscientific and evolutionary theory of consciousness which was developed by Michael Graziano.
Brains construct subjective awareness as a schematic model of the process of attention. The theory is a materialist theory of consciousness, sharing similarities with illusionist ideas.
The brain constructs a simplified model of attention to help monitor and control attention. The information in that model, portraying an imperfect and simplified version of attention, leads the brain to conclude it has a non-perfect model of its own attention. This approach is intended to explain how awareness and attention are similar in many respects, yet are sometimes dissociated, how the brain can be aware of both internal and external events, and also provide testable predictions.
AST in three points
- The brain is an information-processing device.
- It has capacity to focus its processing resources more on some signals than others. That focus may be on select, incoming sensory signals, or it may be on internal information such as specific, recalled memories. That ability to process select information in a focus manner is sometimes called attention.
- The brain not only uses the process of attention, but it also builds a set of information, or a representation, descriptive of attention. That representational model is the attention schema.
Attention is a perception-like model of attention, distinguished from higher-order cognitive models such as a believe or an intellectually reasoned theory.
Illusionism
AST is consistent with the perspective called illusionism.
Three issues:
- people equate illusion with something dismissible or harmful.
- most people equate illusion with a mirage, something that doesn’t exist. But consciousness is a good, if detail-poor account of something real: attention. We do have attention, a physical and mechanistic process that emerges from the interactions of neurons.
- Illusion is experienced by something. Those who call consciousness an illusion are extremely careful to define what they mean by “experience” so as to avoid circularity. But the AST is not a theory of how the brain has experiences. It is a theory of how a machine makes claims - how it can have experiences - and being stuck in a logic loop, or captive to its own internal information, it cannot escape making those claims.
Thought
I have a figment of knowledge. You do not. I hover my hand dramatically, “Let me call your attention to the answer that lies there.” Can I just point to successive things to make your understanding mine?
How can you change someone’s mind?
How do you not pay attention?