Illusionism Big and Small: Some Options for Explaining Consciousness.

Illusionism is a general philosophical framework in which specific theories of consciousness can be constructed without having to invoke a magical mind essence. The advantages of illusionism are not widely recognized, perhaps because scholars tend to think only of the most extreme forms and miss the range of possibilities. The brain's internal models are never fully accurate, nothing is exactly as the brain represents it, and therefore some element of illusionism is almost certainly necessary for any working theory of consciousness or of any other property that is accessed through introspection.

Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans.

At the core of what defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people's mental states. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks. Here we compare human and LLM performance on a comprehensive battery of measurements that aim to measure different theory of mind abilities, from understanding false beliefs to interpreting indirect requests and recognizing irony and faux pas.

Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction.

The question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be considered conscious and therefore should be evaluated through a moral lens has surfaced in recent years. In this paper, we argue that whether AI is conscious is less of a concern than the fact that AI can be considered conscious by users during human-AI interaction, because this ascription of consciousness can lead to carry-over effects on human-human interaction. When AI is viewed as conscious like a human, then how people treat AI appears to carry over into how they treat other people due to activating schemas that are congruent to those activated during interactions with humans.

Predicting the attention of others.

As social animals, people are highly sensitive to the attention of others. Seeing someone else gaze at an object automatically draws one's own attention to that object. Monitoring the attention of others aids in reconstructing their emotions, beliefs, and intentions and may play a crucial role in social alignment.

Fundamental principles of cortical organization reflected in a new study.

In an exciting new finding by Gordon et al., the human motor cortex does not show a traditional body map. Instead, body-part-specific zones are separated by integrative zones, possibly reflecting the statistical structure of the human motor repertoire.

Conscious intention: New data on where and how in the brain.

How do we decide to act, and how do those decisions relate to conscious choice? A new study helps dissociate the neuronal mechanisms that choose, prepare, and trigger movement from our explicit reports of conscious intention.

Right temporoparietal junction encodes inferred visual knowledge of others.

When people make inferences about other people's minds, called theory of mind (ToM), a cortical network becomes active. The right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is one of the most consistently responsive nodes in that network. Here we used a pictorial, reaction-time, ToM task to study brain activity in the TPJ and other cortical areas.

A conceptual framework for consciousness.

This article argues that consciousness has a logically sound, explanatory framework, different from typical accounts that suffer from hidden mysticism. The article has three main parts. The first describes background principles concerning information processing in the brain, from which one can deduce a general, rational framework for explaining consciousness.

Consciousness is already solved: The continued debate is not about science.

A logical explanation of consciousness has been known for decades. The brain must construct a specific set of information about conscious feeling (theory-of-mind information), causing people to believe, think, and claim to have consciousness. Theories that propose an actual, intangible feeling are non-explanatory.

The origin of smiling, laughing, and crying: The defensive mimic theory.

Why do we leak lubricant from the eyes to solicit comfort from others? Why do we bare our teeth and crinkle our faces to express non-aggression? The defensive mimic theory proposes that a broad range of human emotional expressions evolved originally as exaggerated, temporally extended mimics of the fast, defensive reflexes that normally protect the body surface. Defensive reflexes are so important to survival that they cannot be safely suppressed; yet they also broadcast information about an animal's internal state, information that can potentially be exploited by other animals. Once others can observe and exploit an animal's defensive reflexes, it may be advantageous to the animal to run interference by creating mimic defensive actions, thereby manipulating the behaviour of others.

The attention schema theory in a neural network agent: Controlling visuospatial attention using a descriptive model of attention.

In the attention schema theory (AST), the brain constructs a model of attention, the attention schema, to aid in the endogenous control of attention. Growing behavioral evidence appears to support the presence of a model of attention. However, a central question remains: does a controller of attention actually benefit by having access to an attention schema? We constructed an artificial deep Q-learning neural network agent that was trained to control a simple form of visuospatial attention, tracking a stimulus with an attention spotlight in order to solve a catch task.

Attention, awareness, and the right temporoparietal junction.

The attention schema theory posits a specific relationship between subjective awareness and attention, in which awareness is the control model that the brain uses to aid in the endogenous control of attention. In previous experiments, we developed a behavioral paradigm in human subjects to manipulate awareness and attention. The paradigm involved a visual cue that could be used to guide attention to a target stimulus.

Visual motion assists in social cognition.

Recent evidence suggests a link between visual motion processing and social cognition. When person A watches person B, the brain of A apparently generates a fictitious, subthreshold motion signal streaming from B to the object of B's attention. These previous studies, being correlative, were unable to establish any functional role for the false motion signals.

What makes us so certain that we're conscious?

In the attention schema theory (AST), having an automatically constructed self-model that depicts you as containing consciousness makes you intuitively believe that you have consciousness. The reason why such a self-model evolved in the brains of complex animals is that it serves the useful role of modeling, and thus helping to control, the powerful and subtle process of attention, by which the brain seizes on and deeply processes information.

Attention control and the attention schema theory of consciousness.

In the attention schema theory (AST), the brain constructs a schematic, simplified model of attention. The model is associated with three cognitive processes: a model of one's own attention contributes to the endogenous control of attention, a model of the attention of others contributes to theory of mind, and the contents of these models leads to the common human claim that we contain a non-physical consciousness or awareness inside us. Because AST is a control-engineering style theory, it can make specific predictions in complex situations.

Other people's gaze encoded as implied motion in the human brain.

Keeping track of other people's gaze is an essential task in social cognition and key for successfully reading other people's intentions and beliefs (theory of mind). Recent behavioral evidence suggests that we construct an implicit model of other people's gaze, which may incorporate physically incoherent attributes such as a construct of force-carrying beams that emanate from the eyes. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivoxel pattern analysis to test the prediction that the brain encodes gaze as implied motion streaming from an agent toward a gazed-upon object.

Consciousness and the attention schema: Why it has to be right.

This article describes some aspects of the underlying logic of the attention schema theory (AST) of subjective consciousness. It is a theory that distinguishes between what the brain actually, physically has, what is represented by information models constructed in the brain, what higher cognition thinks based on access to those models and what speech machinery claims based on the information within higher cognition. It is a theory of how we claim to have an essentially magical, subjective mind, based on the impoverishment and reduction of information along that pathway.

Implied motion as a possible mechanism for encoding other people's attention.

Recent evidence suggests that the human brain automatically constructs a rich model of other people's attention, beyond registering low-level cues such as someone else's gaze direction. This model is not a physically accurate representation of attention, but instead appears to contain simplifying and physically incoherent features. For example, without explicitly realizing it, people treat the attentive gaze of others as though it exerts a gentle force pushing on objects.

Toward a standard model of consciousness: Reconciling the attention schema, global workspace, higher-order thought, and illusionist theories.

Here we examine how people's understanding of consciousness may have been shaped by an implicit theory of mind. This social cognition approach may help to make sense of an apparent divide between the physically incoherent consciousness we think we have and the complex, rich, but mechanistic consciousness we may actually have. We suggest this approach helps reconcile some of the current cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness.

Implicit model of other people's visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the eyes.

As a part of social cognition, people automatically construct rich models of other people's vision. Here we show that when people judge the mechanical forces acting on an object, their judgments are biased by another person gazing at the object. The bias is consistent with an implicit perception that gaze adds a gentle force, pushing on the object.

The temporoparietal junction and awareness.

Visual attention and awareness can be experimentally separated. In a recent study (Webb , Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independently of visual attention. 2016a;113:13923-8), we suggested that awareness was associated with activity in a set of cortical networks that overlap the temporoparietal junction.