But AST really is illusionism.

Abstract

I applaud Graziano and colleagues (2020) for their bold theoretical leap. Attention and consciousness have long been confused and their relationships confusing. A complex brain needs to deploy attention efficiently, and this requires an effective and constantly updated model of what it is attending to and how. This new approach—equating m-consciousness, or subjective experience, with the model of attention —provides a welcome new way to approach the muddle. At its simplest, “awareness is a model of attention” (p. 21). Yet I wish the authors had clearly admitted that AST really is a form of illusionism. Ordinary dictionaries typically define “illusion” not as something that does not exist but as something that is not what it seems to be—precisely what the authors claim when they say “m-consciousness... does not exist as such. Or at least, it is not what we think it is”. (p. 13). If they had stuck to m-consciousness as the single process deserving the name “consciousness”, its illusory nature would have been obvious. But instead they have two types of consciousness. Their simple and tempting equation is that i-consciousness is the information and m-consciousness is a partial model of that information. In other words, the mysterious, subjective, what-it’s-like kind of consciousness—the kind that worries us so much—is a partial model of mechanistic information processing. Why then call i-consciousness “consciousness” at all? Perhaps this is because of the connection they make with global workspace theories. M-consciousness, they say, does not model all information, or all attentional processes going on in the brain; it specifically models information in the global workspace. As they put it, “GW is an account of i-consciousness” and information (for example about an apple) “has entered the global workspace and thus entered consciousness” (p. 6). But we need to ask precisely what this “entering” means and in what sense the “contents” now deserve to be called “conscious”. There is a real problem with the notion of conscious contents, and I have long argued that consciousness is not a kind of container that has “contents” inside it (Blackmore, 2002). In modelling ongoing processes of attention, rather than specific items or “contents” such as apples, AST might seem to escape this problem which would be a huge advantage. Yet, by also calling i-consciousness “consciousness” they remain stuck with it. Indeed, it seems perverse to go along with GWT in the belief that the contents of the GW are the contents of consciousness, even if this is only i-consciousness and not the mysterious, subjective, m-consciousness. GWT has always been ambiguous in an important sense, and even authors such as Baars (1997) and Dehaene (2014) do not clearly distinguish between two possible, fundamentally different, interpretations. One interpretation relies on a magical transformation: something enters the GW “and then it “becomes conscious” or “enters consciousness”” with no explanation given for what this means or how it can be (Blackmore & Troscianko, 2018, p. 116). People who see it this way, and they may be in the majority, are like Dennett’s “Cartesian materialists” who believe in a “crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain” marking a place where what happens “is what you are conscious of” (Dennett, 1991, p. 107) or those scientists and scholars Graziano and colleagues (2020) criticize for still believing that minds can actively hold information by having subjective experiences. The harder, and less intuitively obvious, interpretation is to say that once something is in the