🗿 Is Consciousness an Illusion?

How your attention might explain the riddle of conscious experience

Consciousness is probably the biggest mystery in neuroscience. It’s defined and studied in a number of different ways, but most people are intrigued by the question of how the electrical activity in your brain can produce subjective experience: thoughts and sensations that actually feel like something. When you zoom in enough on the brain, all you find are tiny wires that transmit electrical impulses, so why is there something that it’s like to be you or “something that it is like to be a bat” (to quote Thomas Nagel)?

Look at a red object in your environment and think about how it feels to see that color. As you look at the object, circuits in your brain that represent the concept of red are firing away to indicate that there’s a red object in front of you. But the brain’s processing doesn’t stop at a mere pattern of electrical activity. It seems to produce a vivid scarlet hue in your visual awareness.

These perceptions—and other conscious experiences like emotions, thoughts, and sensations—feel like they float in a kind of immaterial space. For example, it’s not easy to pinpoint where your thoughts are appearing. People will often say that thoughts are happening in their head but there’s no projection screen in your head. Thoughts and other experiences just appear in a general medium we call consciousness. This is why dualist intuitions of consciousness—ideas like having an immaterial soul that is separate from your material body—are so widespread.

It’s not obvious why the brain doesn’t process your environment and control your body without an ongoing sense of awareness in the background (rather like how you might imagine an advanced robot to behave). So where does that awareness come from? How is it possible that the electrical activity in a bunch of tangled up wires inside your skull can create a conscious perception? Why does it feel like the lights are on inside your head rather than off?

Comic from Inky Rickshaw

🔦 Attention schema

In a paper published in April 2022, Michael Graziano—Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton—outlines a simple, science-based framework for consciousness.

The building blocks of this framework come from a theory of consciousness known as “illusionism”; a position advocated by philosophers including Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the idea that the qualitative sides of your consciousness such as the redness of an apple, the pain of a stubbed toe, or the warm glow of love, are all illusory. They’re useful caricatures that the brain creates to serve an evolutionary purpose, and those caricatures don’t have a one-to-one mapping with reality.

At this point, your natural reaction might be that even if those caricatures don’t precisely reflect an underlying reality, they are still conscious experiences. You might feel something completely unrealistic, but the point is you still feel it. You can deny the reality of what you’re feeling but you can’t deny that you have the feeling itself. Or can you?

It’s always useful to remind ourselves about how powerful and convincing illusions can be. Here’s one below from a 2005 letter to the journal Nature. The chess pieces in the top and bottom rows are completely identical in color.

Image from Anderson & Winawer (2005)

If you’re like me and most other humans, every ounce of your subjective experience suggests the chess pieces in the bottom row are darker than the ones above. You might even believe the bottom pieces are the black pieces on a chess board and the top pieces are the white pieces. But it’s all an illusion and you can prove it by cutting the same thin slice from the centers of the two queens and comparing the colors when you entirely exclude the background. The two queens (and every other pair of pieces) contain the exact same shades of gray from top to bottom.

You can think of your belief in your conscious experience as an equally powerful illusion that doesn’t come with such an easy method for proving that it’s an illusion. You can wholeheartedly insist that you experience a conscious feeling the same way you can wholeheartedly insist that the chess pieces above are different shades. But that doesn’t make your insistence correct. You can believe that you have an immaterial feeling or sensation without those feelings or sensations actually existing.

Graziano’s consciousness framework emerges from two starting principles:

1. “Information that comes out of a brain must have been in that brain.”

2. “The brain’s models are never accurate.”

All of the relevant science we have suggests that these two principles are true. Every experience or belief that we hold is created by neural activity patterns in the brain, and our brains’ models of the world—for example, the way we perceive color, motion, or even our own consciousness—aren’t precise replications of reality.

Graziano argues that our subjective sense of conscious experience comes from the way the brain models our attention. We use attention to focus our mental energy on processing particular objects around us; if we focus our attention on a sound, we appreciate that sound more deeply, and if we focus our attention on a tree, we notice finer details in the shape and color of that tree.

But our attention needs a control system; a process that can identify what our attention is doing at each moment, how it might affect our other bodily systems, and what it might do next. This control system creates a model of our attention that Graziano calls an “attention schema”, and our attempts to make sense of this schema produce a false intuition that we have a soul-like entity inside our heads. Just as you’d struggle to explain to someone that the top and bottom chess pieces in the picture above are an identical color (without being able to prove it), you also struggle to communicate the nature of your attention schema.

It’s an intriguing way to think about the problem of consciousness; a problem with a notorious reputation for evading our ability to understand and discuss it. Graziano gives a nice example of how our sense of consciousness fluctuates depending on what is happening with our attention when we look at an apple:

“As you look at and attend to the apple, a multicomponent model of the apple is constructed, in which roundness, redness, and vivid experienceness are all represented and bound together. That model provides a somewhat simplified, caricaturized representation of the apple’s shape, complex reflectance spectrum, and the attentive relationship between you and the apple”

A little later, he continues to explain what happens if you keep your eyes on the apple but move your attention to thinking about something else. Your sense of “experienceness”—his word for the subjective, qualitative nature of a conscious perception—gets stronger and weaker depending on the state of your attention:

“If you withdraw attention from the apple entirely, the experienceness component of the model, the component that represents your attention on the apple, disappears, and at the same time the visual components of the model fade in signal strength (since attention enhances signal strength). If you attend to the apple again, then the model is automatically rebuilt. Not only is the apple representation boosted again in signal strength, such that it can affect downstream systems around the brain, but the larger model also contains a representation of experienceness again.”

The best part of this theory is its simplicity and lack of mysticism. So much of our conversation around consciousness resorts to feeling as though something must be true and trying to explain a non-physical phenomenon that seems impossible. The elegant solution provided by the attention schema theory (and illusionism more generally) is that consciousness may just be the greatest trick the brain ever pulled.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

• Your perceptions are a caricature: Close your eyes and think about how the different parts of your body feel. What does it internally feel like to have hands? If you keep your hands still, do you sense individual fingers or a messier fuzz of sensation? The brain isn’t a simple window onto reality. It actively builds models of the world that are useful for helping us survive. Wavelengths of visible light are interpreted as colors, and our attention might be interpreted as a non-physical consciousness.

• Reinterpret the things that make you unhappy: The brain’s modeling creates biases in how you interpret the events in your life. For example, negativity biases mean that negative emotions influence your decision-making more than positive emotions do. This can help us to avoid pain but it often spirals out of control. When you find yourself anxious about events you can’t control or otherwise find that hurtful feelings are pointlessly affecting your day, try to recenter yourself by focusing on your own attention. Shining the light of your attention schema back on itself is a calming exercise that brings you into the present moment and interrupts mental rumination cycles.

• Enjoy freedom from the riddle of consciousness: Consciousness is a complicated problem that has confused people for centuries. It continues to confuse us today and we’re not yet anywhere near a consensus among scientists or philosophers. But mull over the simple theory of illusionism and see how it resonates with you. There’s a feeling of freedom that comes with embracing that the centerpiece of our life—our subjective experience—might just be the brain’s ramblings about what our attention is doing.

💡 A final quote

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

~ Aldous Huxley

---

❤️ If you enjoyed this, please share it with a few friends. If you’re new here, sign up below or visit erman.substack.com

📬 I love to hear from readers. Leave a comment on this post or feel free to email me your questions.

👋 Until next time,

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

Follow me on Twitter | Medium | LinkedIn | Facebook