2017
DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2017.00060
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The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness

Abstract: The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim. The theory does not address how the brain might actually possess a non-physical essence. It is not a theory that deals in the non-physical. It is about the computations that cause a machine to make a claim and to assign a high degree of certainty to the claim. The … Show more

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Cited by 46 publications
(33 citation statements)
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“…Before closing, I would like to briefly visit two theories of consciousness which I think merit further consideration and research in connection with the ideas presented here. In describing Attention Schema Theory, Graziano (2013Graziano ( , 2017Graziano ( , 20192015) proposes that a simplified model of attention is used for attentional control, similarly to the way the body uses a simplified body schema for enhancing motor control. Conscious awareness is suggested to be the phenomenal entailment of the attention schema and the representations it biases.…”
Section: Integration With Theories Of Consciousnessmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Before closing, I would like to briefly visit two theories of consciousness which I think merit further consideration and research in connection with the ideas presented here. In describing Attention Schema Theory, Graziano (2013Graziano ( , 2017Graziano ( , 20192015) proposes that a simplified model of attention is used for attentional control, similarly to the way the body uses a simplified body schema for enhancing motor control. Conscious awareness is suggested to be the phenomenal entailment of the attention schema and the representations it biases.…”
Section: Integration With Theories Of Consciousnessmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…There is a multitude of theories related to conscious experience that have implications for anesthetic mechanism, including global neuronal workspace theory, higher-order thought theory, predictive coding, attention schema theory, and others. 41,42,43 Two theories have more explicitly attempted to explain how general anesthetics induce unconsciousness in terms of network science. The cognitive unbinding theory 2 proposes that anesthetic effects on regions important for the synthesis of information (the so-called process of “binding by convergence”) or effects that disrupt the communication between brain regions (the process of “binding by synchrony” or, more precisely, temporal coordination) would be sufficient conditions for unconsciousness 44 .…”
Section: Theories Of Anesthetic-induced Unconsciousness Of Relevance mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Complex ecological environments are also complex social environments as the successful exploitation of ecological niches necessarily involves the successful negotiation of conspecifics (Passingham, 2008; Passingham and Wise, 2012; Wittmann et al, 2018). Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the ability of brains to restrict attention to a subset of stimuli in complex environments resulted in the capacity for self-awareness of mental state, which in turn became awareness of the mental state of others (Frith and Frith, 2006; Graziano, 2017). If this is an accurate mechanistic model, the results we show here suggest that the evolutionary consequences of these dynamics led to feedbacks between group size and brain size that resulted in the unique allometries of group size and collective brain mass in primate species.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Two of the most conspicuous features of the human species are large brains and intense sociality. How the two interact to influence cognition has become the focus of research across many disciplines (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Dunbar, 1998; Richerson and Boyd, 2005; Dunbar and Shultz, 2007; Krubitzer, 2009; Woolley et al, 2010; Whiten and Erdal, 2012; Hutchins, 2014; Dennett, 2017; Everett, 2017; Graziano, 2017; Muthukrishna et al, 2018). Human brains are large, complex, and metabolically expensive, constituting ∼25% of the basal metabolic budget but only ∼2% of the body size.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%