Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
October 20, 2026
Michael S A Graziano
This article argues that human cognition is more than the performance of functions such as memory, decision-making, and attention. The brain also builds schematic models of those cognitive functions and uses those models to monitor, predict, and partially control them. When you introspect, your understanding of who you are and what is happening inside of you is derived from those schematic,...
eNeuro
October 1, 2024
Michael S A Graziano
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
2024
Rose E Guingrich, Michael S A Graziano
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...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
May 3, 2022
Michael S A Graziano
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. The second part describes a...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
2022
Michael S A Graziano
Abstract: 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. They add a magical red herring while leaving unexplained the objective...
Brain
June 22, 2021
Michael S A Graziano
The word consciousness has different meanings to different people. Michael Graziano argues that the three major perspectives on consciousness – the spiritual, the hard problem, and the self-model – represent a progression in our understanding, with only the self-model framework able to account for subjective experience.
March 15, 2018
Michael S A Graziano
3 citations
Although Attention Schema Theory (AST) may seem quite different from other theories of consciousness, it is not necessarily a rival. This chapter suggests it is compatible with many of the common, existing theories, and can add a crucial piece that fills a logical gap. AST has no metaphysical gap, because it contains nothing metaphysical. AST posits a specific kind of relationship between...
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
November 13, 2017
Michael S A Graziano
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 4, 2016
Taylor W. Webb, Michael S A Graziano
We recently proposed the attention schema theory, a novel way to explain the brain basis of subjective awareness in a mechanistic and scientifically testable manner. The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom-up influence and partly under top-down control. We...
Cognitive Neuroscience
2011
Michael S A Graziano, Sabine Kastner
A common modern view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain, perhaps caused by neuronal complexity, and perhaps with no adaptive value. Exactly what emerges, how it emerges, and from what specific neuronal process, is in debate. One possible explanation of consciousness, proposed here, is that it is a construct of the social perceptual machinery. Humans have...