Consciousness as a brain function

[The Grand Nudger]

I think, looking back many years in the future, one particular set of studies will stand out as when the dam broke. Between 95 and 05 there was a flurry of work on the systems basis of social cognition. To make a long story short, we discovered that there were specific regions of the brain recruited in creating models of other people. The thing we're thinking of when we say we "know" a person. When we can, often very accurately, predict their behaviors. When we can imagine how they would feel and experience an event. When, in the theater of our mind, there they are twirling around in that floral print and cackling at the most unfunny shit ever spoken, animated and independent of us. These studies got very little pushback at the time, because their full implications to theory of mind would not become apparent until we connected those findings to a bit of little disseminated work from the 80's..andofc better data collection methods from the 10's to today. Damage to those regions of the brain that construct models of other people have deleterious effects on our own awareness. Our sense of self, and our perception of external events and objects.

There is a literal person making machine in there, and it's making people all the time. We're probably one of them. This is the work that lead to model based control theories and to illusionism.