Controversy and disagreement lie at the heart of most scientific advances. This is notably true of attempts to provide a scientific understanding of consciousness as part of a more general account of human psychology (1,2,3,4). Reviews of current theories of consciousness (5) highlight substantial disagreement, with some suggesting that the neuroscientific study of consciousness is a “quagmire” (6), “plagued by crosstalk” (3) that remains “scientifically controversial, as it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished” (5).

Despite being “a vibrant area of research in psychology and neuroscience” that achieved scientific credibility over the past decade (7), consciousness still remains a mystery and problem for science. The nature of consciousness, the neural structures that bring it about, and the evolutional purpose of consciousness all remain unanswered questions. This paper offers some reasons for the current predicament and offers a suggestion for taking a different conceptual approach, which while not intuitive, provides a basis for a more biologically informed, account of human psychology.

(i)The primacy of intuitive explanations and the heterogeneous range of phenomena covered by the term. Consciousness is a “Humpty-Dumpty” umbrella term (8), that “means different things to different people’ (9). Many of these meanings are sourced from strong intuitions and not formal scientific or philosophical accounts (10). We know the world about us because we experience it directly. We know about thoughts and feelings because we can sense them. Most human knowledge is comprised of intuitive level accounts sufficient for everyday use. For most non-experts, the intuitive understandings of astronomy, genetics, antibiotics, electricity, artificial intelligence, vaccination, gravity, nuclear power and climate change have their origins in early beliefs, supplemented by education, social media and experience that shape how we perceive and explain the world to ourselves and others (11,12).

Since we all readily possess a compelling, self-evident intuitive understanding of consciousness (our private inner experience) and how it works, explaining the nature of consciousness has never required or depended on formal scientific or philosophical accounts. Intuitive accounts explain why the formal study of consciousness was relegated to the margins of mainstream psychology until the late 20^th century (13) and why scientific explanations of consciousness were a late subject of formal psychological enquiry. We (think we) know what ‘consciousness’ is and what it does by simply experiencing it (14). Unlike scientific accounts, intuitive accounts, or lay theories, constructed and supplemented by a lifetime of experience provide effortless, compelling explanations that rarely require explicit justification (15,16).

The fact that our subjective experience, like other mental states is not objective and must be inferred from subjective reports and actions, has rendered intuitive accounts more influential than hypothetico-deductive scientific accounts. In this regard, scientists are no less immune from the influence of first-person intuitive explanations derived from their own subjective experience. “From a first-person perspective, consciousness appears to exert a central influence on human affairs, and scientists have a first-person perspective as much as their subjects. It is not surprising, therefore, that consciousness …viewed from a first-person perspective”, is regarded as “central to the determination of human action.”. (17). Consequently, we argue that all scientists (including the current authors) had little option but to take as a starting point, when trying to offer scientific accounts of consciousness, their own phenomenal experience which comes with the not unreasonable intuitive belief that such mental states, thoughts, intentions, beliefs, desires, cause and control behaviours.

Intuition, the experience of immediate knowing which presents itself as a trusted insight or solution is an evolved survival-based cognitive ability that provides direct explanations of our often-chaotic world arrived at without apparent effort and before more considered slower analytical accounts (15,16). As a compelling and automated cognitive process, intuition can and has fostered significant scientific progress by discovering patterns and connections, but intuitions can also be wrong (18,19). The geocentric model of astronomy that dominated science and religion for thousands of years proposed by the ancient Greeks claimed the earth was stationary and that the planets revolved around it. One reason for the endurance of this explanatory account is that for the most part it readily explained what could be observed from Earth. This remained the case until Copernicus (a Catholic cleric) and later Galileo put forward the alternative account of heliocentrism in the sixteenth century. This account, where the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun, however, took a further two centuries before being formally accepted by the Catholic Church.

Evidence from cognitive development suggests that intuitive informed beliefs co-exist in many areas of science, potentially delaying and or obstructing the acceptance of scientific accounts (20,21). Such accounts are historically entrenched and culturally widespread, making them inerasable and resistant to counter evidence across our lifespan (12).

One of the most powerful intuitive beliefs that affects the way people perceive and explain their subjective awareness is mind-body dualism, the widespread conviction that our private mental world (thoughts, memories, intentions, and feelings) is qualitatively distinct from and cannot be fully explained by the operation of physical brains and bodies (22). Belief in this mind-body distinction is found in most human cultures including young children and readily provides for intuitive assumptions of mental causation. Belief in the later underpins the foundational beliefs of most liberal political systems of government, education, health care, and criminal justice. Dualistic beliefs also impact people’s health-related attitudes (22), scientific literacy and informs notions of criminal justice and moral responsibility (23). Although this distinction between body and mind is challenged by a growing confidence in a neuroscientific materialistic world view (24), dualism remains a strong and persistent conviction for most people including many scientists who appear to be intuitive or closet dualists (23,24).

According to Anthis (3) “much of the debate on the fundamental nature of consciousness [currently] takes the form of intuition jousting, in which the different parties each report their own strong intuitions and joust them against each other in the form of intuition pumps (25), gestures, thought experiments, poetic descriptions, and analogies”. A systematic review of over 1000 academic articles on consciousness between 2007–2017 found some 29 different theoretical explanatory models, where “the probability of having different definitions of the same object correlates directly to the number of theories that try to explain the nature of consciousness itself” (4).

As currently used, the words conscious and consciousness are ambiguous terms that leave room for conflation and muddy distinctions. Lacking clear boundaries (26), the terms are often used to cover a range of mental phenomena and competing psychological accounts (27,4,10). To help reduce ambiguity, we suggest avoiding the term “consciousness” and focusing efforts on the familiar phenomenal sense of subjective awareness, the embodied, immediate sentient awareness of the external world and our mental reflections (meta-cognition: the awareness of one’s own awareness) (14,28). Focusing on subjective awareness is also more in keeping with the findings of a recent online public survey (29) where nearly 90% identified consciousness as the receptive experience of being aware and or experiencing. Nothing appears more real than the experience of subjective awareness, the inner life of integrated perceptions, thoughts, and feelings (31) where self is perceived as ‘a being who experiences (14).

(ii)Intuitive assumptions and scientific accounts. For most, the human experience of subjective awareness intuitively locates us, as subjects, in the driver’s seat with a compelling sense of self-directed volitional control (14,28) for all decisions and actions.  Accordingly, most scientists faced with the challenge of how to explain this inerasable assumption derived from subjective experience assume or incorporate the intuitive premise that subjective awareness plays some form of executive role in the control of mental and physical actions, despite a poor understanding of how this is achieved or its evolutionary purpose. Intuitive accounts remain persuasive and enduring because they also find ready endorsement from the attribution of executive control capacities in all social systems whereby humans are held to be accountable and responsible for their behaviours, actions, and speech.  Publicly shared social mega-constructs, such as democracy, human rights, universal suffrage, citizenship, equality, equity, and disability –all assume an executive embodied agentive capacity for humans (e.g., free will) considered as persons operating in society to administer group/social governance and justice effectively.

Collectively these powerful, socially established constructs affirm the importance of a self, acting in the social role of person, as a locus of embodied awareness and control, where subjects regarded as an “internal action-orderer” (30) are accountable for their actions and responsible for their intentions and decisions (14). Recognising the impact and reality of these social constructs in everyday life is key to explaining why subjective experience continues to play an important role in theoretical accounts of consciousness. These social constructs shape our daily lives more than we know. Where societal governance has collectively defined social constructs as “real” (e.g., human rights, laws, nation boundaries), then these social constructs have material impact on the self, as person and the way society is collectively organised.

While the term “self refers to the subjective and experiential sense that one is or has a locus of awareness of- a private consciousness”, the term “personhood” describes a socially defined and culturally mediated public role (31). The universal acceptance of a rights-based personhood in most democracies (e.g. UN Charter, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),1948,the Equality Act 2010 in the UK) reinforces this compelling sense of self-directed volitional control together with the powerful intuitive experience of a responsible self acting in society. These social attributes, assigned by humans to humans as persons, by virtue of being human are predicated on the explicit and typically unquestioned assumption of an underlying individual liberty with the capacity to exercise thought and choice attributable to a responsible self.

Collectively these powerful, embedded socio-cultural constructs covering money, law, tax, equality, gender, democracy, and religion are effectively agreed collective creations of human minds that are instantiated in the human brain from an early age by the cultural transmission of beliefs and values from parents, friends, education institutions and governments. Often taken for granted such “socio-cultural realities” are critical for the effeciant operation of all socio-legal democratic systems and maintenance of social order.

The subjective experience of self as the director of mental causation has and continues to influence scientific theories of consciousness, with some arguing that subjective awareness plays an ‘active integral part of the cerebral process itself, exerting potent causal effects in the interplay of cerebral operations” (32). Accordingly, a “dominant assumption of cognitive psychology in the 1970s was that the higher mental processes were almost entirely under conscious executive control” (33), with most authors suggesting that subjective awareness is necessary for most high-level processes such as choice, learning and memory, the organization of complex, novel responses, planning, reflection, and decision (34,30,35, 36, 37,38).

The widespread acceptance of intuitive explanatory accounts contributed to the late emergence of psychology as a fledging science at the end of the 19^th century. By “the early 20th century, consciousness was often simply assumed to underlie behaviour” (7). In assigning consciousness, a central role in the global workspace theory of consciousness, Baars and McGovern (38) claimed that “information in the global workspace corresponds to conscious contents” and “consciousness appears to be the major way in which the central nervous system adopts the novel challenging and informal informative events of the world”.

Given “trust in the reality of mental causation [is] thoroughly embedded in our common-sense conception of ourselves as freely deliberating agents that are the causal origins of [our] actions” (40), we understandably and intuitively explain ourselves, to ourselves in terms of an experienced executive self in a social world. The challenge for neuroscience accounts, however, remains “In the lab we can all aspire to objectivity, examining the workings of other brains — or even imagining our own — yet we go home in the evening to our subjective, autobiographical world, and aspire to make personal sense of our lives and loves” (41).

(iii) Challenging intuitive accounts when attempting to provide a science of human psychology. While helpful for many aspects of everyday discourse, intuitive or common-sense accounts can lead to scientific misconceptions (19). The challenge for scientific accounts of human psychology is to explain the compelling, experience informed intuitive accounts, together with the ubiquitous social application of person-centred social constructs that validates personal liberty and responsibility within a materialist, objective scientific framework.

In the case of subjective awareness, however, psychologists have known for well over a century that the content of subjective experiences is generated by brain processes beyond subjective awareness (self-report) and self-control (42, 43, 44). Growing experimental evidence from cognitive neuroscience also reveals that non-conscious systems can carry out all psychological activities assumed to involve “consciousness” (45,46). Evidence from neuroscience show that executive functions including those pertaining to volitional control can be carried out outside subjective awareness by fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems (14). Using evidence from cognitive neuroscience, anaesthetics, hypnosis, and introspection, we proposed that subjective awareness is a brain generated accompaniment that sits alongside psychological outputs derived from the functioning of the brain’s evolved neurocognitive architecture (14,28).

Evidence from introspection also provides another powerful challenge to intuitive accounts. Reflecting on our own everyday mental and emotional experiences shows that we are not aware of how our perceptions and decisions are generated, how we experience becoming aware of them, how or where our thoughts and sentences come to be produced, how we recall memories or how we learn and how we manage to coherently control individual muscles for walking or talking. The same is true of intuition where the compelling sense of knowing, without knowing how we know, is provided instantly and without awareness.

The current consensus from cognitive neuroscience is that we have no direct, real-time contact or readout from the physical world or even our own bodies (47). Subjective experience remains a constructive product of the brain’s interpretation/prediction (top-down processes) informed by sensory inputs (bottom-up processes).  Contrary to the intuitive belief of a sensory created (bottom-up) reality, the brain uses prediction and neural generated mental representations to structure and construct our subjective experience (48). Moreover, as the brain refers sensations to where they originate outside the brain, we never experience anything as coming from inside our brain, even though this is where all experiences must be generated and experienced. As such, subjective experience is the product of integrated and highly edited brain generated representations of sensory inputs and neuropsychological processing.

The reason why subjective awareness, the brain’s own private generated reality appears effortless and immediate is that as subjects of experience, we, are not involved in generating how it comes about. All we have is awareness of the experience. We are not aware of the complex underlying brain-based processes that must be involved in forming new memories or coming up with the right words to answer questions, until some of those neural mechanisms involved are revealed either by experimental research and/or the effects of brain damage. As Velmans (49) points out “One is not conscious of one’s own brain? So how could there be conscious control of such processing?” The realization that all aspects of this brain reality are products of prior levels of neural processing, outside awareness remains a key reason why cognitive neuroscience had to develop in the first place. Accordingly, subjective awareness remains blissfully unaware of the complex underlying neuro-machinery that generates the continuous subjective reality used to explain it.

Examples from selective brain damage show remarkable examples of intact neuropsychological processing without subjective awareness, demonstrating disconnection between underlying neuropsychological process and the subjective experiences we can report on. This can be seen in cases of visual neglect, dyslexia, blindsight, amnesia, prosopagnosia. In blindsight, patients who lack vision for one half of their visual field can be guided by sensory information despite being unaware of it (50). Based on other striking dissociations in conditions such as amnesia, visual neglect, phantom limbs and research from hypnosis suggestion, and placebo, the psychological content experienced in subjective awareness appears generated by non-conscious brain systems (14).

The same is also true for our actions. The experience of conscious intention comes too late to be a proximal initiator of our actions (51,52, 53). As muscle movement is generated by the impulses of motor neurons, the conscious experience of bodily behaviour has its informational equivalent in the activity of the neurons used to generate it.

Not having direct access to the physical world or being able to respond in real time requires the brain to create neurocognitive informational processing representations (54), or mental schemas (6) informed by embodied sensory feedback that translates the physicality of the external and internal world into a coherent experienced phenomenal world extended in three-dimensional space and time (54).

These “brain realities” or lived mental representations comprise complex internal models that engage brain interpretations and predictions from limited sensory signals and memories (47,48). Foremost among these experienced brain realities are cognitive representations of an embodied “self” as an accountable “internal action-orderer” (30) and author of actions with personal responsibility. These stable “brain realities” come with implicit, intuitive explanatory accounts, consistent with the experience. In other words, the experience of subjective experience and the intuitive explanation and beliefs attributed for how these come about are generated by underlying neural brain processes.

While there is no current scientific explanation for how brain tissue generates or maintains subjective experience, the consensus amongst (most) neuroscientists is that subjective awareness is not an immaterial substance, but rather the product of antecedent neural causes. We hold that subjective awareness like other mental contents of mind are generated and sustained by neural brain systems (56). While accounts of the human mind have traditionally distinguished between conscious and nonconscious processes, both ultimately depend on underlying neural machinery.

Without brain functioning, there is no subjective awareness, mental states, associated behaviours, or non-conscious processing. Neurological insults such as seizures, strokes and head injury disrupt phenomenal consciousness and the administration of general anaesthesia and hypnosis confirm this dependency by producing controlled, reversable, and reproducible loss of subjective awareness and associated deficits in cognition over different timescales (57,58). Accordingly, as every conscious mental event must be provided by some corresponding physical neural event, it is not clear what the experience of awareness adds to physical neural causes.

If every mental event is provided by some corresponding physical neural event, then being conscious adds nothing to the information already present in the neuronal activity responsible for producing subjective awareness (59). Put simply, we don’t choose our experiences, we effortlessly become aware of them. Paraphrasing Descartes “I have thoughts and feelings therefore I am aware”.

The realization that we become aware rather than generate or control our thoughts and feelings also applies to dreaming when asleep (28). Here the brain, disconnected from the physical environment, generates a world of conscious experiences, some of which can be recalled. In short, a brief review of our subjective phenomenology shows that we play no role in generating or choosing the perceptions, thoughts or feelings, the colour of grass or the sky – we simply become aware of them.

Despite challenges to intuitive accounts from cognitive neuroscience and introspection, these longstanding explanations persist, because they are “a thousand years old and runs through the whole history of cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions of both the East and the West (61).

(iv) Few theories of consciousness are explicit about the role of evolution (62,63). Most theoretical accounts are “concerned primarily with how consciousness arises…, [while the] central problem in consciousness science is that we still do not know the biological function of consciousness- we do not know why we have experiences” (64). One reason for the neglect of evolutional purpose is that “research on brain and behaviour naturally considered the role of consciousness in behavioural control by the brain”, (7) with the result that most post-behaviourist energies in the 1960’s focused on exploring specific aspects of what were considered lower level automatic non-conscious information processes of higher brain function (such as learning and memory, perception, attention, imagination, reasoning, problem-solving, spatial & language functions, social cognition and body representation) rather than making an explicit call upon subjective awareness (65,66). This kept “consciousness within reach, but seldom touching it” (7) with the result that “few things have been written about the functions of consciousness in the neuroscientific or psychological literature” (67).

Shtulman (19) claims that intuitive accounts have their origins in evolution where innate expectations form the foundations of intuitive theory-building, shaping how we perceive, interact and explain the world around us. Alongside these evolutionary drivers, direct daily experience, configured by brain systems provide a powerful confirmatory role supporting intuitive accounts. Finally, society and culture play a key role by reinforcing intuitive accounts which can undermine scientific accounts (19).

A significant expectation from these intuitive accounts is anthropocentrism, a natural inclination to explain subjective experience from the individual’s perspective. According to Pierson and Trout (68) the “ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible” and “all conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function”. As such, intuitive accounts can be seen as strongly supporting the claim that “consciousness is simply assumed to underlie behaviour” (7) and “appears to be the major way in which the central nervous system adopts the novel challenging and informal informative events of the world” (39). This in turn renders the embodied “self” as author of internal communications and actions, the adaptive beneficiary object.

We proposed an alternative evolutional account (14,28) where subjective awareness as an emergent property generated by the brain’s mental architecture evolved to service the social adaptive function of promoting individual and species survival and well-being (14,28) by enabling the transmission of ideas, feelings, and behaviours from the individual’s private world into that of the public social world.

Although traditional evolutional accounts of natural selection focus on individual genes as the key vehicle for trait transmission, over the past two decades, there has been a growing recognition that human selection operates at multiple levels including higher-level aggregates of cultural and societal selection (69). On the assumption that genetic evolution takes place in a cultural/societal milieu, multilevel selection theorists argue that in addition to genetics, individuals regarded as populations of coordinating, cooperating genes can also be viewed as vehicles for natural selection benefitting biological or reproductive fitness. In this case cultural evolution plays a leading role with genetic evolution following at a slower pace (69).

Specifically, “a culturally derived trait can potentially succeed by increasing the fitness of individuals relative to other individuals within a group, by increasing the fitness of groups relative to other groups in a multigroup population, and so on for multiple tiers of groups” (69). The “ability to transmit learned information across generations in a cumulative fashion and to manipulate our physical and social environments… enabled our ancestors to adapt to their environments much faster than by genetic evolution” (69). As a result, “no other species has spread over the globe, occupied dozens of ecological niches, and expanded into cooperative societies that number in the millions and even billions of genetically unrelated individuals” (69).

If the adaptive value of subjective awareness evolved to provide cultural and societal advantage  (e.g. survival and reproductive benefits) then, we argue, this lies in the capacity to communicate a range of brain outputs such as ideas (beliefs, thoughts) and emotions (happiness, fear, worry, sadness, anger, surprise), feelings, (empathy compassion, love care, trust) from a self-referential perspective for others operating in society (70, 28).

Wilson et al. (69) identifies “prosociality” (behaviours oriented toward the welfare of others or one’s group as a whole), social control (e.g., the punishment of individuals who fail to act prosocially within groups) and the capacity for symbolic thought as key social traits that first evolved by genetic evolution and then coevolved throughout our history as a species. The idea that consciousness is closely related to social processing has been suggested previously by several authors in different forms (71,72, 73,74,75). Graziano suggests that awareness is the brain output of evolved social perceptual machinery that facilitates social intelligence by enabling humans to construct models of other people’s minds, thereby gaining the ability to monitor and predict the internal states and behaviour of others (75).

Adopting a social evolutional approach when providing for a scientific account of human psychology, we aver that subjective awareness is a brain generated mental representation, part of a more extensive evolved biological hardware that lacks any neuro-cognitive capacity to causal influence other psychological processes and or behaviours. This is in keeping with the rest of the natural sciences where “complex and intelligent design in living things is not assumed to be driven by conscious processes on the part of the plant or animal, but instead by blindly adaptive processes that accrued through natural selection” (76). Seen in such terms, subjective experience lacks volitional function, independent of neural brain processes, in the same way that the experience of “eating “does not exist separately from the physical workings of the gut’s digestive process.

When attempting to provide a comprehensive scientific account of human psychology (and not a theory of consciousness), we consider subjective awareness to be an evolved epiphenomenal brain generated accompaniment to neuro-cognitive outputs designed to facilitate social communication and societal governance through the cultural transmission of beliefs, feelings, ideas, and behaviours (14,28). As an emergent brain process, the term epiphenomenal should not be taken here as denying the reality of the phenomenal experience or proposing that subjective awareness is illusionary, rather our claim is that as subjective awareness is caused by antecedent neural brain processes it lacks any independent causal influence upon mental or bodily systems.

As such, we consider the traditional intuitive account of a self-referential embodied volitional capacity as a key evolutionary advantage to be wrong-headed and distracting for scientific accounts of human psychology (28). While important, subjective awareness is just another social adaptive component of an overall brain created mental architecture designed to promote species survival and well-being (28,14). This alternative view that removes subjective awareness from its previous central focus does not imply that as humans we don’t value subjective awareness as our own private internal sentience. Indeed, it is precisely because of the value we place on our experience (and other’s) that intuitive accounts remain so compelling. This is particularly so as the cultural transmission of beliefs, and ideas are often communicated using powerful emotions and where formidable feelings such as empathy, sadness, compassion and happiness are also seen as being the underlying motivations guiding decisions.

While it makes little sense from within a materialist, reductionist scientific framework to attribute social agency and personal accountability to biological organs such as the brain or heart, we suggest that these highly valued social capacities of self-directed volitional control can be meaningfully attributed (by humans) to humans when exercising the social role of a person.

The intrinsic value of communicating the contents of awareness is significant, precisely because it is perceived as originating from the socially defined and culturally accepted public role of the self, as a person (31). The internal sentience of a self with the capacity of “internal action-orderer” makes sense when built into the fabric of the social role of a person.  Most of the legal, political, and educational systems that operate within different world ideological governance systems including socialism, capitalism and communism depend on the social construct, where humans, regarded as persons are treated as responsible embodied agents and where “brains are not responsible but people acting are” (60).

From a neuroscience perspective, therefore, subjective awareness of “what it is like to be now” is no more that the experience of being aware, the awareness of knowing that we are aware, including thoughts about our experienced psychological content (metacognition), and the belief that that such experiences are evidence of an agentive capacity shared by others (14). This perspective is consistent with the natural primacy of non-conscious processes “in the rest of the natural sciences, especially neurobiology” (70) and the reflective realisation that as humans, we possess no control over a wide range of brain and body processes such as vision, breathing, temperature, hunger, sleep and dreaming.

This account understandably flies in the face of everyday experience and remains intuitively and emotionally unsatisfying. However, as pointed out by Chalmers (1996) “Epiphenomenalism is counterintuitive, but the alternatives are more than counterintuitive” (77). Moreover, there are examples where explanations of physical phenomena have long been maintained by intuitional accounts. The explanation for the experience of phantom limb following amputation provides one example. Long considered counter-intuitive and anomalous (78,79), phantom limbs were explained before the 19th century as the product of a miraculous form of limb restoration, all of which avoided the necessity to challenge the compelling intuitive folk account that it was not possible to feel a body part that was no longer physically present. The key basis for this misconception according to Melzack, (79) was the assumed primacy of sensory feedback and a passive brain whereby “Sensory inputs merely modulate that experience; they do not directly cause it” and that “Phantoms become comprehensible once we recognize that the brain generates the experience of the body” and that much of our non-amputated experience of limbs and body is internally generated and maintained by our brain representations independent of sensory feedback.  

Central to our account (14,28,70) is the claim that (i) sociality (the tendency of groups and persons to develop social links and live in communities) is a key survival strategy that shapes the brain’s cognitive architecture necessary for human growth, well-being and reproduction (80) and that (ii) subjective awareness, while not causally efficacious is a brain generated accompaniment for neuro-cognitive outputs, that when shared, facilitate collective social communication, governance and change through the cultural transmission of beliefs, feelings, ideas, and behaviours.

As social animals, designed to engage and co-operate with others using similar social behaviours, we suggest that the brain’s key neurocognitive architecture is designed for social transactions and to enable complex human cultural and adaptive exchange (81). It does this by facilitating the distribution of the ideas, beliefs, feelings, emotions from individual’s and culturally through the performing arts, music, religion, theatre, film and literature.

Within this social orientated account of human psychology, we consider subjective awareness a phenomenal accompaniment of a continuously updated and individually oriented self-referential “personal narrative” (See Figure 1 below. (28). The monitoring and integration of selective, neuropsychological brain outputs by a central executive structure (CES) is not directed or influenced by the experience of awareness itself.

Fig.1 Oakley-Halligan model (14,28) of human psychology. The Central Executive Structure (CES) creates and orchestrates all cognitive psychological processes carried out by the brain. The solid arrows at the top of the three CES’s (Individual and Others) represent the process of Internal Broadcasting that originates from an ongoing Personal Narrative (PN). The dashed arrows represent the process of External Broadcasting whereby selected contents of the personal narrative are communicated particularly, but not solely, via language, to other individuals (OTHERS) facilitating social collaboration and the creation of a cultural store of ideas, skills, and information available to Individuals and Others (Cultural Broadcasting)- represented by the double-headed fine, solid lines. Personal Awareness (PA) is represented as an epiphenomenal subjective experience that passively accompanies the contents of the individual’s Personal Narrative. (PN)

In our account (14,28), the personal narrative (PN) comprises a read-out of thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, ideas, intentions, and perceptions experienced in subjective awareness, but critically the PN is not the author (action-or content orderer) of the neuropsychological products experienced. The PN comprises the edited outputs of “internal broadcasting” from neuropsychological process that lie behind the lived experience of subjective awareness. The subjective experience associated with the personal narrative (the brain’s reality) comes pre-configured with a compelling sense of self, body ownership, agency, and theory of (other) minds.

The PN readout is shaped and influenced by the prevailing social and cultural zeitgeist, where humans, experience and live with the powerful social ideological role of personhood including the attributed set of universal, “rights”, attributes, obligations, psychological capacities, moral entitlements, and individual responsibilities. The evolutionary drivers responsible for the design of the mind’s cognitive brain architecture facilitates the ready acceptance of many of these pervasive social cultural norms including free will, democracy, socialism, equality and above all personal responsibility. These are all enabled and accelerated by cultural and digital broadcasting, a process by which information, thoughts and ideas from individuals enter a communal or social pool through spoken, written, or digital materials, artifacts, and other social structures (TV, social media, government).

In our account, brain systems create and embed the powerful, yet elusive construct of ‘self’ as an embodied “centre of narrative gravity” (82) within the related social construct of the person, enabling humans, socially perceived as “persons”, to successfully communicate the contents of their internal broadcasting as social agencies. All social civic systems recognize the construct of personhood as an essential human construct for what it means to be a “self” amongst “other selves’ with a powerful relational construct of value and responsibility defined and protected by different societies (83).

The social construct of an embodied “self”, as the perceived author of the narrative of phenomenal experience (84) coveys an indisputable sense of personhood and agency in real time, together with wider social expectations of ownership and responsibility for thoughts, actions, percept’s, sensations etc. The instinctive sense of agency that accompanies the effortless experience of self is maintained within the personal narrative outputs by the representation of intentions to act appearing in close temporal proximity to relevant body movement. This temporal coherence is important for maintaining a consistent, meaningful personal narrative where the construct of ‘self’ is represented as being the key author for embodied executive control. This is also consistent with the observation that neural indicators of an impending movement precede the appearance of the intention to move in the personal narrative.

(v). Adopting this social evolutional account, we argue that the mind’s cognitive architecture involves at least two interacting “brain realities” (high level neurocognitive informational processing representations) designed to enhance the survival and well-being of the wider human species living in complex societies. Within this account, subjective awareness is a tool that facilitates sharing ideas and feelings to enable new social constructs to better manage or govern collective behaviours. This long standing cross generational communication leads to different self-regulating communities, national governmental institutions, together with the establishment of different legal systems and economic systems based on different capitalistic and or socialistic ideologies.

In the same way that the brain constructs “body schemas” for modelling interactions from touch, vision, and proprioceptive information to build a virtual model of the body, these high-level neuro-cognitive representations, or schemata (see 75) provide integrated stable information for the embodied “self” (the centre of perceived personal narrative gravity), while also critically rendering brains amenable to receiving and processing outputs from other brains.

In characterising the socially evolved architecture of mind (the set of neural representations responsible for generating mental phenomena) we briefly consider two interacting high level “brain realities”:

(i)Embodied subjective realities: This mental representation with embodied subjective awareness as its core remains key for intuitive pre-scientific accounts. This comprises readouts and selective access via personal narrative outputs from mental (thoughts, perceptions, feelings, emotion, memories etc) and bodily organ information (temperature, digestion, heart rate, respiration etc) including the experience of body itself, sense of body ownership and a perception of  a self-capable of exercising agency within that body (85). This embodied brain generated reality, collated from the selective input and feedback from the interplay of multiple, different, and relatively autonomous bodily systems (skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, lymphatic, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and reproductive) is essential for humans to live, survive and socially interact. Edited outputs are internally broadcast to the ‘personal narrative’ and comprise our continuous stream of subjective awareness. This embodied brain reality includes familiar perceptions of body ownership and agency from the perspective of self (a being that ‘experiences’ things) aligned with the feeling that the perceived body operating in accordance with self-directed intentions. Viewed from this embodied subjective reality, “free will is only worth having if it enables the individual to get what she or he wants” (86).

(ii) Socio-cultural realities: Human brains also possess high-level mental representations where the focus lies on shared social cultural realities outside the embodied self. These non-physical realities incorporate a range of shared social constructs, meanings, and practices that all members of a society recognise as a “shared reality”, and equivalent to biological or physical realities (87). When used to organise people in society and administer social thought, these actively impact, and shape embodied subjective experience, genetic evolution, and ultimately species survival (87).

Social cultural realities include many of the social constructs that we take for granted including democracy, human rights, family, marriage, social class, religious affiliation, neurodiversity, economics, justice, equality, retirement, unconscious bias, social justice, institutional education, political affination, country boundaries, gender, race, money, the agreed measurement of time, notions of citizenship and criminal responsibility. These constructs are frequently normalised to support and propagate empathetic, prosocial, altruistic behaviours promoting social species survival and well-being (69). Importantly, the social adoption of the outputs of collective social personal narratives (socio-cultural realities) are facilitated and regularised by institutional education, religion, social media, art, education, legal and governmental policies.

Socio-cultural realities come with their own compelling narratives and expectations which shape and influence how individuals as persons believe and act, including how social groups could develop political systems to govern themselves. For example, morality and “criminal acts” are not simply objective phenomenon activities per se, but comprise social realities categorised by different social structures for the exercise and operation of laws within established governing institutions. Feldman Barrett (87) argues that social reality remains the “superpower” of human brains, where acting collectively allows us to “make stuff up” as real.

(vi)The cognitive architecture of mind generates a social role for self as a person. Subjective awareness has been “the skeleton in the cupboard of modern neuroscience” (59) when trying to provide scientific accounts of human psychology consistent with antecedent, dependent brain processes (14). The fact that science has yet to explain how the brain’s neurocognitive architecture generates consciousness, understood as the familiar phenomenal sense of subjective awareness continues to fuel support for intuitive notions. Although intuitive accounts where subjective awareness is seen as exerting a central influence on human affairs remains an emotionally more satisfying explanation, “science is not obliged to find a real entity that perfectly matches what the schematic model tells us we have. Rather, our scientific job is to identify the real, physical, brain process that is imperfectly modelled by information in the brain, such that, on the basis of that crude information, we believe we have consciousness” (88).

If modern science is to provide an account of how subjective awareness, as one part of a more general account of human psychology informs real-life social issues including bioethical concerns, nonhuman animals, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and the growth of advanced AI systems (89), then some conceptual ground-clearing (90) is needed to break with the longstanding dependence on intuitive accounts. Key to this is the recognition that biology and culture work together to shape how we have been designed (91) and that subjective awareness evolved as one part of the brain’s mental architecture to service the social adaptive driver of promoting individual and species survival and well-being by communicating the self’s inner ideas, feelings, and behaviours.

While as humans we are rooted in our biological nature, our social nature is largely defined by our roles as persons operating in society. As such the mental architecture of mind, generated by our brains remains strongly adapted for the exchange and reception of information, ideas and feelings with other brains (90). Applying the construct of personhood finds social expression in the multitudes of daily decisions affecting the lives and welfare of all individuals (84). Consequently, while brains as biological organs are incapable of responsibility and agency, “legal and social traditions have long held people [as persons] accountable for their behaviour under the presumption that most behaviour is intentional and the product of conscious decision-making” (92).

The ability to engage with other minds by communicating and sharing neuro-cognitive outputs from personal narratives (external broadcasting) via language, art, social media, politics, music, legal statutes, and social institutions (e.g., schools, universities, government) has created powerful, cultural cross-generational historical reservoirs of ideas that provide for social order, economic growth, social change and technological advancement (e.g. the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Industrial revolution).

While competition between differential prioritising of individual and collective social ideas has inevitably led to conflict and warfare, most socio-cultural constructs are designed to service social organization combat perceived injustices and inequalities. By retaining a strong emphasis on democracy, human rights, free will, social justice and more recently the environment, emerging social constructs seek to improve the quality lives of future generations, the disadvantaged, elderly and marginalized groups.

……………………………….

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