But I am proposing that consciousness cannot be generated unless 

 the brain's muscle-directing regions have actually been activated. 



External and Internal Feedback Loops 



This has been a long but important digression. We can now return 

 to the plot that was unfolding earlier. An animal can unconsciously 

 pursue its four goals of feeding, fighting, fleeing and procreating. 

 The conscious counterpart of such pursuit became possible only 

 through possession of nervous systems having a certain type of in- 

 ternal feedback loop, one component of such a loop being the above- 

 mentioned muscle-directing region. And consciousness is probably 

 possessed only by mammals, though possibly also by birds. For all 

 of them, movement — in either its overt or covert form — is the only 

 means of accomplishing anything. This includes, as we have seen, 

 the acquisition of information. Such movement produces sensory 

 feedback from the surroundings, but the animal needs to be able to 

 distinguish between self-provoked sensory feedback and sensory in- 

 put that it has not itself caused, and which is thus not under its 

 control — to distinguish between touching and being touched, for ex- 

 ample. This requires that self-paced probing of the surroundings 

 must be internally labelled, and the significance of its outcome eval- 

 uated. Such labelling and evaluation, together with the need for an 

 attention mechanism, provide the basis of consciousness. They are, 

 in fact, the source of our raw sensations. A study of the nervous 

 system's circuit diagram (see fig. 2) components contribute to spe- 

 cific aspects of the overall consciousness mechanism, and we will 

 be considering them in more detail below. 



Meanwhile, the crux of the scenario I'm sketching is that our 

 every movement puts a question to the surroundings. Every walking 

 step we take asks Is the ground still there? Such questions are posed 

 unconsciously, if we are sufficiently experienced at least, and the 

 answer, Yes, the ground is still there, is just as unconsciously re- 

 corded. Only if something unexpected is encountered — a hole or a 

 tree root perhaps — does the system detect the mismatch between the 

 anticipated and actual outcome of its exploration. The abortive at- 



