Consciousness is an illusion, a byproduct of evolution: The Attention Schema Theory (AST) of Michael Graziano

Consciousness is not mysterious, it’s just the brain describing itself—to itself.

Michael Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. His style of explaining consciousness is fully materialistic:

• The hard problem of consciousness doesn't exist, because consciousness is an illusion.
• The real problem is just this: Why do humans proclaim "I'm conscious."? What do they mean by that, and what made them proclaim that?
• The answer is that the illusion of consciousness is a byproduct of human evolution.

Basically, consciousness is an illusion, a spandrel of evolution.

Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong (2016), Michael Graziano. In this essay, he shoots down multiple theories of consciousness, because they don't answer the real problem. For example, concerning the Integrated Information Theory:

What exactly is the mechanism that leads from integrated information in the brain to a person who ups and claims, “Hey, I have a conscious experience of all that integrated information!” There isn't one.

In order to figure out why humans have this illusion, it's necessary to study humans as fully physical (no funny qualia business plz) robots that think about themselves but in a grossly inaccurate way:

The theories that show the most promise are metacognitive theories... the brain doesn’t just model concrete objects in the external world. It also models its own internal processes. It constructs simulations of its own cognition. And those simulations are never accurate. They contain incomplete, sometimes surreal information. The brain constructs a distorted, cartoon sketch of itself and its world. And this is why we’re so certain that we have a kind of magic feeling inside us.

The origin of consciousness: we think about own thoughts in grossly simplified models.

Let's read Attention and consciousness (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya. This paper argues that attention and consciousness are different.

This paper in an expanded format is viewable on Scholarpedia.

Attention in this paper always means "selective attention". Think of it as "shining a spotlight" on something, like a face, a melody, a word. It does not mean general arousal and alertness.

We argue that events or objects can be attended to without being consciously perceived. Furthermore, an event or object can be consciously perceived in the near absence of top-down attentional processing.