Item

Abstract

In this article, Graziano, Guterstam, Bio, and Wilterson (Citation2019) raise the claim that our intuitions about consciousness are very much guided by socially shared beliefs about conscious minds. They argue that these beliefs are in many respects misleading and must not be confused with reality. This commentary seconds the basic claim, but advances an entirely different view on relations between social beliefs and reality. More specifically, it addresses relations between the practice of mentalizing and the experience of conscious awareness, suggesting that third-person mentalizing may be a prerequisite for first-person consciousness to emerge. According to this view, the role of social cognition for consciousness is constitutive, not misleading.

One reason to believe in such a role comes from the observation that the study of mentalizing others delivers us very much the same descriptive and explanatory intuitions as the study of our own conscious experience. Here I address two such intuitions that play a key role in both, third-person action perception and first-person conscious awareness: Selfhood and intentionality. Based on these communalities, I argue that first-person conscious experience may be rooted in intuitions derived from third-person action perception.