Graziano's conceptual framework for consciousness

I would like to pass on this link to Graziano's latest (open source) explication of his theory of consciousness, continuing a MindBlog thread that started with a 2014 post on his 2013 book "Consciousness and the Social Brain." Here is his abstact:

This article argues that consciousness has a logically sound, explanatory framework, different from typical accounts that suffer from hidden mysticism. The article has three main parts. The first describes background principles concerning information processing in the brain, from which one can deduce a general, rational framework for explaining consciousness. The second part describes a specific theory that embodies those background principles, the Attention Schema Theory. In the past several years, a growing body of experimental evidence—behavioral evidence, brain imaging evidence, and computational modeling—has addressed aspects of the theory. The final part discusses the evolution of consciousness. By emphasizing the specific role of consciousness in cognition and behavior, the present approach leads to a proposed account of how consciousness may have evolved over millions of years, from fish to humans. The goal of this article is to present a comprehensive, overarching framework in which we can understand scientifically what consciousness is and what key adaptive roles it plays in brain function.

The article is worth a read, and here is Graziano's bottom line, from the last paragraph of his article:

If you start your search for consciousness by assuming the existence of a subjective feeling—a private component that cannot be measured and can only be felt and attested to, experienceness itself—then you are assuming the literal accuracy of an internal model. By principle 1, your conviction that you have consciousness depends on an information set in your brain. By principle 2, the brain’s models are never accurate. You have accepted the literal truth of a caricature, and you will never find the answer to your ill-posed question. When the police draw a sketch of a suspect, and you set yourself the task of finding a flat man made of graphite, you will fail. Yet at the same time, if you take the opposite approach and insist that the sketch is an empty illusion, you are missing the point. Instead, understand the sketch for what it is: a schematic representation of something real. We can explain physical processes in the brain; we can explain the models constructed by the brain to represent those physical processes; we can explain the way those models depict reality in a schematic, imperfect manner; we can explain the cognitive beliefs that stem from those imperfect models; and most importantly, we can explain the adaptive, cognitive benefits served by those models. AST is not just a theory of consciousness. It is a theory of adaptive mechanisms in the brain.