Second, it has a capacity to focus its processing resources more on some signals than on others. That focus may be on select, incoming sensory signals, or it may be on internal information such as specific, recalled memories. That ability to process select information in a focused manner is sometimes called attention. Third, the brain not only uses the process of attention, but it also builds a set of information, or a representation, descriptive of attention. That representation, or internal model, is the attention schema. In the theory, the attention schema provides the requisite information that allows the machine to make claims about consciousness. When the machine claims to be conscious of thing X – when it claims that it has a subjective awareness, or a mental possession, of thing X – the machine is using higher cognition to access an attention schema, and reporting the information therein. For example, suppose a person looks at an apple. When the person reports, “I have a subjective experience of that shiny red apple,” three items are linked together in that claim: the self, the apple, and a subjective experience. The claim about the presence of a self depends on cognitive access to a self model. Without a self model, without the requisite information, the system would be unable to make claims referencing the self. The claim about the presence of, and properties of, an apple depends on cognitive access to a model of the apple, presumably constructed in the visual system. Again, without the requisite information, the system would obviously be unable to make any claims about the apple or its visual properties. In the theory, the claim about the presence of subjective experience depends on cognitive access to an internal model of attention. That internal model does not provide a scientifically precise description of attention, complete with the details of neurons, lateral inhibitory synapses, and competitive signals. The model is silent on the physical mechanisms of attention. Instead, like all internal models in the brain, it is simplified and schematic for the sake of efficiency. Accessing the information within these three, linked internal models, cognitive machinery claims that there is a self, there is an apple, and the self has a mental possession of the apple; the mental possession, in and of itself, is invisible and has no physically describable properties, but has a general location somewhere inside the body and a specific anchor to the apple; and that mental essence empowers the self to understand, react to, and remember the apple. The machine, in relying on that incomplete and inaccurate model of attention, claims to have a metaphysical consciousness of the apple.