I enjoyed very much reading about Valerie Hardcastle's culinary skills in making chili. She has clearly outgrown her early hit-and-miss approach of putting all the end-of-month leftovers in a pot and then adding enough chili powder and jalapeno peppers to smother any taste there might have been. She can now distinguish between Ohio, Texas, and New York chilis. An important advance and one I am sure her family appreciates. She charges that I am doing the same as she did in her early experimental days of chili making-putting into the pot all the ingredients I can lay my hands on arising at the appropriate regions of the brain, stirring them round, and, hey, presto, I claim I have come up with the site for the creation of consciousness!
We have lived long enough in the age of televisual cookery to be more sophisticated than that in making chili or anything else for that matter. I suggest that is even so for consciousness. In my article I presented arguments for the importance of the parietal lobes in the creation of consciousness. The method of search I presented in the article involved determining sites for which there was evidence of high-level processing even in the absence of awareness. Such processing is now well accepted as occurring up to semantic level, as now known from studies of neglect patients and of analyses of degraded inputs (as I discussed in some depth under ''The Central Stages of Consciousness'' in my article). Since there is also good evidence from brain imaging that such processing occurs well after early associative cortices (and occurs importantly in occipital, temporal, and frontal sites), then this is crucial evidence against the early and late models of creation of consciousness (discussed under ''The Early Stage of the NCC'' and ''The Late Stage of the NCC'' respectively). I also argued that feedback processing occurs at almost all levels in the brain, so gives no support to the early model as based on such a mechanism. The siting of the creation of consciousness in the parietal lobes is thus well supported and evades the culinarybased criticisms made in the commentary: I determine which areas are functioning even without awareness (occipital, temporal, or frontal) and those which, when lost through stroke or other damage, lead to loss of awareness, as in neglect (parietal). I would have hoped such an approach would have been part of Professor Hardcastle's updated book of recipes, but apparently it was not; I hope she updates it accordingly. I am taken to task by Professor Hardcastle for arguing in such a ''cookbook'' manner about the further thrust of the article: I claimed that consciousness rests on the existence of what I called the ''Central Representation'' (a term already introduced, I realized by recent reading, by Koch & Ullman in 1985 in an article on modeling, very Reply to Commentary on Taylor, J. G. (2001). The central role of the parietal lobes for consciousness.