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The Attending Mind
13
The Attending Mind: an overview
Context
e.g. "The Subject of Attention" (2012); Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction (under contract)
Outline
Topics
1) history of philosophical research on attention, especially last 500 years
- attention vs. selection
- "Western" vs. Indian philosophy
- phenomenology vs. skeptics
- historical vs. contemporary themes
2) attention and the existence of the self, strong emergence, mental causation
- homunculus fallacy vs. emergent self
- the illusion view vs. mental causation
- bottom-up vs. top-down attention in the brain
- weak vs. strong emergence
Topics
3) the role of attention in perception: objects, space, reference, meaning
- sensation vs. perception
- binding problem vs. combination problem
- Treisman and objects vs. Merleau-Ponty and space
- reference and meaning from foreground and background
4) the relationship between attention and consciousness: GWT, gist, habit
- Global Workspace Theory vs. Phenomenal Consciousness
- theater hypothesis vs. performance hypothesis
- inattentional blindness vs. gist perception
- habitual behavior and experience
Topics
5) whether action and responsibility can occur without attention, as in skill
- the problem of skilled behavior
- gain views, loss views, and hybrid views
- new view: two forms of control, attention-based control and strategic automaticity
- ADHD, negligence, and the law
attention is evidence of an emergent self
with its own causal powers (Chapter 3)
attention supplies meaning for conscious perception and so is necessary for perceptual knowledge (Chapter 4)
Main Claims
attention is not necessary for consciousness, calling for a new conception of consciousness (Chapter 5)
attention is not necessary for action, forcing us to revise traditional theories of action and responsibility (Chapter 6)
+/-
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illusion view:
Ganeri (2017): "anatta is the claim that there is no room for something real at the centre doing the observing or ordering''
+
emergence view:
Desimone & Duncan 1995: “attention is an emergent property of slow, competitive interactions that work in parallel across the visual field”
phenomenology of effort:
Metzinger (2010): sense of self comes from the impression that we are able to direct attention with effort
causal closure of the physical:
Kim 2005: nonreducible mental causation would violate the causal closure of the physical
behavioral/neural signature of TD attention:
distinct from BU: e.g. slower because it operates via feedback from areas of the brain that are further away from the primary sensory and motor areas, using cortical layers that are deeper than those filtering incoming stimuli.
wave dynamics and causal power:
Buzsáki & Draguhn 2004: “This 1/f power relationship implies that...widespread slow oscillations modulate faster local events”
What's Next
attention, altered states of consciousness, and creativity (with Shadab Tabatabaeian)
attention and mind-wandering in skilled behavior (with Alex Dayer)
mental control (Cambridge Elements manuscript)
attention and new technologies (for Princeton workshop)
attention and knowledge (for Pacific APA)
attention and the law (with Carlos Montemayor)