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Organizing Mind.How Attention Structures Mental Life

Sebastian Watzl

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How does attention shape conscious experience?

What is attention?

Connections to other themes?

What is conscious experience? What makes conscious experience

philosophically interesting? Conscious experience and the

appearance/reality distinction. Does attention affect appearances? What is the structure of conscious

experience?

How (if at all) can science and the subjective perspective be reconciled?

Consciousness and time. How do we organize our lives? Attention in the social world.

+How does attention shape conscious experience?

+Conscious Experience

When you are listening to music, when you are looking at the scene in front of you, when you are smelling the scent of a rose, when you are tasting a a bitter chocolate, when you feel a cramp in your thigh ...

There is something it is like for you. Experience has a first person quality

conscious subjects have an “inside” conscious subjects have a subjective perspective

+Conscious Experience

Rhinolophus schnitzleri

+Conscious Experience

“What is it like to be a bat?”

???

Thomas Nagel

+Conscious Experience

Conscious experience has a first person quality.

conscious subjects have an “inside”.

conscious subjects have a subjective perspective.

The phenomenology of an experience = what it is like for the subject of that experience.

+Conscious Experience

Questions one may ask about conscious experience:

Do you have some special knowledge about your own experience? Could you ever be mistaken about the character of your own experience? Is knowledge of your own experience the foundation of knowing about the world?

Epistemology (most prominently associated with the philosopher Descartes)

What is the relationship the picture of ourselves from this subjective perspective and the picture of ourselves delivered by the sciences?How is conscious experience related to the brain? Could science find out that we actually have no conscious experiences (if not, why not)?

E.g. Mind-Body-Problem (also prominently associated with Descartes)

What are conscious experiences? What is to think of ourselves as conscious agents with a perspective on the world? What is it that we might compare to the scientific image of ourselves?

My focus today (and prominently discussed by the philosophers Hume and Kant)

+Conscious Experience

Is the phenomenology of conscious experience an un-analyzable “feel”?

+Conscious Experience and Appearances

Appearance

Reality

+Conscious Experience and Appearances

By having conscious experiences, you appear to inhabit a certain world.

This world is the world of appearance, it is characterized by how things appear to the subject of the experience.

Because conscious experience presents appearances, we can ask: is the world how it appears to me in my experience or is it different?

+Conscious Experience and Appearances

You

The world as it appears to youConscious

experience

+Does attention affect appearances?

Gustav Fechner

“The pendulum-beat of a clock [appears to us] no louder, no matter how much we increase the strain of our attention upon [it]”*

William James

“[I]n listening for certain notes in a chord, the one we attend to sounds probably a little more loud . . .”**

* Fechner 1889, p. 452-453 (quoted in James, 1890, p. 425); ** James 1890, p.425

+Yes, attention does affect appearances!

Unattended higher contrastAttended lower contrast

From Carrasco, Ling and Read 2004

Look to have the same contrast!

Marisa Carrasco

+Yes, attention does affect appearances!

“[These] changes in the phenomenology of perception manifest themselves in experience as differences in apparent contrast, apparent color saturation, apparent size, apparent speed, apparent time of occurrence and other appearances.” (Block 2010, p. 23).

Ned Block

+Conscious Experience and Appearances

Two questions:

What are appearances?How is, for example, the appearance of a world in experience connected to thinking that this is how the world is?

Is experience exhausted by appearances?Is every difference in the phenomenology of your experience a difference in how the world appears to you?

+The Appearance View

Experience is exhausted by appearances.Every difference in the phenomenology of your experience is a difference in how the world appears to you.

Why hold the appearance view? The natural connection between having a certain subjective perspective and

appearing to inhabit a certain world. The idea that experience is “transparent”, like a window to an apparent

world: When we reflect on our experiences, we tend to find appearances: what

did I see, hear, smell, taste, and how did it look like, sound like, feel like, …

+Does attention shape conscious experience only by affecting appearances? The appearance view would say: yes.

Since the only way anything could make a difference to consciousness is by affecting appearances.

But…

+Does attention shape conscious experience only by affecting appearances?

Any effect of attention on appearances, can be replicated without attention.

Instead of focusing attention on the piano, someone could simply turn up the volume of the piano a little bit!

But the phenomenology of the replica experience is different from the phenomenology of the attention experience!

+Why the appearance view is false

Appearance Replica

Attention Experience

+Why the appearance view is false

+Why the appearance view is false

An Argument Attention experiences have appearance replicas that

present exactly the same appearances without attention. The phenomenology of attention experiences is

different from their appearance replicas. So, the phenomenology of attention experiences is not

exhausted by appearances.

+What is missing?

“[T]he moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. […]

Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground – intelligible perspective, in a word.

James 1890/1981, p. 402

William James

+Phenomenal Structure

Start with the role attention plays for us: it prioritizes some aspects of our mental lives over others. Think of focusing your attention on some project like training for a

marathon, bringing up your children, learning how to play the guitar.

Attention structures conscious experience so that some of its parts

are more central than others.

In doing so, it affects the subject’s subjective perspective (and not how things appear through that perspective)

+Phenomenal Structure

Conscious experiences are complex. They have many parts.

The experience of the saxophone

The experience of the piano

The experience of the bass

+Phenomenal Structure

Complex experiences are just the sum of their parts.

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+Phenomenal Structure

Complex experiences have structure: some of their parts are more central than others

Higher attentional priority

+Phenomenal Structure

… is peripheral to …

The experience of the piano

The experience of the saxophone

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Phenomenal Qualities

covered by the appearance

view

Phenomenal Structure

+Phenomenal Structure

Phenomenal StructureMissing from the appearance view

+Phenomenal Structure

Phenomenal QualitiesCovered by theappearance view

Phenomenal StructureMissing from the appearance view

A holistic feature of conscious experience. Characterizing you complete perspective

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What is Attention?

+Science knows what attention is!

Number of scientific publications on “Attention”

2000-2010: 10 833 1990-2000: 5 649 1980-1990: 2 496 ...

+Everyone knows what attention is!

“Every one knows what attention is. It is ….”James 1890/1981, p. 403-404

Conscious Experience “I mean this [ ]”

Conscious Engagement with Others Infants probably acquire the concept of attention

through acts of joint attention at around one year.

Ordinary Conversation “You will get a better sense for the rhythm, if you

focus on the piano and drums instead of the saxophone.”

+How to react to this?

What is the relationship the picture of ourselves from this subjective perspective and the picture of ourselves delivered by the sciences? Reductivism

Science helps to identify some element of our pre-scientific subjective perspective with a scientific conception.

Eliminativism Science shows that something that appeared to exist from

the pre-scientific subjective perspective actually doesn’t exist.

Anti-Reductivism Some element of the pre-scientific subjective perspective has

some degree of independence from the scientific perspective.

+Connections to other themes

+Consciousness and Time

Two questions about consciousness and time: What is the temporal structure of conscious

experience?What, if anything, is there to the metaphor of “the stream of consciousness”, its “forward flowing” character?

What is the connection between the temporal structure of conscious experience, and the temporal structure of the appearances?Do they always match up, so that you experience a fast (or slow) change just if your experience is changing fast (or slow)?

time

Jordan Suchow Silencing Illusion

+Organizing a Mental Life

Executive attentionRoughly, the capacity to keep focused on long(er) term goals and projects in the face of distraction

What is the connectionbetween the capacity tostructure conscious experience and thecapacity to focus on long term projects?

What is the significance of attention for strength of will, and similar phenomena?

Image taken from a repetition of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (Mischel et al. 1972)

+Joint Attention and the Social Mind

Attention often is not a solitary phenomenon. We often experience someone else’s

attention being focused on us (or on

what we do or say). Can we, after all, experience the conscious

experience of others? (though maybe not bats!)

We often engage in acts of joint attention. What is the importance of joint attention

for understanding that different people have different perspectives?

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