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8 Beyond Appearances The phenomenal contributions of attention

1 The phenomenal contributions of attention

The first part of this book has provided an account of the nature of attention. Attention is the regulating of priority structures. The second part is going to be about the relationship between attention and consciousness.

It is uncontroversial that attention affects conscious experience. As a reminder consider the following examples.

Suppose that you are listening to a jazz band. You will have one kind of conscious experience when you focus attention on the sound of the saxophone and a different conscious experience when you focus it on the sound of the piano. You might focus on the subtleties of the melody or on the timbre of the saxophone’s voice; or you might focus on the rhythm of the piece, even if no specific instrument is keeping that rhythm. Differences in how you deploy your attention make a difference to what it feels like to listen to the music.

Now suppose that you are on a train (maybe on your way home from the concert). You will have one conscious experience when you focus attention on your newspaper and a different conscious experience when you focus on the scene that is passing by outside (maybe you shift attention without moving your eyes). Sometimes your attention will be drawn to quick movements. Sometimes you will resist and keep focused on what you are reading. Now your attention will move from one word, sentence or paragraph to the next. Just like in the Jazz concert, the deployment of attention during the train ride will be a factor in shaping your conscious experience.

Aside from these auditory and visual examples, consider also the following. You might focus on the aftertaste of dark chocolate in your mouth; focus on the texture of the surface you are touching with your fingers, or on the shape or size of a coin under your palm; you might focus attention on the fresh air you are breathing and inhale deeply to savor that smell of early spring, or – if you are less lucky – your attention

160 Beyond Appearances

might be caught by the smell of burnt toast in the kitchen. You might focus your attention on a slight pain in your foot, or an itch on your neck. You might trace the outlines of your body with your attention or focus attention on your breathing. You might feel a craving for chocolate and your attention might wander to thoughts about a particular flavor, or the mental image of a chocolate bar you really like. You might ignore that craving and instead keep focused on a practical or theoretical problem to which you are trying to find a solution. In all these cases, and many more, attention shapes consciousness.

While the investigation of attention has been suggested to belong to the “easy” part of the investigation of consciousness, and questions about attention have been supposed to be questions about mental functioning,1 these examples illustrate that attention also shapes phenomenal consciousness – the kind of consciousness that makes the mind-body problem hard. What it is like for you in a Jazz concert or on a train ride is affected by how your attention gets deployed.

What is phenomenal consciousness? When you enjoy phenomenal consciousness, there is something it is like for you. There is a subjective way you experience the world. Phenomenal consciousness, phenomenology, or conscious experience is what characterizes beings with a subjective perspective: what it is like for you to enjoy dark chocolate is something that is – at least – hard to understand for anyone but you (some think it is impossible). These characterizations are pointers to the phenomenon of phenomenal consciousness; not definitions. We will discuss more substantial views about the nature of phenomenal consciousness in due course. Mental episodes, using our pointers, are phenomenally conscious when they have phenomenal properties, properties that contribute to what it is like for the subject to undergo those mental episodes.

That attention shapes phenomenally conscious experience, understood in this sense, as our examples illustrate, is clear. Attention makes a phenomenal contribution. It’s employment and distribution partially explains what your experience is like for you, i.e. which phenomenal properties your experience instantiates.

But how does attention shape consciousness? How should we understand its phenomenal contribution?

The present chapter will lay the groundwork. I will discuss and criticize views on which the phenomenal contributions of attention can be fully captured in terms of its effects on what you are aware of, and on how these things appear to you. An attractive view of conscious experience, I will call it the appearance view, entails that the effects on what you are aware of and how it appears to you must exhaust the contribution of attention to consciousness. According to the appearance view the phenomenology of experience is exhausted by the way the world or an aspect of the world appears to the subject. The arguments in this chapter will show that the appearance view is false, because it misses a central element of how attention shapes

1 See Chalmers 1995, p. 27.

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consciousness. In the chapters that follow, I will provide an account of what it misses. The appearance view only accounts for one type of phenomenal property: phenomenal qualities. It fails to account for phenomenal structure.

The arguments in this chapter will not presuppose the priority structure view of attention. The view will re-emerge in the next chapter.

2 Can the phenomenal contributions of attention be deflated?

The uncontroversial claim that attention makes a phenomenal contribution does not entail that this contribution is especially interesting. For comparison, consider the phenomenal contribution made by movements of head and body. Turn around. Your movement partially explains that the phenomenology of your experience is now very different from what it was before. You didn’t see what was behind your head, and now you see it. A stark difference in visual phenomenology. Yet, it is consistent with the striking phenomenal contribution of bodily movement to think of that bodily movement as a relatively uninteresting causal antecedent of visual experience. Similarly, the fact that attention makes a phenomenal contribution does not entail that by considering it we will learn anything about either consciousness or attention.

Could we think of the phenomenal contribution of attention as much like that simple phenomenal contribution of bodily movement? Maybe attention is like opening your eyes. It enables conscious experiences. Or brings a stimulus to consciousness.2 The phenomenal difference between focusing your attention on something and not focusing attention on that thing would simply be that in the first case you are phenomenally conscious of it and in the second case you are not. We can call a view that treats attention as a causal antecedent of conscious experience a deflationary view of the phenomenal contributions of attention. According to a deflationary view you are conscious of everything you attend to, and your are not conscious of anything you do not attend to. And that is all there is to the phenomenal contribution of attention.

Someone attracted to such a view might have felt uneasy when I described the rich experiences you might have during a Jazz concert or on a train ride. That description, while intuitive, could be mistaken – she might have felt. Maybe consciousness is much sparser and doesn’t extend beyond the focus of attention? Maybe we are subject to a refrigerator light illusion: we are mislead about the richness of consciousness, because we become conscious of something only as we focus our attention on it, just like someone might naively think that the refrigerator light is always on because it is on as soon as he looks.3

There are several motivations for the deflationary view.

2 E.g. Mack and Rock 1998 and Prinz 2005, 2011, 2012. 3 E.g. O’Regan and Noë 2001, Noë 2004. For critical discussion of how we could find out whether consciousness is rich or sparse see Schwitzgebel 2007, 2010 and Hine 2010.


Most prominently, there is a series of the psychological experiments that demonstrate what has come to be called inattentional blindness.4 In the most famous experiment the experimental subject watches two teams of basketball players – one dressed in white and the other one in black. The subjects are instructed to perform the attention demanding task of counting the passes between the white players. The experiment shows that in such a situation many subjects fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit that appears right in the middle of the scene they are observing. Results like these have rightly gained widespread recognition. There is no question that they are fascinating and surprising, and that they cast doubt on some of our pre-scientific convictions. One way to interpret these findings is to support the deflationary view: without attention the gorilla and all other aspects of the environment outside the focus of the subject’s attention are as “invisible” as the back of her head – invisible to phenomenal consciousness.

There is at least one second motivation for the deflationary view. It comes from a neurological disorder called hemi-neglect.5 In its most common form hemi-neglect results from damage to specific parts of the right hemi-sphere of the brain (often caused by a stroke). Patients with hemi-neglect tend to ignore anything on their left side. For them, their left side seems invisible to phenomenal consciousness, again like the back of your head is to you. In the present context hemi-neglect is relevant because it is widely regarded as an attentional deficit. Both the neuronal sites of the damage as well as several other indicators suggest that the patients have lost the ability to focus attention on anything on their left side. Without the focus of attention it seems that the world becomes invisible. We seem to have further confirmation that attention enables consciousness.

3 Deflating the deflationary view

But do these findings actually support the deflationary view?

One concern might be that the results are about what subjects are able to notice, to report on, or to use for the control of reasoning and action. One might suggest that the experiments concern what Ned Block calls access consciousness and not phenomenal consciousness.6 If there is phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness, then the inattentional “blindness” results leave open that phenomenal consciousness itself is rich and extends beyond attention, while access consciousness is sparse and restricted to the focus of attention. It might be difficult to establish phenomenal consciousness in the absence of accessibility. But as long as there is a conceptual distinction between access and phenomenology in-accessible phenomenology is at

4 See Mack and Rock 1998, Simons and Chabris 1999, Most et al. 2001, as well as many more. See Chapter 12 (Sec. 5.1, p. 249 ff) for more discussion. 5 See Chatterjee 2002 for an overview. See Chapter 12 (Sec. 5.3, p. 252 ff) for more. 6 Block 1995.

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least an epistemic possibility. Appeal to in-accessible phenomenology might thus be used to question the alleged evidence for the deflationary view.7

In order to undermine the deflationary view we do not have to enter this complex debate about access and phenomenology. The deflationary view fails for much simpler reasons, and even if there is a strong link between phenomenal consciousness and accessibility. Indeed, the experiments about inattentional blindness themselves undermine instead of support the deflationary view.

For the success of the deflationary view it is not enough to provide evidence that we are conscious only of what receives at least some attention. Rather, it must be shown that there is no conscious experience outside a (fairly narrow) focus of attention. Otherwise, there could still be a phenomenal contrast between an experience with a lot of attention and one with only a little (a phenomenal contribution made by gradations of attention). The deflationary view has no room for phenomenal differences made be such gradations of attention.

Against the deflationary view we know that gradations of attention make a phenomenal difference, and that there is consciousness outside the narrow focus of attention.

Start with some introspective evidence. The deflationary view entails that at the Jazz concert you do not consciously hear the saxophone or drums when your attention is focused on the sound of the piano. Listening to music would be very boring if we could consciously hear only what is at the focus of attention. But once it is admitted that we do hear the sax even when focused on the piano, and the piano when focused on the sax, the deflationary view has no account of the phenomenal difference between the two cases.

The introspective evidence can be supported by experimental results. The most direct evidence comes from research by Marisa Carrasco and colleagues that investigates the effects of attention on appearances (we will return these results in the next section).8 In the relevant experiments subjects are presented with a simple display with one item on the left side and another item on the right of a fixation point. The subject’s attention is drawn to one of the sides by a short flash. Subjects are then asked to compare the apparent contrast of the two items, the one that is attended and the one that is unattended, and report the orientation of the one that looks to have a higher contrast. Subjects are able to do this, i.e. they are able to compare (and report) how something looks at the focus of attention with how something looks outside the focus of attention. But then there must be some way the item outside the focus of attention looks to the subject. But if there is some way an item looks to the subject (at least in a way that she can use for comparison and report), then the subject is

7 See Block 2007, 2008 for appeal to the phenomenon of partial report as shown in Sperling 1960 and more recent work by Landman et al. 2003 and Sligte et al. 2008. For critical discussion see the commentaries in Block 2007, Kouider et al. 2010, Brown 2012, Cohen and Dennett 2011, Philips 2011, Stazicker 2011, and Block’s response in Block 2012. I will briefly return to the relationship between phenomenal consciousness, accessiblity, and attention in Chapters 12 and 13. 8 E.g. Carrasco, Ling and Read 2004.


phenomenally conscious of that item. And so there are phenomenally conscious states outside the focus of attention. Carrasco’s results thus directly undermine the deflationary view.

For further evidence that phenomenal consciousness exceeds the narrow focus of attention, consider the famous inattentional blindness experiments themselves. While the discovery of inattentional blindness suggests that there are many cases where subjects are not conscious of what is outside their focus of attention, the relevant findings undermine any claim that subjects are never conscious without focused attention. Just consider that around fifty percent of the subjects in Simons and Chabris famous gorilla experiment did notice the gorilla.9 The finding is that attention has a large effect on what subject’s are conscious of, not that subjects are never conscious without focal attention. Since the subjects who noticed the gorilla performed the task just as well as others (which was ensured by the experiment) we have evidence that their attention was focused on the task (or the basketballs) and not on the gorilla. Since they were conscious of the gorilla (in both the access and the phenomenal sense), they provide a counterexample to the claim that subjects are never conscious of anything outside the focus of attention.10 The famous inattentional blindness experiments themselves demonstrate that the deflationary view is false.

While attention affects what we are aware of, we thus know that this is not its only phenomenal contribution. Even if some attention is necessary to “bring a stimulus to consciousness” (I myself defend a version of this claim in Chapter 13), the phenomenal contributions of attention cannot be deflated.

4 How attention affects appearances

What, then, are the phenomenal contributions of attention?

It is natural to think of its effects on appearances. The phenomenal differences between the piano experience and the saxophone experience might be thought to be a difference in how the music sounds to the subject. Maybe the piano sounds a bit louder when you attend to it?

The appearance properties of a phenomenally conscious episode are, I shall say, those of its properties that contribute to the way an aspect of the world appears to the subject when she undergoes that episode.11 For the case of visual experience, for example, its appearance properties consist in the way things look to the subject when

9 The results are similar in more recent work. In Most et al. 2001, for example, between 30 % and 60 % of the subjects notice the unattended item (depending on the exact experimental condition). 10 Similarly, Mack and Rock (1998) found that subjects often notice the “gist” of a scene even outside the focus of attention (though no gist seems to be noticed without any attention. See Mack and Clarke 2012). 11 Shoemaker (1994), and the literature discussing his proposal, uses the term “appearance property” to denote a property of a worldly thing in virtue of which it appears some way to the subject. This is not how I am using the term. Appearance properties, for me, are properties of experiences. It is in virtue of having such properties that the world appears some way in the relevant experience. The difference between Shoemaker’s and my use of the term reflects an ambiguity in the intuitive notion of an appearance.

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she has that experience. The appearance properties of auditory experience consist in the way things sound to her. The natural idea thus is that the phenomenal contributions of attention are effects on the appearance properties of phenomenal episodes.

Does the music sound louder when you attend to it? Generally, does attention affect which appearance properties an experience instantiates?

Interestingly, while it is entirely obvious that attention makes a phenomenal contribution (such as in the Jazz case) whether it affects appearances is not entirely obvious. Consider, for example, that the influential early psychologists Gustav Fechner and William James disagreed on whether attention affects appearances, both – one might think – expert introspectors. Fechner, famous for first describing a mathematical relationship between stimulus and sensation (later called the Webner-Fechner law of psychophysics), thought that

the pendulum-beat of a clock [appears to us] no louder, no matter how much we increase the strain of our attention upon [it]12

William James, by contrast, believed that

in listening for certain notes in a chord, the one we attend to sounds probably a little more loud…13

If a generalization of Fechner’s view were correct, i.e. the view that the focus of attention makes no difference to how the world appears to the subject, then the idea that attention shapes consciousness by affecting appearances would be a non-starter. We would have to look elsewhere for the phenomenal contributions of attention.

Yet, recent evidence suggests that James was closer to being correct – attention seems to affect at least visual appearances (we know less about the auditory case).

The most detailed investigation of how attention affects appearances is due to Carrasco’s work already mentioned above. Carrasco and her colleagues were able to provide evidence that attention affects apparent contrast as well as other appearance properties.14 A Gabor patch, the oriented black and white grating we have already encountered, their experiments suggest, looks to have a higher contrast than an unattended one. And an attended low contrast patch will look to have the same contrast as unattended high contrast patch. Attention seems to boost appearances of contrast. Indeed, the appearance effect of attention can be quantified: subjects cannot, for example, distinguish the apparent contrast of an attended 22 % Gabor patch, from an unattended 28 % patch. Similar effects, Carrasco and others have later come to show, are found for other experiential dimensions such as apparent spatial frequency,

12 Quoted in James 1890/1981, p. 425 (see also Fechner 1889, p. 452-453). 13 James 1890/1981, p. 425 14 Carrasco, Ling and Read 2004.


apparent size, apparent color saturation, apparent spatial relations, and apparent duration.15 An “attended item looks bigger, faster, earlier, more saturated, stripier,” as Ned Block puts it in a recent discussion of those results.16 Further, the attended parts of ambiguous figures tend to look closer,17 and attention affects which edge looks to belong to which part of an observed scene.18 Attention enhances the spatial resolution of conscious vision,19 and it degrades its temporal resolution.20

Some empirical doubts about these effects remain. Some have argued, for example, that Carrasco’s results confound effects of attention on response bias (effects on a subject’s reports) with effects of attention on phenomenal consciousness.21 I tend to think that the evidence points to a real effect of the distribution of attention on a variety of appearance properties. Many of these effects of attention on appearances are small (I recommend looking at a 22 % and a 28 % Gabor patch for good measure.22 It really is not so easy to tell them apart. If the effect of attention on auditory appearances are anything similar, we need not fault Gustav Fechner for his failing introspective capacities). Still, the effects are statistically significant and reproducible. More likely than not, attention does affect appearances.

5 The appearance view

Do the effects of attention on the appearances exhaust the phenomenal contribution of attention?

An extremely appealing view about the nature of consciousness seems to entail that this has to be so. Isn’t consciousness just how the world appears to the subject? Isn’t her conscious experience the subject’s apparent world that might or might not match the real world?

According to the appearance view of phenomenal consciousness, as I shall call it, the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by the way the world or an aspect of the world appears to the subject. I take this as roughly equivalent to the idea that phenomenal character entirely consists in what is present(ed) to the subject in experience or in what the subject is directly aware of.23 According to the appearance

15 Gobell and Carrasco 2005; Tsal and Shalev 1997; Gobell and Carrasco 2005; Anton-Erxleben, Heinrich and Treue 2007; Fuller and Carrasco 2006; Liverence and Scholl 2011; Tse et al. 1997 16 Block 2010, p. 41. 17 Rubin 1915/2001 and Driver and Baylis 1996 for the Rubin Vase; Kawabata (1986) and Matsuura and Ichikawa (2003) for the Necker Cube. 18 Driver and Baylis 1996; Vecera 2000, Vecera, Flevaris and Filapek 2004, Wagatsuma, Shimizu and Sakai 2008, Kimchi 2009. 19 Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998. 20 Yeshurun and Levy 2003. 21 See Schneider 2006, Schneider and Komlos 2008, Valsecchi, Vescovi and Turatto 2010, and Schneider 2011. For replies see Anton-Erxleben, Abrams and Carrasco 2010; Anton-Erxleben, Abrams and Carrasco 2011; and Block 2010. 22 A internet search for “Carrasco attention apparent contrast” should help to find the patches. 23 I follow Alston 1999 in accepting this equivalence.

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view there couldn’t be a difference in phenomenal properties without a difference in appearance properties. In other words we have the following.24

Appearance View The phenomenal properties of every experiential episode supervene on its appearance properties.

The appearance view leaves open how, if at all, this supervenience can be explained. One option, for example, is that phenomenal properties are identical to appearance properties.

The appearance view makes the following the following straightforward prediction about the phenomenal contributions of attention.

Appearance View Prediction The phenomenal contributions of attention in any experiential episode supervene on its appearance properties.

Since any difference in phenomenal properties amounts to a difference in appearance properties, any difference in the phenomenal properties explained by attention must amount to a difference in appearance properties. If the appearance view is right, the effects of attention on the appearances must exhaust the phenomenal contributions of attention.

How attractive is the appearance view? Some might think that it is a truism; they might think that the phenomenal properties are the appearance properties because, after all, “the English word ‘phenomenon’ derives from the Greek for appearance”.25 And indeed, think about how to introduce the notion of phenomenal consciousness to the novice. Phenomenal consciousness, one might say, concerns not how things are – independently of you – but how they seem to you: how the chocolate tastes to you, how the music sounds to you, how red looks to you, or how the world appears to Nagel’s famous bat itself. Phenomenal consciousness is your apparent world. How then could there be parts of consciousness that do not concern appearances?

Some might think that moods like joy, sadness or depression shape consciousness without shaping appearances. But doesn’t sadness color the world? Doesn’t everything seem more gloomy now? Others might worry about headaches, or nausea. But doesn’t your head feel some way in former case, and your stomach in the latter? When we narrow our focus to specific conscious feelings, there seems to be nothing but appearances. Something seems some way to the subject.26

Below I will argue that the appearance view fails. But it fails not because there is some experiential episode, some part of consciousness, like a headache or nausea, that it does not cover. What it does not cover is how the parts are put together.

24 As common, supervenience is defined as: the A properties supervene on the B properties =Def there couldn’t be a difference in the A properties without a difference in the B properties. 25 Crane 2001, p. 72 (italics removed. Note that Crane in this quote does not endorse the view that the appearance view is a truism; though he does hold a intentionalist version of it; ibid. See below.) 26 For responses like these see e.g. Tye 1995, 2000; Crane 1998, 2008; or Mendelovici 2014.


Whether, for example, the apparent sound of the saxophone is at the center or at the periphery of your conscious perspective. It is true, as many proponents of the appearance view have suggested, that when we aim to focus attention on our experience of a sound or the sensation of red, we focus attention to the apparent sound or the redness we are aware of. But exactly when we do that, there is also the shape of our conscious perspective created by putting that apparent sound or apparent redness at the center of our attention. And that, I will argue, is not captured by the appearance view. For our purposes, we can thus take the appearance view to be restricted to episodes of perceptual experience. My argument shows that the appearance view fails even for this class of experiences where the view is most plausible, and my alternative (developed in the next chapters) finds application even within visual or auditory experience alone.27

6 The appearance view and intentionalism

As stated the appearance view remains somewhat vague owing to vagueness in the notion of an appearance property. Those who have followed recent debates in the philosophy of consciousness might ask whether the appearance view is the same as intentionalism.

Intentionalism about conscious experience, roughly, is the view that the phenomenology of a conscious experience supervenes on or is determined by the intentional or representational properties of that conscious experience. This view has been widely discussed in the recent philosophical literature about consciousness.

There are a variety of arguments for intentionalism.28 But there are also a number of challenges. General challenges attempt to undermine the phenomenal adequacy of intentionalism, challenge the intentionalist’s idea that experience has accuracy conditions, try to convince that intentionalism is unmotivated, or argue that intentionalism cannot handle cases of phenomenal variation in the absence of changes in accuracy conditions.29 Specific challenges attempt to provide counterexamples to the intentionalist’s claim that the phenomenal properties supervene on the intentional properties. These have included blurry vision, afterimages, phosphenes, perspectival shape, and the phenomenal differences between the sensory modalities such as vision and touch.30,31

27 I believe that an important aspect of moods, in the end, also concerns how they shape the attentional structure of consciousness. But I won’t argue for this claim here. 28 See Harman 1990; Dretske 1995; Tye 2000, 2002; Byrne 2001; Pautz 2007, 2008, 2010. 29 For the first three arguments see Martin 2002 or Travis 2004. For the last one see Block 2003, 2010. I discuss Block’s challenge in Watzl forthcoming_b. 30 Seee Block 1996, 2003; Boghossian and Velleman 1989; Peacocke 1983). 31 Considerations about the phenomenal contributions of attention have been proposed both as general challenges to intentionalism, as well as as specific challenges. See Block 2010 for the first kind; Chalmers 2004, Nickel 2007, and Speaks 2010 for the second.

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But the appearance view is not the same as intentionalism. We can think of intentionalism as one interpretation or species of the appearance view. It is the appearance view plus an account of what appearance properties are. Roughly, the idea is that the rather vague notion of a way the world appears to the subject can be understood in terms of the arguably more precise notion of an intentional attitude toward a content (roughly: a way the world is according to your experience).32 Appearance intentionalism thus is the appearance view and the following.

Intentionalist Interpretation For each appearance property A there exists some intentional attitude R and content c such that undergoing an phenomenal episode with A consists in bearing R to c.33

Yet, one can reject the intentionalist interpretation and still accept the appearance view. Indeed, this is what many alternatives to intentionalism do: the so-called theory of appearing; direct realism; Mark Johnston’s “awareness” view; Peacocke’s sensationalism; and Block’s mental paint view.34 Let me give some examples.

Consider the following remark by Charles Travis, a well-known opponent of intentionalism:

perception, as such, [simply] places our surroundings in view, affords us awareness of them … it confronts us with what is there.35

This is a statement of Travis’ denial that experience represents anything or has content. Yet, Travis continues to talk of the way things look or appear to the subject. The quote points to Travis’ view of appearance properties in terms of “confrontation” with what is there. Travis makes no attempt to challenge the appearance view. On his views, appearance properties just are not intentional properties.

Consider also Peacocke’s view of “sensational” properties (Peacocke’s terminology for the non-intentional phenomenal properties of experience). In agreement with an important motivation for intentionalism,36 he says that

in being aware of something, we are aware of some of its (apparent) properties and relations, and the properties and relations of which we are aware in experience are never purely properties and relations of the experience (except perhaps the time at which it occurs), but are

32 Most clearly this move is in Byrne 2001. The argument from transparency (e.g. Harman 1990; Tye 2000, 2002) and the argument in Pautz (2007, 2008, 2010) are similar in strategy. For a less ambitious move from the claim that experience has appearance properties to the claim that experience has content (whether or not these contents exhaust their phenomenal properties) see Siegel 2010 (Ch. 2.4 + 2.5). 33 See Pautz op. cit. for formulations of intentionalism, on which this is modeled. 34 For the appearance view see: Hicks 1938, Barnes 1944/45, Langsam 1997 and Alston 1999; for direct realism see: Snowdon 1990; McDowell 1994; Martin 1997, 2004, 2005; Campbell 2002, Hinton 2003; Brewer 2004 (disjunctivists might disagree with intentionalism on whether something appears to us in hallucination or illusion.) For Johnston’s view see: Johnston 2004, 2007. Peacocke’s sensationalism can be found in: Peacocke 1983, 2008b. Block’s mental paint view is in: Block 2003, 2010. 35 Travis 2004, p. 65 36 The so-called “transparency” of experience. See: Harman 1990; Tye 2000, 2002. I will return to issues regarding the transparency of experience in Sec. 10.2 below, as well as in Chapter 11.


apparently properties and relations of other things. … In the case of the sensational properties, the experienced properties are, in the visual case, properties and relations of the visual field and its parts.37

Peacocke’s sensationalist view like Travis’ remark – while it rejects intentionalism – is compatible with the appearance view. Peacocke holds that some appearance properties are not intentional properties.

Finally, consider Ned Block’s mental paint view. In the paper that argues against an intentionalist account of the effects of attention found by Carrasco’s group Block himself states these effects as follows.

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.38

Block’s statement of the phenomenal effects of attention shows that he intends to undermine the intentionalist interpretation of appearance properties without targeting the appearance view itself. Block, like Travis, believes that appearance properties are not intentional properties (though both disagree on what appearance properties do consist in).

Given the disagreement between intentionalism and its rivals on how to interpret appearance properties I will leave the appearance view at the intuitive and somewhat vague level I started with. It will be precise enough to be shown wrong.

7 Phenomenal uniqueness and attentional appearances

The appearance view entails the appearance view prediction, i.e. that the phenomenal contributions of attention supervene on appearance properties.

The appearance view prediction does not presuppose that attention makes a distinctive phenomenal contribution. Attention might have a variety of different effects on the appearances in various scenarios. With attention colors look more saturated, movements look faster, and maybe saxophones sound louder. For all the appearance view says, these phenomenal effects of attention have no common phenomenal core. Indeed, the view is compatible also with the claim that in some cases attention makes movements look faster and in others look slower.

But it is plausible that there is a phenomenal property that all attention episodes share. After all, it is natural to describe every phenomenal contribution of attention

37 Peacocke 2008b, p. 15 38 Block 2010, p. 23

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(partially) in terms of “concentration of consciousness”, “experiential highlighting”, or “phenomenal salience”.39 We thus have the following natural claim.

Phenomenal Uniqueness There is a (non-disjunctive) phenomenal property P such that all and only attention episodes have P.

The phenomenal uniqueness of attention is an extremely appealing thesis. Many theorists assume it without arguing for it, or even making it explicit. It is natural to ask “What is conscious attention?” and take it to be a question about the phenomenology of attention, and thereby assume that all conscious attention episodes indeed share a phenomenology. The same for questions about what the experience of attention consists in, or questions about the phenomenal character that constitutes conscious attention.40 And, of course, when William James describes attention as implying “the concentration of consciousness” he also assumes that there is one phenomenal property that is shared by all forms of attention.

By combining the appearance view prediction with the phenomenal uniqueness claim we get the following view.

Attentional Appearance View There is an appearance property A° such that all and only attention episodes have A°.

Given the appeal of the phenomenal uniqueness claim, the next two sections discuss the attentional appearance view. I will show that it is very implausible. Attention affects, as shown by Carrasco’s and other experiments, a wide variety of appearance properties. But there is no unique way things appear to the subject that is common between all the ways a subject may deploy her attention (from various visual forms, to auditory, emotional and intellectual attention). The defender of the appearance view has to give up the phenomenal uniqueness claim.

8 Attention is not like a camera lens

In principle, a proponent of the attentional appearance view could remain silent about which appearance property all attention episodes share. But more likely, she will make a specific suggestion. Some such specific suggestions have been discussed and several others have some intuitive appeal. I will mention specific problems with some these views, and then turn to some general considerations that suggest that an attentional appearance view is unlikely to be correct.

Most versions of an attentional appearance view can be dismissed fairly quickly even if they might have an intuitive ring to them.

Consider, for example, the idea that an attended item stands out as a figure (or perceptual object) from the undifferentiated ground (A° would here be the appearance 39 See Hamilton 1895, James 1890/1981, Wundt 1902; Campbell 2002 for these metaphors respectively. 40 See Wu 2010, Watzl 2011, Pautz 2010 for respectively asking these three questions.


(as) of a perceptual object)41. This would be one way of making precise the idea that without attention our experience would be a “buzzing and blooming confusion” of colors, shapes and sounds.42 Only the focus of attention fuses them together into figures that stand out from the undifferentiated sea of features. One might appeal to Treisman’s feature binding theory in this regard.

Yet, as we have seen (Chapter 1 Sec. 7) there is no evidence to support the claim that attention is uniquely responsible for feature binding. Subjects are aware of perceptual objects (or indeed have object-awareness) outside the focus of attention, and hence the appearance as of an object is not present only in attention episodes.43 There is also no plausibility to the claim that it is present in all attention episodes. Just consider feature-directed attention. Or consider spatial attention in cases where no perceptual object is present (like focusing on a specific location on a uniformly colored screen). In either case, the phenomenal contribution of attention does not consist in the appearance of an object. So, while much visual attention is directed at perceptual objects,44 and while object-directed visual attention might indeed correspond to the appearance of an object (unsurprisingly), the appearance of objects is neither necessary nor sufficient for the phenomenology of attention.

There is one view, though, that has a bit more to it. On this view the phenomenology of attention consists in clarity or determinacy of conscious experience. This view seems to make talk about attention as focusing so appealing: to attend to something is a bit like focusing a camera lens on it.45

This view comes in a number of variations (some more and some less plausible). For example, one might think, that the phenomenology of attention consists in sharpening the accuracy and contrast of the appearances. We can see his view hinted in the 18th century when Christian Wolff defines attention as “the faculty that brings it about that in a perception composed of parts one part has greater clarity than the others.”46 And more than 150 years later William Hamilton writes.

Consciousness may be compared to a telescope, attention to the pulling out or in of the tubes in accommodating the focus to the object; … Attention is consciousness and something more. It is consciousness

41 For one account of what that phenomenal property amounts to see e.g. Siegel 2010 (Ch. 7). 42 See James 1981 [1890] (p. 488) for the metaphor. The metaphor concerns what babies would first experience, and hence is taken a little out of context here. James does not endorse the object view. 43 See Kanwisher and Driver 1992, Moore and Egeth 1997, and the review in Scholl 2001. Mole 2010 makes the same point in a different context. 44 The first research that convinced many psychologists that much visual attention is object-based was Duncan 1984. For recent reviews see Scholl 2001 or Chen 2012. 45 There are data that strongly suggest that focus metaphor for attention was more or less invented by William James and William Hamilton in the late 19th century (which is, of course, also when cameras became more widely used): the phrase “focus attention” is almost entirely absent in books published before 1890, and rises steadily after that. There is no corresponding trend for the word “attention” itself. See here: https://goo.gl/u5sx80 (see Michel et al. 2010 for the corpus and method. Since “focus attention”, obviously, is much less frequent than “attention”, and I was interested not in absolute frequencies but only the evolution of frequencies across time, the data for “focus attention” were multiplied by a factor of 175). 46 Wolff 1738, p. 168.


voluntarily applied, under its law of limitations, to some determinate object; it is consciousness concentrated.47

And Edward Titchener, the early dean of experimental psychology we have encountered at the beginning of Chapter 1, says this.

It seems to me beyond question that the problem of attention centres in the fact of sensible clearness. … Attention, in other words, means a redistribution of clearness in consciousness, the rise of some elements and the fall of others, with an accompanying total feeling of a characteristic kind.48

Yet, the notions of clarity of consciousness or its focalization are notoriously vague and hard to get a good grip on. Anne Treisman expressed this worry in the 1960s as follows.

Fifty years ago psychologists thought of attention as ‘the focalization of consciousness’ or ‘the increased clearness of a particular idea’. But these and other definitions in terms of mental faculties or subjective experience proved sterile for empirical research and ended in a series of inconclusive controversies.49

This worry was pertinent fifty years ago, at the time of Treisman’s writing. And she was entirely correct to reject any definition of attention in terms of clarity of consciousness. But for the question of whether attention affects how “focalized” consciousness is, there is now empirical evidence that is independent of the intuitive appeal and distinguished history of the camera lens view. A range of experiments show, for example, that visual attention to a certain location increases the spatial resolution of vision at that location. In this respect, it brings a stimulus into focus. And it is a consistent finding in many experiments that subjects have better discriminatory powers at the focus of attention, where they can detect finer details.50

It would be good to have a precisely worked out version of the best version of the camera lens view. The best account, in my view, can be found in recent work by Bence Nanay and James Stazicker.51

This account does not concern clarity but appeals to the determinable-determinate relation between properties. Being red is a more specific property than being colored. There are many ways for an object to be colored, but there are fewer ways for it to be red. Being crimson would again be more specific than being red. We thus get a 47 Hamilton 1895, p. 941. See also James 1981 [1890], p. 403 (quoted in Chapter 1, p. 6). 48 Titchener 1908/1973, p. 181ff. 49 Treisman, 1964, p. 12 50 E.g. Shiu and Pashler 1995; Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998; Montagna, Pestilli, and Carrasco 2009. 51 See Nanay (2010) and Stazicker (2011a,b). Chalmers (2004) and Tye (2008. p. 172) also suggest views like this (though they do not fully endorse them).


hierarchy of properties from the least specific to the most specific. The relationship between the more specific and the less specific in this sense is the relationship between a determinable and its determinations or determinates. We can call absolutely determinate properties those that have no further determinations. We can apply the derminable-determination idea also to spatial properties. Being square would, for example, be a determination of being rectangular. Spatial resolution can be captured in this way too: being exactly one and a half meters tall would be a determination of being between one meter and two meters tall.52

Arguably, appearances are never absolutely determinate. If only because our perceptual systems are somewhat noisy, things never have a completely determinate look. A person in the distance, for example, might look to be between 180 and 200 centimeters tall without looking to be any more specific size. A number of actual heights of the person in the distance are compatible with how it looks to the subject. The same for color experience: because color processing is noisy no color perception will present a perfectly specific shade of red. What we experience is a somewhat determinable shade of red; a variety of actual colors are compatible with the color it looks to have. So, there is good reason to think that experience presents us with somewhat indeterminate properties.53

With the help of this account of perceptual indeterminacy, we can now make more precise the idea that the phenomenology of attention consists in the focalization of consciousness. The idea would be that attention selectively affects how determinate something looks. If, for example, you focus attention on some letters on your newspaper the size and shape properties you are experiencing is more determinate than the size and shape properties of what you are experiencing outside the focus of your attention. We can apply this to the Jazz example too. When you focus on the saxophone, then maybe its pitch, its timbre and the temporal details of what it is playing are experienced more determinately than the sound of the piano. Focalization thus amounts to a relative increase of determinacy in experience. So, we have the following view.

Determinacy View The appearance property A° consists in the experience of more determinate properties relative to a comparison class C.

The determinacy view can be made even more precise by specifying the comparison class. There is, for example, a diachronic version according to which an essential part of the phenomenology of attention consists in an increase of how determinate the properties of the attended item look to be when you begin to attend to it (and a decrease when you stop attending to it). There is a also a synchronic version according to which an essential part of the phenomenology of attention consists in the appearance of more determinate properties at the focus of attention compared to what at that time is outside the focus of attention. The determinacy view could be applied 52 There are different accounts of the metaphysics of the determinable-determination relation. They won’t matter for our purposes. See Sanford 2011 for an overview. 53 See Hellie 2005, Morrison 2011, and Stazicker 2011 for discussion of the relevance of perceptual noise for the indeterminacy of perceptual appearances.


to feature directed attention (the attended feature looks more determinate than other features) as well as object directed attention (the features of the attended object look more determinate than the features of unattended objects).

The determinacy view clearly is attractive. It seems to make precise an idea about the phenomenal contribution of attention that has appealed to many who have written on the subject.

Yet, despite its intuitive appeal and despite the experimental results mentioned above, the determinacy view has significant shortcomings.

First, it is unclear whether the effects of attention on spatial resolution really do generalize, as the determinacy view requires. Nothing is known, for example, about the effects of attention on the determinacy of color representation. In fact, in some cases the effects seem to go in the wrong direction: evidence suggests that visual attention decreases the (apparent) temporal resolution of visually presented events: if a subject focuses on a particular location at which either two items are presented in rapid succession (with a short temporal gap between) or a single item for a longer time, she is more likely to see the two items fused together as one compared to outside the focus of attention. Similarly, some evidence suggests that attention sometimes degrades the discriminability of apparent motion (hence motion sometimes seems to be presented less determinately at the focus of attention). These results call into doubt that the connection between attention and perceptual determinacy is as tight as the determinacy view suggests. The evidence at least is not very clear cut.54

Second, it is important to note what makes the determinacy view intuitive and what makes the figure/ground view mentioned above intuitive will tend to pull in different directions. On the one hand, attention is supposed to go with increased determinacy. But on the other hand, attention is supposed to go with integration into a single object or figure which will often be enforced by neglecting irrelevant detail. It is unclear then whether increased determinacy is the single element that is common to all cases of conscious attention.55

Maybe these two problems can be overcome: a proponent of the determinacy view might, for example, attempt to restrict the view in some motivated fashion, or attempt to combine it with elements of the object view (though it is not obvious how this would preserve the phenomenal uniqueness claim).

The third, and in my view biggest problem for the determinacy view, though, is the following counterexample. Suppose you looking at a screen with only two red dots, one on the left L, and one on the right R. Between you and the screen there is a pane of glass. Now consider the following two scenarios. 54 For the research suggestion the degradation in temporal resolution see Yeshurun and Levy (2003) and Rolke et al. (2008). The evidence, though, is not completely unambiguous. For results going the other way see Chica and Christie (2009). For motion discrimination see Yeshurun and Hein (2011). 55 How the integrative and the discrimatory function of attention tend to pull in different directions in the empirical work is pointed out by Yeshurun and Hein (2011).


The Left Attention Scenario Your visual attention is focused on L.

The Left Determinacy Scenario You defuse your attention equally across the screen. But the part of the pane of glass in front of L is a lens that sharpens your vision of L (like glasses for better eye sight). The pane of glass has no such effect on any other part of the screen behind it.

If you are wearing glasses, the left determinacy scenario is easy to get a grip on. It’s like having glasses (or better glasses) only for L. You can (imperfectly) simulate the left determinacy scenario by taking off only the right lens of your glasses.

Everyone will agree that there is an obvious and clear phenomenal difference between these two scenarios.56 But the determinacy view has a hard time explaining that difference. Suppose we have figured out exactly how attention affects spatial resolution (e.g. by relying on the experiments in Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998). Then we can construct a system of lenses (or a pane of glass) that exactly mimics those effects on spatial resolution. Yet, there seems to be a clear phenomenal contrast between the two scenarios. What it is like to look through a pane of glass that gives you a more determinate view of (a part of) the left side is not at all what it is like to focus your attention on something to your left. Visio-spatial attention does not feel like spatially delimited eagle vision. This contrast becomes even more vivid when we consider cases where you shift your attention, or start to focus on something, and contrast this with looking through a pane of glass that dynamically changes its resolution in different parts.

Of course, the left determinacy scenario only mimics the spatial resolution effects of attention. If attention also makes other visually experienced properties more determinate (which we don’t know much about) the scenario does not capture those. But I think there is a strong intuition that adding further lenses that affect the other experienced properties would not make a difference. There remains a phenomenal contrast between the left attention scenario, and any variation of the left determinacy scenario.

If this is not already a convincing counterexample to the determinacy view, consider also that the determinacy of visual experience does not only depend on the distribution of attention but also depends on the distance from the fovea.57 As we move away from fovea the visual field is represented with less and less determinacy (this is true for spatial resolution, but also for color vision).58 A subject who shifts attention away from the fovea in fact just partially compensates for the decline in

56 This example has some similarities to the phenomenal contrast method developed by Susanna Siegel (e.g. in Siegel 2010). Siegel, though, is interested in establishing that perceptual experience has high level contents. My aims are different. I do not believe that the relevant phenomenal contrast is to be explained in terms of contents at all. 57 See Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998. 58 It is easy to test this for yourself by taking an unknown playing card in your hand (don’t look at its front face) and then move it slowly from the outside to the center of your visual field. You will need to move it very close to the midline before you can even detect its color, let alone its identity.

Why probably no attentional appearance view is correct 177

determinacy and resolution.59 So, a case of defuse attention where a dot like L is presented at the fovea should phenomenally match one where attention is focused on a dot that is slightly away from the fovea (since attention compensates for the distance from the fovea). But again there appears to be a clear phenomenal contrast between these two cases.

If there is indeed a phenomenal contrast between the left attention scenario and the left determinacy scenario (and attention and foveation) then the phenomenal contribution of attention is not exhausted by considerations of determinacy. While attention indeed affects perceptual determinacy the determinacy view leaves out an aspect of the phenomenology of attention.

9 Why probably no attentional appearance view is correct

We can generalize some of the discussion of the determinacy view. It is unlikely that any appearance property is shared by all and only attention episodes.

First, there is a diverse variety of potential objects of attention. There are features like color, timbre or movement; there are locations, and material objects. Attention also occurs in all modalities: there is visual attention, auditory attention, tactile attention, gustatory attention, attention to bodily sensations, non-visual attention to parts of one’s body (or body image), and more. The odds are stacked strongly against the claim that there is a single appearance that is shared by all and only the mental episodes that involve the subject’s focus of attention. Appeal to determinacy may have been the attentional appearance view’s best bet.

Second, consider the idea of restricting the attentional appearance view (and with it the phenomenal uniqueness claim) to a single form of attention such as object-directed visual attention. Even here the evidence suggests that attention has a staggering variety of effects on appearances: we have already encountered spatial frequency, apparent size, apparent color saturation, apparent spatial relations, apparent duration, apparent distance, apparent spatial resolution, and apparent temporal resolution. None of them are likely to be present in all and only attention episodes. This problem for the attentional appearance view thus repeats the problems of a reductionist account of the nature of attention (see Chapter 1). We find diversity instead of unity.

What we currently know about how attention affects appearances thus strongly suggests that there is no appearance property that is shared by all attention episodes, in direct opposition to the attentional appearance view.

Since the attentional appearance view is entailed by the appearance view prediction and the phenomenal uniqueness claim, a proponent of the appearance view thus is

59 This is the central result of Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998.


probably forced to either drop the phenomenal uniqueness claim or accept a form of primitivism where the attentional appearance A° is left unexplained.

Taking either option carries significant costs.

Consider the second option. While primitivism about color appearances, for example, has some intuitive appeal (there is a common look to everything that looks red), there is no intuitive appeal to the idea that everything that is attended appears attended (there does not seem to be a common way something looks when it is attended). Taking the second option is a significant cost. The burden of proof is on the primitivist to show that this option has any plausibility and is not an ad hoc move.

Taking the first option, I believe, also is a significant cost. It is quite plausible that there is a unique phenomenal property that is shared by all attention episodes. It is hard to assess the weight of the relevant cost in the abstract. A proponent of the appearance view might, for example, soften the blow by claiming that we talk about all attention episodes in similar ways (as the quotes above have indicated), because all of these – though phenomenally diverse – share a functional property, e.g. they might be experiences that lead to practical advantages in engaging with some relevant object. They might also claim that we should be doubtful that introspection is so discerning as to reveal a common phenomenal property in all attention episodes, or that it reveals the phenomenal character that “constitutes” conscious attention.60 Nevertheless, the proponent of the appearance view will have to do significant work to show why the phenomenal uniqueness of attention is, while false, so extremely appealing.

We can think of the dilemma between these two unappealing options as the first argument against the appearance view. The appearance view has no plausible explanation of phenomenal uniqueness.

10 The replication argument against the appearance view

Let me then get to a second argument against the appearance view. It is independent of whether we accept or reject the phenomenal uniqueness claim or primitivism. I call it the replication argument.61 I will first introduce the intuitive idea.

60 Pautz 2010a. 61 The argument, in a sense, builds on cases presented by Chalmers 2005, Nickel 2007, and Speaks 2010 (Lee 2009 touches on a similar argument in a discussion of time consciousness). All of them present cases, where – they argue – a difference in the direction of attention makes a phenomenal difference, but makes no difference to the intentional content of the experience. Chalmers 2005, for example, suggests thinking about shifting attention between two red pinpoint lights in an otherwise dark environment. The findings regarding how attention affects appearances reviewed above challenge their views (arguably, for example, the red color of the attended pinpoint light would look more saturated. See Fuller and Carrasco 2006). In actual cases differences in attention are accompanied by differences in appearances. The replication argument shows that the differences in appearances do not exhaust the phenomenal differences between the relevant attention scenarios. I have myself presented similar cases in Watzl 2010, 2011a,c. Block (2010) also mentions the general idea, but the ‘attention and mental paint’ argument against intentionalism does not depend on it. The term “replication” is due to James Stazicker (who uses it in his dissertation. Stazicker does not endorse the argument, though).

The replication argument against the appearance view 179

Consider the Jazz concert. Suppose that your attention is focused on the piano and not on the saxophone. This experiential episode is phenomenally different from an experiential episode where you focus your attention on the saxophone, and from one where you do diffuse your attention. If there were no difference in appearances between these episodes, the appearance view is already shown to be wrong. But let us suppose that there is a difference in appearance. Let us suppose that William James was correct and that the piano now sounds a little more loud. This effect of attention on how loud an instrument sounds clearly can be replicated without attention. Just turn up the volume for the piano. We can thus replicate an effect of attention on the appearances simply by a change in our subject’s environment. Have we thereby replicated what it is like to focus attention on the piano? The answer seems clearly: No. Hearing a louder piano while being focused on something else is not at all what it is like to focus attention on the piano. But if an appearance replica, an experience that presents the same appearance properties with a distinct distribution of attention, is phenomenally different from the attention experience then there is more to the phenomenal contributions of attention than can be captured by the appearance view.

Consider also Carrasco’s findings. With attention the Gabor patch looks to be a little higher in contrast (a 22 % patch under the focus of attention looks like a 28 % patch outside the focus). Again, this effect is easy to replicate without attention. Just present a patch that actually has the higher contrast. The same holds for the effects of attention on apparent size (make things bigger), on apparent color saturation (make the color more saturated), apparent time of occurrence (present the item earlier), and so on. But just like in the Jazz example, the replica experiences seem to be phenomenally different from the attention experiences whose appearance properties they replicate. What it is like to focus attention on one of two 22 % Gabor patches is different from what it is like to diffuse attention in a scenario with one 22 % patch and another with 28 %.

We can now see that the problem with the determinacy view was an instance of a larger problem. Effects of attention on appearances can be replicated in ways that do not involve attention. In the case of determinacy we didn’t change the environment directly. Instead we changed how the subject was related to the environment. We gave our subject the partial glasses that provides her with a more determinate view of some aspects of her environment and a less determinate view of others. This experience replicates the determinacy distribution of attention experiences, but – like the other appearance replicas – it is phenomenally different from the attention episode whose appearance properties it replicates.

In the end, I argue, this replicability problem arises even for any alleged primitive property A°.

Let us now make the replication argument precise. Let an appearance replica eA of an attention episode e be any experiential episode with a different distribution of attention (including fully diffuse attention) and exactly the same appearance properties as e. We then have the following two claims.

Replicability Every attention episode e has at least one appearance replica eA.


Difference At least some appearance replica eA is phenomenally different from the attention episode e whose appearances it replicates.

Together these claims are inconsistent with the appearance view. Since e and eA share all appearance properties they would have to share all phenomenal properties, but according to the difference claim they don’t. The next two sections are devoted to defending the two claims.

A note on the dialectic: in order to undermine the appearance view it would suffice to show that there is at least one phenomenally distinct replica of at least one attention episode. The fact that the replicability claim holds universally, though, points to a systematic and general problem with the appearance view – the source of the problem would be hidden by the a weaker, existentially quantified, claim. The source of the problem, I will suggest, is that the appearance leaves the nature of attention and the phenomenal contributions of attention disconnected. The effects of attention on the appearances do not flow from the nature of attention. While they are explained by attention, they are not constituted by attention. For this reason it is possible to get these effects also without attention. And so we get the replicability claim. The phenomenal difference claim shows that there is also a phenomenal contribution that is more intimately connected to the nature of attention.

10.1 Replicability

The appearance view, in a sense, outsources phenomenal character. It thinks of consciousness as an encounter with an apparent world. It is the character of that apparent world that determines the appearance properties of an experiential episode. The subject’s mental life makes only a generic contribution to the phenomenal character contributed by appearance properties. Her experiencing is the same in all experiential episodes. What differs – to use Peacocke’s view of sensational properties as a foil – are the “(apparent) properties and relations” and those are “never purely properties and relations of the experience […] but are apparently properties and relations of other things.”

From this we get the following argument: any variation in appearance properties must be a variation in the properties and relations apparently encountered in experience. But then a variation in a subject’s mental life cannot be necessary for any specific variation in appearance properties. For those appearance properties are encountered by the subject and not properties of the subject’s mental life. But variations in attention are variation in the subject’s mental life. And so variations in attention cannot be necessary to any variation in appearance properties. And if they are not necessary then there are appearance replicas.

I will now elaborate on this argument. The replicability claim follows from two highly plausible claims. One is a fairly minimal claim about the nature of appearance properties. And the other is a fairly minimal claim about the nature of attention. Let a distinctive aspect of a subject’s mental life be any mental property, process or event


of a subject that can vary independently of whether she is conscious and of which world she is in. So, being conscious is not a distinctive aspect of a subject’s mental life. But being tired or happy are a distinctive aspects of a subject’s mental life. The two plausible claims then are the following.

Worldly character of appearances There is no appearance property A such that a distinctive aspect of the subject’s mental life is necessary for the instantiation of A.

Mental character of attention Attention is a distinctive aspect of the subject’s mental life.

The worldly character of appearances and the mental character of attention together entail that there is no appearance property such that attention is necessary for the instantiation of that appearance property.

I will not say much about the mental character of attention. This claim certainly follows from the priority structure view defended in the first half of this book, which conceives of attention as a structuring of a subject’s mental life. But it also seems to follow from any reasonable view about the nature of attention. While one might disagree about much concerning attention, the claim that it is an aspect of a subject’s mental life is hard to disagree with. It would be very implausible to hold that the nature of attention consists in a (possible) aspect of the world that we may encounter in our experience.

Let us then consider the worldly character of appearances.

The worldly character of appearances is entailed by the possibility of what – following David Chalmers – I call phenomenal Eden.62 A subject’s phenomenal Eden is a scenario that is exactly how it appears to the subject.63 In phenomenal Eden there are no illusions or hallucinations. There is no difference between appearance and reality. It reveals a world of phenomenal qualities. In phenomenal Eden: if something looks some way then it is that way. And if it sounds some way then it is that way, too. In phenomenal Eden appearance properties are properties of parts of world. The subject’s experience simply reveals those properties.

Some philosophers believe that the actual world is like phenomenal Eden.

62 Chalmers (2006). Chalmers constructs Edenic worlds in terms of representational content. The way I use the notion here, thus, is slightly different from his and generalizes it from its application to appearance intentionalism to the appearance view. Given Chalmers fairly inclusive take on the intentionalist position the notions, though, are so close that it seems justified to piggy-back on Chalmers’ terminology. 63 Note that we should not think of these Edenic scenarios as metaphysically possible worlds: the way the world appears in some experiences might be contradictory. In the waterfall illusion, for example, one might say that something looks to be moving and at the same time looks still (see Crane 1988, Pautz 2008). In order to accommodate this option Edenic scenarios can be constructed from pointwise Edenic fragments: there is an Edenic world fragment corresponding to each consistent appearance property (i.e. one for looking moving and one for looking still), but the scenario need not compose a complete and consistent world.


Consider a relational view of experience, according to which the “qualitative character of experience is constituted by the qualitative character of the scene perceived,”64 or on which perceptual consciousness “confronts us with what is there.”65 If appearance properties are properties of the environment, then the have a worldly character. Distinctive aspects of the subject’s mental life are not necessary for their instantiation.

Consider also the intentionalist view endorsed by Michael Tye (2009, p. 119) on which (in the absence of illusion and hallucination) “[t]he phenomenal character of an experience … is out there in the world.” On this view all phenomenal properties (including appearance properties) are properties of the environment. They are represented in our experience. No distinctive aspect of the subject’s mental life is necessary for their instantiation. She just needs to represent the environmental properties.

In order to establish the worldly character of appearances we do not need to commit to these specific views. We only need the much weaker claim that phenomenal Eden is possible.66 If phenomenal Eden is possible, then things could be as they appear, and so no distinctive aspect of the subject’s mental life is necessary for the instantiation of any appearance property (since in Eden appearance properties are environmental properties).

One might object that some appearance properties could be partly constituted by modes of presentation of worldly properties. These would constitute a subject’s subjective take on the world, and are not ways the world could be, and so they would not have a worldly character.

In response, I believe that it is plausible to think that modes of presentation are properties of the world and not properties of the subject. Consider a penny that appears elliptical. The elliptical appearance of a penny from my vantage point does not depend my mental life. It is an objective, though relational, feature of the penny. As Mark Johnston puts it: “[y]ou could have accessed the same or similar modes of presentation …, if you had been situated in my viewing position.”67 Like Johnston, I believe that this generalizes. Modes of presentation are “all there on the side of the things themselves.”68 But even if modes of presentation were not objective, it is not clear that we need them in order to characterize appearance properties. It is plausible that appearance properties can be characterized purely in terms of the experienced properties (a Russellian content). Specifically, it is plausible that for each Fregean content (composed of modes of presentation) there is a phenomenally matching

64 Campbell 2002, p. 114f. 65 Travis op. cit. 66 Chalmers 2006 provides a provisional defense of this possiblity. 67 ibid. 68 Johnson 2007, p. 253.


Russellian Edenic content.69 And those Russellian contents are objective and not dependent on the subject’s mental life.

So, to sum up the argument: if appearance properties are ways the world appears to the subject in her experience, then variations in the subject’s mental life cannot be essential to appearance properties. The appearance properties are “out there”, “all on the side of the things themselves”.

10.2 Difference

Let me then move to the second part of the replication argument, the difference claim. According to the difference claim, there is (at least sometimes) a phenomenal difference between an attention episode e and its appearance replicas eA.

I find that almost everyone considers the difference claim to be intuitively obvious. There is an obvious phenomenal difference between, say, focusing your visual attention on some small detail, and diffuse attention over the scene as a whole. This difference remains even if we suppose that the world appears the same in both scenarios. The relevant phenomenal difference simply doesn’t seem to amount to a difference in the apparent world a subject encounters in her phenomenal experience. That there is a phenomenal contrast between e and eA in such cases, in my view, is at least as obvious as the claim that there is a phenomenal contrast between seeing pine trees before learning to recognize them vs. seeing pine trees after learning to recognize them, between “seeing stars” (after being hit on the head) vs. seeing (actual) stars, or between experiencing actively moving your head (or arms) vs. experiencing your head (or arms) being passively moved.70 Those who trust the phenomenal contrast method in its verdict that there is a phenomenal difference between the relevant scenarios in cases like these (whether or not they share the relevant author’s explanation of that phenomenal difference) should also accept that there is a phenomenal difference between e and eA.

In the rest of this section, I offer three further considerations in favor of the difference claim. First, an explanation for why that claim is intuitive. Second, two negative arguments to dispel reasons for skepticism. And third, one positive, epistemic, argument.

First, why does the difference claim seem so intuitive?

69 See Chalmers (2006), as well as Chalmers (2013) for plausible response to an important objection by Susanna Siegel (2013). Further, apparent counterexamples to the Russellian content view in terms of ambigious figures (duck/rabbit, or square/regular diamond) are presented by Peacocke 1983 and Macpherson 2006. Plausible responses on behalf of a defender of Russellian content can e.g. be found in Orlandi 2011. Note that Orlandi is one of the many people who appeal to differences in attention in order to explain the phenomenal differences between, say, the duck experience and the rabbit experience without showing that those attentional differences can be explained by a Russellian representationalist. I agree with Orlandi and others that Russellian representationalism plus attention can account for ambiguous figures. Russellian representationalism cannot account for the phenomenal contribition of attention, though. 70 Both of these examples are discussed in Siegel 2010. For a review of the literature on the agentive experiences of the last example see Bayne 2008a.


It is because attention concerns not how the world seems, but a subject’s take on the world. When our subject focuses her auditory attention on the saxophone she takes a specific auditory stance towards the music. And when the focuses her auditory attention on the piano she takes a different auditory stance. What it is like to take one of the two different stances differs from the other even if we compensate for any effect a difference in stance may make to the way the music sounds. The same for visual attention to the Gabor patches. The way our subject is visually oriented toward the scene by focusing on some aspects and not others is independent of the apparent composition of the scene she encounters.

To think that an attention episode is phenomenally indistinguishable from all its appearance replicas is to hold that the stance a subject takes in her experience is phenomenally neutral. It would mean that we could outsource also our own take on the apparent world we encounter in consciousness. In Chapter 13, I will argue that the subject’s attentional stance could not possibly be outsourced: any subjective perspective must include a contribution by the subject’s own stance. For this reason, I argue there, a distinctive phenomenal contribution of attention is essential to phenomenal consciousness. What makes the difference claim thus intuitive is that we cannot also outsource our own perspective or take on the apparent world around us.

Second, why might someone resist the difference claim?

Consider the transparency of experience. Proponents of the appearance view are often impressed by the observation that in attempting to focus attention on the qualities of our experience we just end up focusing on the properties and relations we seem to experience. Gilbert Harman famously expressed this observation regarding the so-called ‘transparency’ of experience as follows.

Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict that you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree, including relational features of the tree “from here.”71

This observation might well be correct. But which features of the presented tree you focus attention on itself might make a phenomenal difference which is not a difference in the (apparent) features of the tree or in how it looks “from here”. The transparency observation simply does not support the appearance view precisely when it comes to the phenomenal contribution of attention. Transparency arguments thus do not undermine the difference claim.

Consider also our epistemic access to experience. Some proponents of the appearance view argue that if there were phenomenal properties beyond appearance properties then we could not have access to those properties. Alex Byrne (2001, p. 211), for example, suggests the following.

71 Harman 1990, p. 39.


Suppose that … the world seems exactly the same to the subject throughout [experiences] e and e*. Concentrating on the world as it currently appears to her and recalling the way the world appeared a moment before, she will not notice a change in phenomenal character, because she has no basis for noticing one. Any other information she might extract from her experiences, if it is not information about the way the world appeared or appears, is not relevant. So, if the subject does notice a change in phenomenal character, e and e* are not the same in content.72

But suppose that e is an experience with diffuse attention and then suddenly the subject’s attention become focused (maybe she took some Ritalin). Now she is in e*. Suppose that we compensate for any effects on the appearances so that e and e* are appearance replicas of each other and “the world seems exactly the same to the subject.” I take it, against Byrne, as obvious that our subject would notice a difference between e and e*. The basis of noticing a difference is that she is doing something different now. First, she did not listen to (or “concentrate on”) the melody of the saxophone, now she is listening to (or “concentrating on”) its melody. We do have epistemic access to the way our attention is distributed (I will return to that access in Chapter 11).

Third, I offer the following epistemic argument for the difference claim.

It is based on two highly plausible claims. Here is the first.

Discriminability There is some attention episode e and its appearance replica eA such that subject immediately and without (external) observation is in a position to discriminate (or notice a difference) between undergoing episode e and undergoing episode eA.73

When considering the discriminability claim we have to consider somewhat idealized introspective capacities. The subject might not actually always know whether she is in e or in eA: she might be too tired or have some other form of discriminatory impairment. But this idealizing does not distract from the main force of the discriminability claim that appeals to what the subject is in a position to discriminate.74 Taken in this way, I consider the discriminability claim to be argumentative rock bottom.

We need a second claim to link a subject’s discriminatory powers to differences in phenomenal character. The required, and also highly plausible, principle is the following claim.

72 Byrne here defends intentionalism. It is not entirely clear that he defends the appearance view. 73 I take discriminating between x and y or noticing a difference between x and y to imply coming to know that there is a difference between x and y. See Williamson 2000, p. 33-41, and the reference in Byrne 2001, p. 209. 74 The reader might notice a certain similarity to an argument for intentionalism provided by Byrne (2001). Evidently, I do not accept his form of intentionalism.


Discriminability-Phenomenology (DP) Link If a subject immediately and without (external) observation is in a position to discriminate (or notice a difference) between undergoing e and undergoing e*, then e is phenomenally different from e*.

The discriminability claim and the DP-Link together entail the difference claim.

The DP-Link is very plausible. How could you notice a difference between undergoing one mental episode and undergoing another, if it were not for a difference how those states feel like? There would seem to be no basis for you to notice a difference. Phenomenal episodes seem to be exactly those episodes to which the subject has a special epistemic access, so that just by undergoing those episodes a subject is in position to know that she is undergoing them.

Several philosophers have recently defended principles that are genuinely stronger than the DP-link. Consider a knowledge-phenomenology (KP) principle such as the following.

A subject immediately and without (external) observation is in a position to know that she is undergoing a mental episode e, only if e is a phenomenal episode.

David Pitt (2004), for example, argues that the only explanation of why subjects are able to know immediately and without observation which thought they are currently thinking is that there is a phenomenal difference between thinking a thought with one content rather than thinking one with a different content. And Declan Smithies (2012) has argued that only something like the KP-principle can explain why a person with “hyper-blindsight … [who] has a reliable mechanism that is disposed to generate higher-order beliefs about phenomenally unconscious visual states without reliance on observation, inference, or testimony”75 would not know that she is in those unconscious states (since her higher order beliefs would lack justification). When restricted to non-dispositional, occurrent mental episodes a KP-Link thus is very appealing.76

The DP-link principle is genuinely weaker than the KP-link principle. A subject might be in a position to know that she is undergoing a certain mental episode without being able to discriminate it from another episode. If for some mental episode e knowledge that you are undergoing e, comes – as it were – for free, then you could know that you are undergoing e without being able to notice a difference between undergoing e and undergoing a distinct episode e*. The DP-Link claim like the KP-Link claim would explain the inability of hyper-blindsighters to come to know that they undergoing unconscious perceptual episodes, since those hyper-blindsighters (while having reliable beliefs about those perceptual episodes) would not notice a

75 Smithies 2012, p. 272 76 On this view, self-knowledge of dispositional states like the belief that p can be explained by reference to their constitutive connection to occurrent mental episodes like the conscious judgment that p (see Smithies 2012).


difference between undergoing one such episode rather than another. At the same time, NP-Link does not imply that phenomenology lies at the basis of every form of self-knowledge.

Those who accept the discriminability claim, and also accept the plausible DP-link thus also have a positive argument for the difference claim.

10.3 Summary

Let me sum up. I have argued for the replicability claim and I have argued for the difference claim. We have thus established that attention episodes are phenomenally different from episodes that match them in appearances. This completes the replication argument. We should reject the appearance view. It does not capture all phenomenal contributions of attention.

The argument admittedly at some points has been somewhat intricate and technical. It is thus worth repeating the simple diagnosis of why there is always an appearance replica to every attention episode: the effects of attention on appearances do not reflect the nature of attention. What attention is, as I have argued in the first part of this book, is a prioritizing of some mental states over others. While priority structures may correlate with certain appearances, they are not constituted by such appearances. A certain distribution of attention thus never entails – as part of what it is – any specific appearances. A proponent of the appearance view would thus have to posit a brute modal connection between a certain distribution of attention and certain appearances. But there is no reason to believe that there are any such brute modal connections. A successful theory of how attention manifests in conscious experience should reflect the nature of attention. The next chapters will provide such a theory.


Appendix: Did Husserl make a similar argument?

It may be worth mentioning a precursor of the argument of this chapter. In Edmund Husserl’s work we find, to my knowledge, the first clear statement of the view that the contributions of attention to consciousness go beyond its effects on the appearances. In the first volume of Ideas77 in a section entitled ‘The Noetic and Noematic Aspects of Attentional Changes’ Husserl presents a thought experiment that, it seems, aims to establish that changes in the distribution of attention are not exhausted by the effect of attention on the content (what he calls the Noema) of perceptual consciousness. This – extremely brief – argument thus seems to have the same conclusion (and indeed somewhat of the same shape) as the replication argument. While Husserl believes that changes in attention “affect [the conscious episode’s] noema” (p. 224), and “modify its mode of appearance.” (ibid.), he at the same time suggests that such effects of attention on the appearances do not exhaust the contributions of attention to a conscious episode (as the appearance view would claim), but “exhibit alterations of the whole mental process with respect to both its noetic [mode of intentional directedness] and noematic sides” (italics in original, p. 223).

Husserl considers fixing a specific episode of consciousness both with respect to the content of that episode as well as with respect to our consciousness of that content. He says

Let us take a physical thing or a physical process of which there is perceptual consciousness, and fix it, in idea, with respect to its noematic contents, while we take the whole concrete consciousness of physical thing [sic!] or the physical process throughout the corresponding section of phenomenological duration, and fix it with respect to its full immanental essence.

He then goes on to consider changes of attention within that conscious episode:

the idea in question involves fixing of the attentional ray as wandering in a determinate manner <throughout that section of phenomenological duration> …

Husserl here seems to work with something like the spotlight metaphor of attention; he says that we metaphorically may speak of the Ego’s “mental regard” or “ray of its regard”.78 The crucial step, then, is his suggestion that

[i]t is the evident that modes of alteration ... are possible which we designate by the name “alterations merely in the distributions of

77 Husserl 1983 [1913] 78 ibid. p. 222.

Appendix: Did Husserl make a similar argument? 189

attention and its modes” [where] the noematic composition of the mental process remains the same …

So, the suggestion seems to be that changes in the distribution of attention are possible which do not affect the contents of the relevant conscious episode. Presumably in order to give content to his suggestion Husserl then goes on to give examples of the various ways in which the content of the relevant conscious episode could stay the same. He says that the nomatic composition

… remains the same in so far as one can always say that the same objectivity is continuously characterized as being there in person, presenting itself in the same modes of appearance, in the same orientations, with the same appearing traits; that in the modes of indeterminate indication, of making non-intuitively co-present, and so forth, there is a consciousness of such and such a stock of content belonging to it …the alteration consists merely of the fact that, in one of the compared cases, one moment of the object is “favoured” and, in another case, another; or of the fact that one and the same moment is “paid attention to primarily” at one time and only secondarily at another time, it “just barely noticed still,” if not indeed “completely unnoticed” though still appearing. Those are indeed different modes belonging specifically to attention as such.

Husserl’s conclusion then seems to be that while attention does affect the contents of consciousness, it will not be possible to fully characterize the contribution of attention to conscious experience without appeal to modes of consciousness “belonging specifically to attention as such.” These modes, further, appear to allow for something like gradations: attentionally favoring an object, attending to it secondarily, barely, or in a “completely unnoticed” manner. Being within focal or central attention is only one side of how attention affects consciousness. The “completely unnoticed”, for Husserl, is a mode of conscious attention as well. We will encounter a suggestion of this type again in the next chapter.

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