Introduction
Structure in Mind
1
Attention regained
It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention. Attention is like
water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you
hope that it flows the right way.… I use framing the way a movie
director or a cinematographer would. If I lean my face close in to
someone’s … it’s like a closeup. All their attention is on my face, and
their pockets, especially the ones on their lower body, are out of the
frame. Or if I want to move their attention off their jacket pocket, I can
say, ‘You had a wallet in your back pocket—is it still there?’ Now
their focus is on their back pocket … and I’m free to steal from their
jacket.1
This is how Apollo Robbins, self-described “gentleman thief” and public speaker,
describes his technique. And it is true: moviemakers and magicians do it too. Like
pickpockets, they are masterful in how they play with our ever-changing focus of
attention. They steal it. Divert it. Distract. Force us to focus.
Petty tricksters and light entertainment, of course, are only the beginning. Attention
framing and misdirection pervade the very big and very real world. Spin-doctors
work hard to ensure that some aspects of reality are shoved into our faces, while
others are swept under the rug. Our world is attentionally engineered. Quite literally
so. Channels for attention are carved into the fabric of our homes, the news we watch,
the social media we consume, and into the urban landscapes around us. By creating
channels of attention, agendas are generated and policies are framed.
Similar techniques are used in the world of business. In a life full of distractions
companies skillfully use the “choreography” of attention to get us to focus on where it
suits them. Flickering billboards crowd cities and roadsides. Windows pop up on
computer screens. Messages arrive on smartphones. They are designed to capture
attention. Other techniques play with our motivation. They use our fluctuating desires
and goals to get us to focus on that one buyable item rather than the myriads of others
1
Greene 2013.
we could – then and there – have concentrated on instead (why don’t you get some
chewing gum when you are waiting at the cashier anyway?). Indeed some argue that
in the contemporary economy attention “has become a more valuable currency than
the kind you store in bank accounts” and so “understanding and managing attention is
now the single most determinate of business success.”2
Attention shapes how our lives are going. Personally and collectively. This is why
there are industries dedicated to its manipulation. We should not leave the
understanding of attention to those who manipulate it. What is attention? How is
related to how our lives are going? How is attention related to other aspects of an
agent’s life: her preferences, actions, goals, experience, knowledge, and belief?
It is hard to find a place for attention. On the one hand, the idea that attention is a
piece of neuronal machinery can seem attractive. The much discussed attention
deficits can be fixed, some think, by medicating the child – oiling the brain machine
with Ritalin and the like.3 Few would think that knowledge deficits can be fixed in the
same way. On the other hand, attention can seem to be one of the most subjective,
intimate aspects of our personal experience, and something that can be skillfully
engaged. David Foster Wallace, in a widely publicized commencement speech, for
example recommends: “if you really learned how … to pay attention, then you will
know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a
crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred,
on fire with the same force that lit the stars: compassion, love, fellowship, the
subsurface unity of all things.”4
Can we provide an account of attention that integrates what we know from its
scientific study with its central role in shaping agency and experience?
This book provides such an account. Its main goal is to argue that attention is central
to the structure of the mind. Attention is not another element of the mind – like
perception, cognition, emotion, motivation or intention. Attention is not a separate
box or capacity in the organization of mind. Attention is constituted by a structure of
the mind that contains elements of the mind as parts. Attentional structure is the
organizing of the mind into parts that are central or prioritized and those that are
peripheral. Depending on what kind of state is currently the center of our mind, there
can be perceptual attention, intellectual attention, emotional attention, desire-like
attention and attentive basketball playing. Attention thus crosscuts the usual divisions
of the mind: between the cognitive and the conative, the perceptual and the
intellectual, the active and the passive, the epistemic and the practical. Attention can
be any of these things. The priority structure of the mind is orthogonal to those other
partitions of the mental. Because attention is a structure of the mind, attention is both
2
Davenport and Beck 2001, p. 3.
See the US National Institute of Mental Health Guidelines (NIMH 2014). A recent meta-analyses of more than 9000 (sic!)
studies estimates a worldwide prevalence of ADHD of 5 % in childhood – with strong variations of estimates depending both on
world-region and methodology (Polanczyk et al. 2007). Adult prevalence (about which much less is known) is estimated to be
around 2.5 % (Simon et al. 2009). Both studies are cited in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
(American Psychiatric Association 2013).
4
Wallace 2009, p. 92f.
3
basic and dependent: it is a structure that is basic, but a mental life needs to fill that
structure. If one looks at specific elements of the mind, one will never find the
attention; attention tends to evaporate on a close look; nothing but one mental state
after the other. Attention is about how the parts of the mind are related.
This account of the nature of attention, and the corresponding account of how
attention structures conscious experience, helps to show why attention matters. The
struggle over attention is a struggle over mental territory. What gets into our
“universe” 5? What gets a central place in it, and what is a mere side note? To
manipulate attention is to manipulate how a mental life is put together.
2
The nature of attention, and how it shapes consciousness
The book addresses two main questions.
The first question is: What is attention?
This is a question about the nature of attention. What is the phenomenon that Apollo
Robbins and the advertisement companies try to manipulate, that a child with ADHD
has problems in sustaining, and the capacity for which meditation is supposed to
enhance? Indeed, is there a single phenomenon or just a complex of syndromes? Is
attention a brain mechanism, a mental resource or something else? Are there different
forms of attention, and how – if at all – are they unified?
My brief answer to the first question is this: attention is a unified phenomenon, but
not a unified mechanism or brain property. Attention is a unified subject level
phenomenon (Chapter 1). It is a mental activity that we can – but need not – perform
intentionally (Chapter 2). Activities in the relevant sense are on-going mental
processes (distinguished from mental states) that involve subject level guidance
(Chapter 3). Specifically, attention is the activity of prioritizing some parts of our
minds over others. It consists in regulating, what I call, priority structures. These are
structures of mental states. In terms of priority structures we can provide a unified
account of all forms of attention (Chapter 4). I argue that priority structures play a
crucial role for organize, integrate, and coordinate the various parts of a subject’s life
(Chapter 5). The regulation of priority structures is guided by psychological salience.
Guidance by psychological salience, I argue, is subject level guidance (Chapter 6).
And can be controlled by the subject’s executive control system: her goals, plans, and
intentions. When it is controlled like this, a particular stretch of attention can be a
paradigmatic intentional action (Chapter 7).
The second question is: What is the relationship between attention and
consciousness?
5
We can thus agree with James 1890/1950 (p. 424) who says that “each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to
things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”
What is the subjective side of attention? What is it like to be distracted, and what is it
like to keep and control the focus? The difference attention makes to consciousness is
often subtle: when the pickpocket shifts your focus to the back pocket, you might not
notice that shift. But nevertheless your experience is different afterwards. What is the
phenomenological difference made by a difference in the focus of attention? Is there
unified type of experience that is characteristic of attention, or is there just a complex
of different phenomenological effects of attention? And what, in general, is the
connection between attention and consciousness?
My brief answer to the second question is: the effects of attention on consciousness
cannot be deflated. While attention sometimes simply makes things visible and
affects conscious appearances, the phenomenal contribution of attention goes beyond
those effects. The phenomenal character of a mental episode is therefore not
exhausted by how things appear to the subject (Chapter 8). The structural nature of
attention, I argue, is reflected in the structure of consciousness. Attentional structure
manifests in consciousness as the differentiation of the phenomenal field into center
and periphery. There is phenomenal structure in addition to phenomenal qualities
(Chapter 9). The guidance of attention also has a phenomenal manifestation.
Psychological salience, I argue, shows why the stream of consciousness is
experienced as flowing (Chapter 10). And the active, intentional, guidance of
attention provides an answer to how we know about attention “from the inside”
(Chapter 11). While the empirical evidence on the relationship between attention and
consciousness remains inconclusive (Chapter 12), I argue that the phenomenal
structure of consciousness is essential to it. Without structure consciousness would
not provide us with a unified, subjective perspective. Consciousness, on the resulting
view, is an engaged and active perspective (Chapter 13).
On the way to answering those two main questions about the nature of attention and
about its relationship to consciousness, we will encountered many other topics that
have been at the center of many philosophical discussions – some ancient and
traditional, and some of intense current controversy. And they are questions whose
answer, I will argue, is fundamentally transformed once we have a proper grasp on
what attention is and how it shapes consciousness.
3
Attention and philosophy
The book is a work of philosophy. It approaches its goals by looking at the territory
through a philosophical lens and by drawing on philosophical tools. The book is
intended for philosophers as well as for empirical researchers interested in
foundational questions. It is written with the intent that both groups can learn
something from it. It aims, on the one hand, to show that the study of attention is of
intrinsic philosophical interest and of crucial significance for central topics in the
philosophy of mind. On the other hand, it also shows how the current empirical
investigation of attention is fruitfully complemented with work at the level of
generality that a philosophical analysis provides.
In stark contrast to the intensity of public interest in attention and to the richness and
detail of its scientific investigation, professional philosophers for a long time have
almost completely neglected attention as a topic of study. While philosophers had –
for decades – worked on belief and desire, knowledge, memory, intention, plans,
action and consciousness, there had been comparably little work on what attention is,
its role, its connections to other aspects of mentality, or its normative significance.
Where PsycNET, the main database for publications in psychology, contained about
as many entries for “attention” as for “consciousness” Philosopher’s Index, the
equivalent for publications in philosophy, had only three percent of the number of
“consciousness” entries for “attention”.6
This situation is striking. At least in hindsight. Outside Western academia many think
of attention as a “philosophical” topic;7 it is a topic that was much discussed in the
rich Eastern philosophical traditions; it was an important topic for early modern
philosophers such as Malebranche and Thomas Reid; and it never went out of fashion
in the phenomenological school of thought tracing its roots to Husserl. So, why did
philosophers in so much of Western academia begin to neglect attention? Were they
justified in doing so?
Here is a first potential reason for the philosophical neglect of attention. It is the
thought that there are no specifically philosophical problems about attention. While
we might not currently know all the details about attention and lack a fully
comprehensive theory, we have a good grip on how to investigate it by using the
standard methodologies of psychology and the neurosciences.
The image of attention as in itself philosophically boring was no doubt facilitated by
the strong influence of information processing tools on empirical attention research.
Isn’t attention – after all – just a limitation in processing capacity? Information
theoretic tools came to be central in psychology in the 1940s and 1950s. The
psychologists who pioneered these new methods, like Donald Broadbent or Anne
Treisman, approached the human mind with the attitude of engineers. They asked:
how does it work – and how can we improve it? Other pioneers of cognitive science,
like Noam Chomsky, engaged with philosophers and with philosophical questions.
By contrast, the pioneers of modern attention research, whose approaches shaped the
field for almost half a century, were explicitly interested in questions of practical
application (how many instruments can a pilot reliably monitor?) and they were
explicitly un-interested in “philosophical” questions (is the mind a blank slate? How
many mental faculties are there?). And they had a clear picture of attention. Attention,
according to them, is a filter in the information-processing machine that is our mind.
And once one thinks of attention as such a filter, or relatedly as a set of mechanisms
by which pieces of information get channeled, suppressed or exported, a resource, or
as a limitation in processing capacity, it is hard to find anything that is
philosophically puzzling about it. Broadbent’s or Treisman’s early models might have
6
The situation has started to change, and the philosophical investigation of attention – as the discussions in this book will
demonstrate – is becoming a flourishing field.
7
Amazon.com classifies much of the literature on mindfulness as philosophy (Among the 100 top sales in “philosophy” in early
2014 we find six books on mindfulness training; accessed February 7th, 2014).
to be refined to integrate them with what we now know about parallel processing, or
they might have to be replaced by more specific neuronal models; but these are all
challenges and tasks for scientific psychology and neuroscience; they do not pose
problems a philosopher would be in an appropriate position to answer. According to
the general picture, attention is just an aspect of cognitive processing.
One of my goals in this book is to remind us that what we have here really is no more
than that: a vague general picture. I show that once we scrutinize that picture,
attention does start to pose interesting philosophical questions and it poses challenges
to some of the standard methodologies of psychology and the neurosciences. Once we
look closer at the science of attention we recognize that the scientific theories of
attention do not manage to identify attention with any specific form of information
processing or neuronal mechanism (and indeed hardly ever aim at such an
identification). The science of attention mostly deals with the effects of attention on
information processing and on psycho-physical response, as well as with the neuronal
correlates of attention. It leaves open what attention is, i.e. what it is that has these
effects and is underpinned by these neuronal correlates.
Chapter 1 argues that we should treat attention like many philosophers have treated
thought, desire, volition or intention. Attention is a subject level mental activity. It is
unlikely that a reductive identification of attention with a specific brain process or
property will succeed. There are substantial subject level facts about attention. These
need to be integrated with what we know about attentional information processing,
but they cannot be identified with such processing. Further, and in this sense different
from thought and desire, I will show that attention is in an important sense holistic –
it consists of a complex structure, organized both at a time and over time out of other
mental states (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). For this reason, attention cannot be
located as a particular node in a functional analysis of the mind, and thus escapes a
standard model of explanation in the cognitive sciences.8 The capacity for attention is
not one that we will find by analyzing the capacities of the mind into an organization
of simpler and simpler sub-capacities. What I say about my first aim – to investigate
the nature of attention – thus will show that the “attention is easy” reason for the
philosophical neglect of attention is not a good one.
There might be a second reason for the long time neglect of attention in philosophical
academia. It derives from the fact that one of the philosophically most interesting
aspects of attention – i.e. how it affects the structures of consciousness – for a long
time fell outside the view of the most central philosophical discussions. Philosophical
discussions of consciousness were focused on understanding the connections between
consciousness and the material world (the mind-body problem). They were not
focused on getting the details of the structure of consciousness right.
But questions about the structure of consciousness have resumed their central position
in the philosophical debate. They have re-entered partly from within the debate of the
mind-body problem. Consider discussions of the relationship between consciousness
and intentionality. Many philosophers have been (and still are) interested in the
8
See Cummins 1983, 2000.
interface of consciousness and intentionality because they believe that it holds the key
to a successful naturalization of consciousness and hence a solution to the mindproblem. But at the center of this interface lie questions about the structure of
consciousness: are all conscious states intentional states, i.e. are they in some special,
interesting sense directed at or about something? Is the phenomenal character of
conscious experience (what it is like for you) exhausted by its intentional content (or
intentional content plus the mode with which that content is presented)? To answer
these questions, first and foremost, is to understand something about the structure of
consciousness – and hence is independent of ulterior motives concerning
naturalization.
The second big goal of the book is to show that considerations about attention are
highly relevant for answering questions about the structure of consciousness. This
second goal – to some degree at least – is independent of what we want to say about
the nature of attention. That attention shapes consciousness is something that even a
proponent of the view of attention as cognitive mechanism can accept; a cognitive
mechanism after all might affect (or underlie) our experience. Further, that there are
effects of attention on consciousness is fairly uncontroversial. What it is like to listen
to a piece of music is clearly affected by whether you focus attention on the sounds of
the piano or on the melody being played by the saxophone. The question is what to
make of these effects. I will show that in order to accommodate them we have to go
beyond the intentional structure of consciousness. We have to take seriously the idea
that certain elements are more central and others more peripheral in the field of
consciousness (Chapter 9). Consciousness has centrality structure in addition to
intentional structure. Indeed, I will argue, this structure is essential to consciousness
(Chapter 13). Without attentional structure consciousness would not be the unified,
subjective perspective it is.
Considerations about attention also affect other important topics about the structure of
consciousness. Consider the unity of consciousness. Are the conscious occurrences in
a single subject especially unified? I will argue that the centrality relations between
the parts of our field of consciousness serve as a form of glue that connects those
parts into a single unified whole (Chapter 13). Attention is at least one important
aspect of what unifies conscious experience. Finally, consider the question of whether
we can be or become aware of our own conscious experiences. According to some
advocates of the so-called transparency of consciousness we are never aware of our
own experiences but only aware of the world through our experiences of it.9
According to other views about consciousness, by contrast, every conscious state
necessarily is such that its subject is aware of being in it.10 I will show that by appeal
to attention we can defend a more subtle position: we are aware of a conscious state
when we actively bring it to the attentional center of consciousness. In contrast to
some versions of the transparency thesis, we thus can be aware of conscious states
(Chapter 11). But we also do not need to claim that every conscious experience brings
with it self-awareness.
9
See e.g. Harman 1990 or Byrne 2001.
See e.g. Kriegel 2009.
10
4
Methods
I said that this is a book of philosophy, that it asks philosophical questions and uses
philosophical tools. What do I mean by that? What is my philosophical method?
Generally, I agree with those who are skeptical of the existence of a specifically
philosophical method. We use many methods. Nevertheless, we can group the tools
of this book into roughly the following categories (in praxis the tools interact in often
complex ways).
First, there are scientific results in the psychology and neuroscience of attention (and
consciousness). A study of the nature of attention and the way its shapes
consciousness cannot proceed in independence of studies of attentional processing
and the psychophysical effects of attention. The science of attention is one of the
richest areas in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Philosophical work on
attention is fortunate to find itself in the middle of such riches. While, as I said, I will
argue that attention cannot be exhaustively understood on the level of neuronal or
sub-subject processing (Chapter 1), the nature of the processes that underpin attention
puts constraints on the kind of thing attention could be (see Chapters 2-7). The fact
that much of attentional processing consists in synchronized activity of a large variety
of functionally distinct brain areas, for example, is at least prima facie evidence
against identifying attention with a highly specific computational function that does
not require such large-scale neuronal integration (Chapter 1 and Chapter 4).
Similarly, the fact that attention often modulates early sensory processing can be used
in an argument against the idea that attention just is an agent’s selecting information
for higher level processing (Chapter 5). Understanding the various attentional
processes, what they have in common, and how they are operating is an essential part
of understanding attention.
The route from science to philosophy is not a one way street, though. While I
sometimes draw on science, at other times I will criticize common assumptions in the
science of attention (e.g. Chapter 1 argues – against widespread assumptions – that
attention is “real” but not a well-defined set of neuronal mechanisms). And finally,
sometimes I will take a stance in on-going scientific debates (e.g. in Chapter 5 I argue
against the popular view that the function of attention is to protect the organism from
information overflow; in Chapter 6 I take sides with those who hold that all attention
capture is contingent on the subject’s tasks, expectations and goals; and in Chapter 12
and 13 I suggest that attention is necessary but not sufficient for conscious
experience). My owl of Minerva, to use Hegel’s famous image, thus is going to fly in
broad daylight: I am going to work in middle of a lively on-going scientific and
philosophical project. Philosophers should neither be ignorant of the relevant science,
nor should they show false deference to what “the science says”. Especially in
cognitive science most results are (at least somewhat) controversial within the
scientific community, and one actually has to get quite deeply into the science to take
an informed stance on a topic of philosophical relevance. There are risks to this sort
of work (such as being undermined by new scientific findings, but also being
disappointing to both philosophers and scientists). But there are also benefits (such as
understanding more about a complex domain). How the relevant risks and benefits
should be balanced has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
There is a second tool, which will be used in tandem with the first. This tool is our
ordinary understanding of attention (and consciousness). Given the central role of
attention in our understanding of mentality (see Chapter 1) we can draw on this
understanding in order to provide us with a first grip on the phenomenon. I will thus
sometimes appeal to ordinary judgments that make use of the concept of attention.
Insofar as these judgments are true, they will tell us something about attention.
Insofar as they are epistemically warranted, we can rely on them for answering
questions about attention. This much I take to be uncontroversial. And sometimes
fairly ordinary truths can tell us something important about attention. For example, if
some people are able to focus their attention on a painting for more than five minutes,
then attention must be something that is sometimes going on for more than an instant
(see Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). In addition, attending must be the kind of thing that
people are able to do (ibid.). Ordinary judgments about attention, the way I am using
them, are not sacrosanct. They might be false. The findings of a psychological study
might show that they are false. In this case, our theorizing should not rely on them.
My third tool is introspection on conscious experience (this tool, obviously, will be
used mostly in the second part of the book – the one that deals with attention and
consciousness). In many circumstances subjects reliably report aspects of the
phenomenal character of their own experience. We can accept the reliability of such
reports without assuming that phenomenal character is constituted by access to it, that
we have a special faculty of introspection, or indeed that there is any unified and
distinguished introspective method. We also are certainly not infallible at describing
our own experience, and at least generalizations about our own experience can be
highly contentious.11 Arguably introspection on consciousness is roughly as reliable
as perception of our immediate environment. We become unreliable if the
circumstances are not right: brief exposures, distraction, delays between observation
and report, drugs and sleep deprivation are the usual suspects. Under similar
circumstances introspective reports will be unreliable as well. Introspection, like other
methods, should be used cautiously and with an eye to when it is likely to be reliable,
and when it is likely to fail: it will, for example, be often easier to detect whether
there is some phenomenal difference between two scenarios than to say what the
difference is, and introspection will be a better guide to finding out about aspects of
consciousness than to finding out about mental processing, mental faculties, and the
like (see Chapters 8 and Chapter 9 for such uses of introspection).
In praxis, scientific results, ordinary understanding and introspection often interact in
complex ways and indeed cannot be separated. Many scientific results regarding
attention to some degree rely on our ordinary understanding and introspective report.
Ordinary understanding is both subtly influenced by popular science and often draws
on introspection of the first person case. And introspection often occurs in the context
of considering scientific stimuli and within the confines of ordinary understanding.
11
Schwitzgebel 2008. See Watzl and Wu 2012 for discussion, and some of the points of this paragraph.
5
Reading guide
The book is divided into thirteen chapters. Together they comprise a comprehensive
story about the structuring mind. It is a story that begins with the science of attention
and ends with the form of consciousness. The first part of the book is about the nature
of attention (Chapters 1-7). The second part is about the relationship between
attention and consciousness (Chapters 8-13).
As for any book, there are many ways to read the present one. The one intended by
the author is: begin at the beginning and end at the end. This to me was the most
natural presentation of the ideas. But, of course, there are other options. If you want
to get as quickly as possible to some of the main ideas of the book: read Chapter 4, 5
and 9. This should give you a decent overview of both the account of attention and of
how it shapes consciousness. Then explore the other chapters to get a sense of the
surrounding territory. If you are most interested in the nature of attention, and if your
approach to this topic has been the scientific study of attention, you might want to
start with Chapter 1 and then jump to Chapters 4-7. You can then return to reading
Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 to clarify some issues that may have been puzzling. If you
are most interested in the relationship between attention and consciousness, you may
start with Chapter 8. Then work towards Chapter 9, Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 (a
jump from Chapter 9 to Chapter 13 is also fairly natural), There will probably be
some things that will be difficult to understand without the background of the first
half of the book. But you will get some idea, and then can work backwards by reading
Chapter 4 and then Chapter 3. These alternative routes through the landscape of ideas
may intrinsically be as good as the route that goes from beginning to end. Books that
followed those traces could have been written. Because they don’t follow the route I
have pursued myself they may, though, lead to a more fragmented reading
experience.