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Attention
Edited by Sebastian Watzl (University of Oslo)
About this topic
| Summary | Attention is a central aspect of the mind. Like for other aspects of the mind, philosophers disagree on how to precisely characterize that aspect. Very generally speaking, attention concerns the current selective direction of the mind. Philosophy studies, for example: (a) The nature of attention. What exactly is attention? How are the various theories of attention in psychology and the neurosciences related to metaphysical nature of attention? (b) The explanatory role of attention. What is metaphysical or explanatory relationship between attention and other philosophically interesting aspects of our lives, such as consciousness, demonstrative reference, salience, agency and intentional action, mindfulness, or emotion, (c) The epistemological, aesthetic, ethical and political role of attention. What is the role of attention in the acquisition and exchange of knowledge, for rationality, or epistemic justification? Are certain forms of attention important for aesthetic appreciation? Does ethical virtue require a certain distribution of attention? Is there something problematic about the contemporary ‘attention economy’? |
| Key works | The treatment of attention in James 1890 is widely considered the classic in psychology. One of the most cited neuroscience works is Posner & Petersen 1990. Monograph length treatments of attention in contemporary philosophy include Mole et al 2011, Watzl 2017 and Jennings 2020. For a specific focus on attention and consciousness, consider e.g. Block 2007, Prinz 2012, and Watzl 2017. For connections to demonstrative reference see Campbell 2002, Smithies 2011, and Dickie 2015. The role of attention for aesthetic experience is the topic of Nanay 2014. For attention and ethics see especially Murdoch 2009. For a popular treatment connecting attention with political issues see Williams 2018. Collections of works in the philosophy of attention and related issues are Mole et al 2011 and Archer 2022. |
| Introductions | Wu 2014 for a book length introduction. For a shorter overview see the updated version of Mole 2010 and the somewhat older articles Watzl 2011a and Watzl 2011b. |
Show all references
Related
Subcategories
The Nature of Attention (233)
Joint Attention (196)
Salience (246)
Attention and Action (193)
Attention, Misc (226)
See also
- Mental Actions (390)
- Perception (18,219 | 1,681)
- Science of Perception (1,986 | 531)
Contents
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Material to categorize
- Moral significance in artificial systems: if not consciousness, then what?François Kammerer - manuscriptMany think AIs would be morally significant if and only if they are phenomenally conscious in certain ways. This sentientist conception has been challenged, and alternative views emerged, on which agency, or the possession of desires, are sufficient for AI moral significance, even without consciousness. I argue that these alternative views face serious problems. They should probably be ruled out. I diagnose the mistake we made when formulating these views – a process I call “analytical drift”. I make methodological suggestions (...)
- Teaching contested philosophical articulations of attention through 'Ex Machina' and 'Her'.Michael Quinn - 2025 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 12 (2):112-130.Given the increased use of technology in and out of schools, and that such technologies deliberately attract and arrest the attention of their users, students learning about how attention is considered philosophically becomes significant. As such, attention, as a topic of philosophical interest at secondary school level, is a worthy philosophical inquiry for contemporary students. However, given that defining attention is contested, with significantly varying perspectives, teaching these articulations simultaneously can prove difficult. I argue that using film, by capitalising on (...)
- Teaching contested philosophical articulations of attention through 'Ex Machina' and 'Her'.Michael Quinn - 2025 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 12 (2):112-130.Given the increased use of technology in and out of schools, and that such technologies deliberately attract and arrest the attention of their users, students learning about how attention is considered philosophically becomes significant. As such, attention, as a topic of philosophical interest at secondary school level, is a worthy philosophical inquiry for contemporary students. However, given that defining attention is contested, with significantly varying perspectives, teaching these articulations simultaneously can prove difficult. I argue that using film, by capitalising on (...)
- Blameworthiness, slips, and the obvious need to pay enough attention: an internalist response to capacitarians.Thomas A. Yates - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-25.Capacitarianism says that an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if at the time of their conduct the agent lacked awareness of the wrong-making features of their conduct but had the capacity to be aware of those features. In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of so-called “slips” and use these objections to support a rival (“accessibility internalist”) view which requires awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivative blameworthiness. The objections (...)
Attention and Consciousness
- 意图场论：一种面向认知控制与人工意识结构的场模型.Xiangbin Zhao - manuscript本文提出“意图场”作为自显体系中的控制核心结构，区别于传统哲学对意向性的语义解释，转而将其刻画为一种具有方向性偏置、调谐驱动与状态切换能力的场结构控制域。 -/- 意图场被建模为： • 可进行经验维度切换的控制机制 • 可生成差分偏流的调谐驱动结构 • 具有节律性动力环的反馈—开边控制单元 • 具备多总线连接架构的跨域调控系统 -/- 该模型尝试为注意力机制、主动选择、认知控制、状态转换与人工意识架构提供结构解释，并在理论层面区分“重放型计算系统”与“具备意向性结构的自显系统”。 -/- 本文旨在与以下研究方向对话： -/- 预测加工（Predictive Processing）、主动推断（Active Inference）、神经振荡控制模型（Neural Oscillation Models）、认知状态机（Cognitive State Machine）、以及通用人工智能架构设计。.
- The Normative Profile of Knowledge by Acquaintance.Emad H. Atiq - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.Many philosophers have found it plausible that sense experience affords a species of non-propositional awareness and knowledge, what Russell (1911/12) termed “knowledge by acquaintance.” At the same time, a prominent strand in epistemology maintains that knowledge has a distinctive normative profile: it is embedded in justificatory relations, serves as a standard of success for underlying attitudes, grounds regulative norms, and qualifies as a cognitive achievement. Yet it remains unclear how a non-propositional state of acquaintance, formed without evidential basis and beyond (...)
- 知行合一与实证科学：第一人称方法在东方修行智慧中的现代重构.建平 李 - 2025 - Https://Doi.Org/10.17613/E1Emb-K3B96.摘要：基于“玄-弦”本体论框架与笔者20年纯个人禅修实证，本文系统重构东方修行 智慧中的“知行合一”本质，解构东方第一人称方法的核心特征，并实现其与现代实证科 学的深度融合。研究发现：王阳明“知行合一”的本质并非“后天认知与行动的统一”，而 是“先天真知（玄/良知）与自然真行（弦的本然运转）的同源一体”——“知”为玄的本 体属性（先天圆觉、至善良知），非后天分析认知；“行”为弦的自然流通状态（不受后 天私欲干扰的本然运转），非盲目行动的“执行力”。王阳明所言“至善”绝非后天道德层 面的善恶判断，而是玄的先天本体属性，后天善恶仅为“表德”，与先天本体无涉，这一 点可通过《传习录》原文“至善者，心之本体也”“天理即良知”得到精准印证。世俗化误 解将“知行合一”曲解为“想到即做到”或“刻意道德表演”，本质是混淆“后天小我认知”与 “先天本体真知”，背离王阳明“志止于至善”的核心宗旨。东方修行的第一人称方法（禅 修觉知、身心体验）核心特征为“本体性、关联性、验证性”——觉知是玄的本有功能， 通过后天身心状态（如紧张/清净）与先天玄的关联，可验证玄的回归程度（弦的波动 状态），其“空明、光明”的体验本质是玄的本体显化，非后天刻意追求的境界。本文以 纯个人实证为唯一依据，结合《大学》《传习录》《六祖坛经》等核心原典与现代神经 学、心理学实证研究，由笔者基于“玄-弦论”独家注解，构建“真知（玄）-真行（弦） 第一人称验证（身心感知）”的完整体系，驳斥伪知行合一的世俗误解，东方修行智慧 的现代学术化重构提供支撑。.
- 离相无住与般若观照：审美体验在禅修中的陷阱与超越之道.建平 李 - 2025 - Https://Doi.Org/10.17613/8Qct9-F5Y25.摘要：基于“玄-弦”本体论框架与笔者20年纯个人禅修实证，本文系统阐释禅修中审 美体验的执着陷阱与“离相无住”的般若超越之道。研究发现：禅修中的审美体验陷阱本 质是“执相住境”——表现为两种极端：其一“执空”，执着于空明、清凉等虚无化体验， 落入“顽空”；其二“执有”，执着于丹田、光影等具象化体验，困于“实有”。二者的共同 本质是“弦被后天执着束缚，陷入固定波动状态，无法自然流通，背离玄的本体属性”。 “离相无住”的核心内涵是“不执着于任何审美体验、境界状态，让弦脱离束缚，自然回 归玄的空明本体”——既不执空、不执有，亦不执中、不执清净、不执光明，凡有所执 皆为住相，凡有所住皆为弦的被困。超越陷阱的关键是“般若观照”：以玄-弦论为认知 工具，以“觉知执着、不随不拒”为实践方法，让弦的波动自然流通，最终显现“天地空 明”的真实自性（玄的本体）。本文以纯个人实证为唯一依据，结合《金刚经》《道德 经》《六祖坛经》等核心原典，由笔者基于“玄-弦论”独家注解，构建“识别陷阱-解构本 质-般若观照-回归本体”的完整超越体系，为禅修者突破审美执着陷阱提供学术化、可 操作的实践指南。.
- 基于阴阳五行理论的《黄帝内经》七情学说与现代神经内分泌机制关联性研究.建平 李 - 2025 - Https://Doi.Org/10.5281/Zenodo.18167685.摘要：本文旨在系统探讨《黄帝内经》中提出的七情（喜、怒、忧、思、悲、恐、 惊）学说，并基于阴阳五行理论，构建一个阐释情志活动影响人体健康的结构化 模型。论文首次明确提出七情内在的阴阳属性划分（如怒为阳、郁为阴）及其与 五脏（肝、心、脾、肺、肾）五行配属的对应关系，揭示了情志致病的动态病理 学路径。通过跨学科的文献分析与理论思辨，本研究将《黄帝内经》“恬淡虚无， 真气从之”的核心养生理念，与现代神经科学、内分泌学的“稳态平衡”概念进 行深度对话与互释。研究提出：“恬淡虚无”可理解为一种理想的中枢情绪稳态， 而“真气从之”则是以此为基础的自主神经平衡与内分泌功能的最佳运行状态。 本文论证了负面情志通过“扰动气机”这一中介环节，破坏阴阳平衡与五行生克， 进而引发特定脏腑的神经功能紊乱与激素分泌失调，最终导致疾病的现代科学内 涵。本研究不仅为传统中医情志理论提供了清晰的现代化阐释框架，也为现代心 身医学、心理生理学及压力管理等领域提供了源自东方智慧的独特理论贡献与实 践启示。.
- Introspection and Attention.Sebastian Watzl - 2026 - In Anna Giustina, The Routledge Handbook of Introspection. Routledge.The chapter begins with a tension regarding the role of attention in introspection. Starting from this tension, this chapter addresses number of issues. First, how much theory of attention should be involved in the discussion of attention and introspection? The chapter argues for a ‘theory-light’ approach that recommends constructing and reconstructing our theories of attention and introspection simultaneously. Second, what may be meant by ‘inward-directed’ or ‘introspective’ attention? The issue, it is argued, is surprisingly complex and depends on the nature (...)
- Bringing Context Into Focus: Parallels i n tHe Psychology of Attention and the Philosophy of Science.P. Sven Arvidson - 1998 - Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 29 (1):50-91.In the experimental psychology of attention, the phenomenon of attentional context has been underappreciated, while focal attention has taken center stage. Similar problems of context are found in certain realist arguments in.the philosophy of science. Through the lens of Aron Gurwitsch's phenomenology of attention, this paper discusses and evaluates the ways in which context is or is not brought into focus in experimental psychology and the philosophy of science. It concludes that recent developments in both realms show promise. Also some (...)
- Conversational salience and mutual attention.Christian De Leon - forthcoming - Mind and Language.The notion of conversational salience has proven useful for linguistic theorizing. Regardless of whether salience determines facts about meaning or merely aids in the communication of meanings, what is said is tied up with what is salient. I argue that the linguistic notion of salience is best understood in terms of the psychological notion of mutual attention. I discuss competing options and argue that only mutual attention suffices for establishing conversational salience in the way required by linguistic theory. The picture (...)
- Unification of Artificial Intelligence and Psychology: Volume Two - Consequences.Petros A. M. Gelepithis - 2024 - Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.This book —the second of a two-volume monograph— extends the unification of the foundational Volume 1 and draws its consequences. The monograph’s novel approach, is used to unify three pivotal phenomena of Cognitive Science and AI: knowledge, consciousness and emotions. The extended Theory of Noémon Systems expounds ramifications for cognitive science, philosophy of mind, mathematics, and the issue of the unity of science and art. It also discusses the similarities and differences between humans and AI/robot systems with respect to consciousness, (...)
- Attention, Not Self, by Jonardon Ganeri: New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. x + 392, £30 (hardback). [REVIEW]Christopher Mole - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):194-197.
- Blindsight, blandsight, and blingsight: unconscious perception, attention, and the epistemology of perception.Nicholas Silins - 2025 - Synthese 206 (1):1-25.There is a debate about whether attention is necessary for your conscious perceptual experiences to justify your beliefs about the external world. This debate has tended to be silent about what unconscious perception might do for our beliefs about the external world. There is also a debate about whether consciousness is necessary for your perception to justify beliefs about the external world. This debate has tended to be silent about what role attention might play in relation to unconscious perception. Here (...)
- (1 other version)The Subject of Consciousness.C. O. Evans - 2004 - Routledge.First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
- Attention, Consciousness and Inattentional Blindness.Alexander Wentzell - 2025 - Synthese 205 (221):1-25.This paper examines the connection between two distinct mental phenomena: attention and phenomenal consciousness. I identify two types of views. Equivalency views maintain that attention is both necessary and sufficient for phenomenal consciousness. Dissociationist views deny this. This paper presents a novel argument for dissociationism, by way of an empirical phenomenon called “inattentional blindness.” Inattentional blindness occurs when subjects engaged in an attention-demanding task fail to see an otherwise visible but task-irrelevant stimulus. Dialectically, IB is unanimously cited by proponents of (...)
- Pains You Can’t Ignore: Attentional Demand and the Problem of Intensity.Peter Burgess - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.Much of the focus on pain in the literature is the nature of pain’s badness. This paper addresses the relatively overlooked problem of intensity. I construe intensity as the degree to which pains demand involuntary attention, the degree to which a pain can’t be ignored. I use a global workspace framework to explain intensity, a view that is uniquely situated to explain the relevant empirical evidence. I construe intensity theoretically via a pain’s mode of representation, how pain is represented rather (...)
- The Normativity of Introspective Acquaintance Knowledge.Jacopo Pallagrosi - 2025 - Synthese 205 (152):1-25.Recent works in epistemology have defended the existence of acquaintance knowledge - a non-propositional form of knowledge constituted by the subject's acquaintance with particulars. A significant obstacle to the epistemic legitimacy of acquaintance knowledge lies in the fact that acquaintance is a descriptive psychological phenomenon, whereas knowledge is a normative one. In this paper, I aim to address this challenge by arguing that introspective acquaintance knowledge - the subject's knowledge of their own experiences constituted by acquaintance with them - exhibits (...)
- Visual attention and representational content.Kim Soland - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.Attention makes a phenomenal difference to visual experience, but the nature of this difference is controversial. There are three possibilities. The first is that the phenomenology of visual attention has deflationary content, which is to say that attention makes a phenomenal difference only by modulating the appearance of an attended object's visible features. Secondly, it has novel content—attention contributes unique representational content to visual experience. Thirdly, it has no content—the phenomenal contribution of attention to visual experience is not representational at (...)
- Inner awareness: the argument from attention.Anna Giustina & Uriah Kriegel - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (9):2451–2475.We present a new argument in favor of the Awareness Principle, the principle that one is always aware of one’s concurrent conscious states. Informally, the argument is this: (1) Your conscious states are such that you can attend to them without undertaking any action _beyond mere shift of attention_; but (2) You cannot come to attend to something without undertaking any action beyond mere shift of attention unless you are already aware of that thing; so, (3) Your conscious states are (...)
- Degrees of Attention and Degrees of Consciousness.Azenet L. Lopez - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 229-250.A standing question in consciousness science is whether consciousness arises gradually or in a sudden way. This empirical question is connected to a metaphysical one, concerning the kind of property that consciousness is, i.e., graded or categorical. Recently, Lee (2022) suggested that settling this question requires deciding which theory of consciousness is true. Applying an insight from Wiese (2020), this chapter pursues a way of approximating answers by examining properties that are necessary for consciousness, which consciousness must have regardless of (...)
- Perceptual Links: Attention, Experience, and Demonstrative Thought.Michael Barkasi - 2015 - Dissertation, Rice UniversityPerception is conscious: perceiving involves a first-person experience of what’s perceived. It’s widely held that these perceptual experiences are independent of what's perceived. Viewing two visually indiscriminable #2 pencils would involve the same experience, despite viewing different objects. It’s also widely held that conscious perception enables thinking about what's perceiving. When you see one of those pencils you can think, THAT is a pencil. Some philosophers, including John McDowell and John Campbell, have suggested that these two features engender a puzzle: (...)
- The Philosophical Landscape on Attention.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2020 - In The Attending Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.Attention has a long history in philosophy, despite its near absence in the twentieth century. This chapter provides an overview of philosophical research on attention. It begins by explaining the concept of "selection from limitation," contrasting it with the more recent "selection for action." It reviews historical texts that discuss attention, focusing on those in the Western canon whose understanding of "attention" aligns with contemporary usage. It then describes the differential treatment of attention in phenomenology and behaviorism in the last (...)
- Seeing Without Discriminating.Ayoob Shahmoradi - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.What does the most fundamental type of perceptual (or mental) reference look like? One view suggests that perceptual reference requires representation-as, while another holds that it requires discriminating the perceived item. I distinguish five types of discrimination, three of which are personal-level and distinctively visual, and explain their implications and interrelations. Next, I argue that the plausibility of the claim that perceiving something requires discriminating it—rather than simply attributing properties to it—depends on the type of discrimination at issue. A weak (...)
- Template Tuning and Graded Consciousness.Berit Brogaard & Thomas Alrik Sørensen - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 251–273.Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inexact categorizations of visual input (...)
- Proactive control and agency.René Baston - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (1):43-61.Can agents overcome unconscious psychological influences without being aware of them? Some philosophers and psychologists assume that agents need to be aware of psychological influences to successfully control behavior. The aim of this text is to argue that when agents engage in a proactive control strategy, they can successfully shield their behavior from some unconscious influences. If agents actively check for conflicts between their actions and mental states, they engage in reactive control. For engaging in reactive control, agents need awareness (...)
- Wandering Inquiry.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of (...)
- Growing Evidence for Separate Neural Mechanisms for Attention and Consciousness.Alexander Maier & Naotsugu Tsuchiya - 2021 - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 83:558-576.
- The Role of Information in Consciousness.Harry Haroutioun Haladjian - forthcoming - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.This article comprehensively examines how information processing relates to attention and consciousness. We argue that no current theoretical framework investigating consciousness has a satisfactory and holistic account of their informational relationship. Our key theoretical contribution is showing how the dissociation between consciousness and attention must be understood in informational terms in order to make the debate scientifically sound. No current theories clarify the difference between attention and consciousness in terms of information. We conclude with two proposals to advance the debate. (...)
- Biological Naturalism and the Mind-Body Problem.Jane Anderson - 2022 - Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan.This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to understand “the mind-body problem”. The crux of this problem is phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as “what it is like” to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers refers to the problem of “what-it-is-like” as “the hard problem” of consciousness and claims that this problem is so “hard” that investigators have either just ignored the issue completely, investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that there is literally (...)
- Consciousness, Attention, and the Motivation-Affect System.Tom Cochrane - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7):139-163.It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...)
- (Un)conscious Perspectival Shape and Attention Guidance in Visual Search: A reply to Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020).Benjamin Henke & Assaf Weksler - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: Routledge.When viewing a circular coin rotated in depth, it fills an elliptical region of the distal scene. For some, this appears to generate a two-fold experience, in which one sees the coin as simultaneously circular (in light of its 3D shape) and elliptical (in light of its 2D ‘perspectival shape’ or ‘p-shape’). An energetic philosophical debate asks whether the latter p-shapes are genuinely presented in perceptual experience (as ‘perspectivalists’ argue) or if, instead, this appearance is somehow derived or inferred from (...)
- Dynamic Attentional Mechanisms of Creative Cognition.Shadab Tabatabaeian & Carolyn Jennings - 2023 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4.In popular imagination creativity requires us to surrender control. Yet, attention is at the heart of control, and many studies show attention to play a key role in the creative process. This is partly due to the selective nature of attention—creative cognition consists of two phases, idea generation and idea evaluation, and selective processes are essential for both phases. Here, we investigate attentional (i.e., selective) mechanisms underlying each phase, using the framework of two major attention taxonomies: top-down/bottom-up and internal/external attention. (...)
- Notas sobre o conceito de atenção em Descartes.Lia Levy - 2017 - Modernos E Contemporâneos 1 (2):46-56.O artigo busca evidenciar as vantagens exegéticas de um estudo mais amplo sobre o conceito de atenção na filosofia de Descartes e avançar preliminarmente algumas hipóteses sobre seu sentido e função. Mais precisamente, sugere-se uma aproximação dos conceitos de atenção e tempo, de modo que a primeira se definiria - não como uma experiência subjetiva incomunicável, ou como uma qualidade dessa experiência-, mas em relação ao conceito cartesiano de duração, tanto em sua conexão com a mente humana quanto independentemente dessa (...)
- In praise of poise.Daniel Stoljar - 2018 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar, Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. new york: MIT Press.
- Attention and perceptual justification.Nicholas Silins & Susanna Siegel - 2018 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar, Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. new york: MIT Press.
- Mindmelding, Chapter 11: Disentangling self and consciousness.William Hirstein - 2012 - In Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.This chapter shows that mindmelding is metaphysically possible, i.e., that it does not violate any laws governing the metaphysical nature of reality. Metaphysical issues are fundamental and lie at the core of the most difficult parts of the problems of privacy and the mind-body problem itself. There is nothing stopping us from placing the idea of mindmelding on clear, unproblematic, and plausible metaphysical foundations. It is argued that the position of privacy is the one on shaky metaphysical grounds. Two metaphysical (...)
- Psychedelics: A Window into Perceptual Processing.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2024 - In Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans, Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry. Oxford University Press. pp. 92–115.This chapter presents findings indicating that psilocybin-induced visual distortions and impaired executive functioning originate in temporary disruptions of attentional mechanisms. It then revisits a predictive processing account of neural processing and argues that this lacks the resources to provide a unified model of the perceptual mechanisms underpinning psychedelic experiences caused by classic hallucinogens such as psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and mescaline. Lastly, an alternative theory of perceptual processing is proposed—the Gist Theory of Perception—that can better explain how the psilocybin-induced (...)
- Emotion and Attention.Jonathan Mitchell - 2022 - Philosophical Studies (1):1-27.This paper first demonstrates that recognition of the diversity of ways that emotional responses modulate ongoing attention generates what I call the puzzle of emotional attention, which turns on recognising that distinct emotions (e.g., fear, happiness, disgust, admiration etc.) have different attentional profiles. The puzzle concerns why this is the case, such that a solution consists in explaining why distinct emotions have the distinct attentional profiles they do. It then provides an account of the functional roles of different emotions, as (...)
- Psychedelic Expansion of Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study in Terms of Attention.Jason K. Day & Susanne Schmetkamp - 2022 - InCircolo 13:111-135.Induced by intake of the psychedelic substances LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, psychedelic experiences have been extensively described by subjects as entailing a most unusual increase in the scope and quality of their consciousness. Accordingly, psychedelic experiences have been widely characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.” This article poses the following question, as yet unaddressed in contemporary philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology: to what exactly does “expansion of consciousness” refer as a general characterisation of psychedelic experiences, and what role (...)
- Degrees of Attention in Experiencing Art.Ancuta Mortu - 2020 - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 55 (1):45-66.This paper examines gradients of attention in relation to aesthetic appreciation. My main claim is that we should leave open the possibility that aesthetic response might be triggered by stimulations taking place far from the centre of one’s focused attention. In support of this claim I first discuss the notion of ‘periphery of attention’ and the challenges that it poses to contemporary psychological theories of aesthetics. I provide four criteria for differentiating between several types of attentional processes and then proceed (...)
- The Phenomenal Contribution of Attention.Jonathan Mitchell - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Strong or Pure Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is exhaustively determined by its intentional content. Contrastingly, impure intentionalism holds that there are also non content-based aspects or features which contribute to phenomenal character. Conscious attention is one such feature: arguably its contribution to the phenomenal character of a given conscious experience are not exhaustively captured in terms of what that experience represents, that is in terms of properties of its intentional object. This paper (...)
- Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind.Francesca Brencio - 2021 - InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia E Culture 11.F. Brencio (2021) [in Italian and English] (ed.), Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind, in “InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia e Culture”, 11, ISSN 2531-4092.
- Attention and Perception.Ronald A. Rensink - 2015 - In R. A. Scott, S. M. Kosslyn & M. C. Buchmann, Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisicplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource. Wiley. pp. 1-14.This article discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the 20th century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It covers current work on various forms (...)
- Perception and Attention.Ronald A. Rensink - 2013 - In Daniel Reisberg, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 97-116.Our visual experience of the world is one of diverse objects and events, each with particular colors, shapes, and motions. This experience is so coherent, so immediate, and so effortless that it seems to result from a single system that lets us experience everything in our field of view. But however appealing, this belief is mistaken: there are severe limits on what can be visually experienced. -/- For example, in a display for air-traffic control it is important to track all (...)
- Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry.Sophie Archer (ed.) - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.What is salience? This collection addresses this neglected question by considering the role of salience in a wide variety of areas. All 13 chapters are specially commissioned, and written by an international team of contributors.
- The Many Faces of Attention: why precision optimization is not attention.Madeleine Ransom & Sina Fazelpour - 2020 - In Dina Mendonça, Manuel Curado & Steven S. Gouveia, The Philosophy and Science of Predictive Processing. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 119-139.The predictive coding (PC) theory of attention identifies attention with the optimization of the precision weighting of prediction error. Here we provide some challenges for this identification. On the one hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too broad a phenomenon to be identified with attention because such weighting plays a central role in multimodal integration. Cases of crossmodal illusions such as the rubber hand illusion and the McGurk effect involve the differential precision weighting of prediction error, yet attention (...)
- Does Loudness Represent Sound Intensity?Kim Soland - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-27.In this paper I challenge the widely held assumption that loudness is the perceptual correlate of sound intensity. Drawing on psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that loudness is best understood not as a representation of any feature of a sound wave, but rather as a reflection of the salience of a sound wave representation; loudness is determined by how much attention a sound receives. Loudness is what I call a quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that is determined (...)
- An Agent of Attention: An Inquiry into the Source of Our Control.Aaron Henry - 2019 - Dissertation, University of TorontoWhen performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...)
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