Consciousness Without Attention

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is a hot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity of theories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery of a form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention would require a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example, understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding, at least three forms of consciousness have been argued to exist without attention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on the question of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I here present a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful: conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form of consciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimes absent.

Conscious access in the near absence of attention: Critical extensions on the dual-task paradigm

“…Addressing conscious access for stimuli in the dual-task remains a critical limitation if this paradigm seeks to address the necessity debate (Jennings, 2015) .…”

“…One feature of this debate that has risen to prominence in recent years concerns the necessity of top-down attentional amplification for conscious perception (the necessity claim ) (Cohen, Dennett, & Kanwisher, 2016;Dehaene, 2014;Jennings, 2015) . While several noteworthy theories of consciousness remain divided on this claim, scientific enquiry has made progress in its attempts to independently manipulate top-down attention and visual consciousness using a variety of tasks and visual illusions (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2016;van Boxtel, 2017;van Boxtel, Tsuchiya, & Koch, 2010) .…”

“…Jiang, Costello, & He, 2007;Yi Jiang, Yi, & Sheng, 2006;Merikle & Joordens, 1997) for reviews, see (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011;Yang, Brascamp, Kang, & Blake, 2014) . Thus, achieving highly accurate dual-task performance in tasks with complex stimuli such as faces does not guarantee that these discriminations are performed consciously (Jennings, 2015) . In fact, in combination with excessive training, there is reason to suspect that at least some aspects of successful discrimination under dual-task conditions may be a product of unconscious processing (Merikle & Joordens, 1997) .…”

The Evil Demon Inside

“…The temporal point here is important. The motivation is not just that, when I turn my attention to the sound, I experience the sound, but also that, when I turn my attention to the sound, I 17 See Searle (1992), Koch and Tsuchiya (2007), or Jennings (2015). 18 See Mack and Rock (1998), Prinz (2011), or M. A. Cohen et al (2012.…”

Attention and Consciousness

“…Recent years have seen a growing body of work exploring the relation between consciousness and attention (e.g., Block ; Jennings ; Montemayor and Haladjian ; Prinz ; Wu ). Sebastian Watzl has recently presented a full‐blown attentional theory of phenomenal consciousness (Watzl ) .…”