- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
This fits with the feeling that we can consciously choose where to look, which
sounds to listen to, or what to think about, and that paying attention can be hard
work. James imagines ‘one whom we might suppose at a dinner-party resolutely
to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a low voice,
whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about exciting and
interesting things’ (1890, i, p. 420).
She read, with an eagerness which hardly left her power of
comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next
sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of
the one before her eyes.(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813)James ultimately came down on this side. His reasons were not scientific; indeed,
he concluded that no amount of evidence could really help decide whether
consciousness depends on attention or vice versa, and therefore he made his
decision on ethical grounds – the decision being to count himself among those
who believe in a spiritual force. James was convinced that the essence of voli-
tion is ‘attention with effort’, and that this is central to what we mean by self. So,
for him, the answer to this question was vital for thinking about the nature of
self and of free will. ‘Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will’, he
concluded (1890, ii, p. 562), and by will he meant the genuinely causal force of
conscious, personal will. In James’s account, consciousness is thought of as a force
of will which directs attention; attention then shapes the nature and contents of
conscious experience. In a sense, then, this account could fit into the previous
category, except that he includes a prior causal stage where conscious willing
comes first. Any other theory that puts consciousness first, including most spiri-
tual theories (like those mentioned in Chapter 5), would say the same.NO CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION
Moving beyond causal links, there are three possibilities that imply no causal link.
First, consciousness and attention might be correlated without being causally
connected to each other. Second, they might be altogether distinct. Third, they
might in fact be the same thing.
Sometimes awareness of things we are not attending to is an intrinsic and valu-
able part of our experience, like appreciating the bassline while focusing on the
melody: in this case, attention is not even necessary for consciousness. Koch (Koch
and Tsuchiya, 2007; Tononi and Koch, 2008) argues that the correlations between
consciousness and attention, particularly selective attention, are so patchy and
so complex that we must treat them as distinct brain processes; so, consciousness
does not reduce to attention. This argument is supported by experiments using
a binocular suppression task, which found that activity in V1 is influenced much
more strongly by directing attention to a target than by being aware of it (Wata-
nabe et al., 2011). In some cases, awareness and attention even seem to have
opposite effects. When the retina adapts to overstimulation, for example, the
visual system generates an afterimage, and perceptual suppression (i.e. absence
of awareness) makes the afterimage weaker, but so does sustained attention‘My experience is what
I agree to attend to’
(James, 1890, i, p. 402)