- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
effects. Using attention to denote an unspecified causal agent relies on a myste-
rious homunculus; it is like playing a ‘theoretical wildcard’ to dodge the need to
develop a workable theoretical account (Anderson, 2011, p. 4). If we give up on a
unified view, the ‘Disunity view’ can argue that
Just like chemical analysis shows that jade is not a single kind of mineral
(instead there are nephrite and jadeite that are superficially similar),
[. . .] [t]alk about attention does not carve the mind at its joints, because
attention, like jade, is not a natural kind.
(Watzl, 2011, p. 848; 2017, p. 32)
So if we go looking for a specific centre or circuit in the brain responsible for
attention, we won’t find anything.
Nonetheless, we could still argue that attention is a natural kind at a personal level,
even if not at a sub-personal (e.g. a neural) level. The basic argument here would
be: if it feels like a meaningful category for talking about conscious experience,
that means it is. Applying the same logic would, however, lead us to unquestion-
ingly accept folk concepts like the stream of consciousness or even the soul.
This means that when Sebastian Watzl ties the two together, saying ‘Attention is
the mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness’ (2011, p. 849), there
is a danger of giving reality to things that do not exist. But in any case, as he con-
cludes, studying attention forces us to tackle difficult categories like the differences
between states, processes, activities, and manners of going on, and to think care-
fully about the links between mind and action, and between functional roles and
phenomenal qualities, all of which are crucial to thinking about consciousness.
When we start to challenge our intuitions about attention – that there must be
a localisable set of brain areas responsible for it, that it is even a unified thing at
all – we realise that there is a crucial, profound challenge to be made when it
comes to the relation between attention and consciousness. Do we have any way
of working out what it means to be conscious of what is being attended to or not
being attended to?The basic problem is that whether and how something forms part of someone’s
conscious experience can be determined only by either report (what people
say) or other explicit decisions (what people do). But reporting on what we see
requires us to attend to it. So too do many of the decision-making tasks that are
used as criteria for consciousness. So, as philosopher James Stazicker puts it, ‘the
failure to report an object of visual consciousness might reflect a failure to attend
to the object, rather than an absence of visual consciousness of the object’ (2011,
p. 163). In this case, how can we ever even begin to work out how consciousness
and attention relate to or differ from each other? In Stazicker’s terms, how could
we ever test whether their relationship is one of dependence or independence:
whether the spotlight of attention falling on things is what makes them conscious,
or whether it illuminates episodes of consciousness without constituting them?
This problem is another version of the question that Ned Block raises in con-
trasting phenomenal (P) consciousness and access (A) consciousness. Is there
more in conscious experience than can be accessed? There is a long tradition of
relevant experiments, beginning with American psychologist George Sperling’s‘Talk about attention
does not carve the mind
at its joints, because
attention, like jade, is
not a natural kind’
(Watzl, 2011, p. 848)
‘the failure to report
an object of visual
consciousness might
reflect a failure to attend
to the object’
(Stazicker, 2011, p. 163)