The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness

David Barrett

is where we voluntarily allocate attention on whatever objects or features we are interested in.
Bottom-up attention is where objects or their features automatically, non-voluntarily grab our
attention. It could have turned out that these were simply two different processes that were
mistakenly given the same name (as if there were something in common between them). In the
case of top-down attention, where, for instance, we are searching for a particular person in a
crowd, what happens is that the location of our target makes that target conscious. We can now
report about what we see and begin to take steps towards whatever actions we like. In the case
of bottom-up attention, where, for instance, a stimulus pops out of the background, again the
stimulus becomes immediately conscious to us in a way that allows executive-style manipula-
tions. In either case, then, it appears what attention is really doing is making our stimuli available
to working memory. This unification of what could easily be disparate neural processes is a nice
implication of Prinz’s view. The simplicity it implies is a further reason to believe that attention
just is the process by which information becomes available to working memory.
Putting all of the foregoing together, then, we finally have Prinz’s full, unique theory of
consciousness:

Prinz’s AIR Theory of Consciousness:

Consciousness arises when and only when intermediate level representations undergo

changes that allow them to become available to working memory.^1

Start with the evidence he provides for the contents of conscious experience, mix that with the
evidence Prinz has for attention being the mechanism that makes these contents conscious, then
add in his theory about what attention is, and you have the full AIR theory.^2

3 A Critical Appraisal of Prinz’s View

To provide a brief review of the main assertions and to make evaluation more orderly, we can
chop up Prinz’s overall view into the following succession of claims:

1 Consciousness arises at the intermediate level of processing.
2 Consciousness arises when and only when we attend.
3 Attention is the process by which information becomes available to working memory.
4 Consciousness arises when and only when intermediate level representations undergo
changes that allow them to become available to working memory.

From here we can evaluate each claim in turn.

Claim 1

Claim (1) is a view about the contents of conscious experience. For Prinz, what we are con-
scious of is always construed perceptually. This is a result of his identification of intermediate
level, perspective-dependent, and detail-filled representations as the exclusive stuff that popu-
lates conscious experience. Thus, there cannot be, for example, any conscious experience that
goes along with cognitive states (see Pitt 2004; Siegel 2006) or the self (see Kriegel 2005). This
is why Prinz spends multiple chapters in the middle of his book (2012) arguing against the
idea of ‘cognitive phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenology of the self.’ Yet the bare existence of
these topics, along with their defenders, shows that it is philosophically controversial to locate
consciousness exclusively at the intermediate level of processing.