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Organizing Mind.
How Attention Structures Mental Life
Sebastian Watzl

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How does attention shape
conscious experience?
What is
attention?
Connections to other themes?
 What is conscious experience?
 What makes conscious experience
philosophically interesting?
 Conscious experience and the
appearance/reality distinction.
 Does attention affect appearances?
 What is the structure of conscious
experience?
 How (if at all) can
science and the
subjective
perspective be
reconciled?
 Consciousness and time.
 How do we organize our lives?
 Attention in the social world.

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How does attention shape
conscious experience?

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Conscious Experience
 When you are listening to music, when you are looking at the scene
in front of you, when you are smelling the scent of a rose, when you
are tasting a a bitter chocolate, when you feel a cramp in your thigh
...
 There is something it is like for you.
 Experience has a first person quality
 conscious subjects have an “inside”
 conscious subjects have a subjective perspective

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Conscious Experience
Rhinolophusschnitzleri

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Conscious Experience
“What is it like to be a
bat?”
???
Thomas Nagel

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Conscious Experience
 Conscious experience has a first person quality.
 conscious subjects have an “inside”.
 conscious subjects have a subjective perspective.
 The phenomenologyof an experience = what it is like for
the subject of that experience.

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Conscious Experience
 Questions one may ask about conscious experience:
 Do you have some special knowledge about your own experience? Could
you ever be mistaken about the character of your own experience? Is knowledge of your own
experience the foundation of knowing about the world?
 Epistemology (most prominently associated with the philosopher Descartes)
 What is the relationship the picture of ourselves from this subjective
perspective and the picture of ourselves delivered by the sciences?
How is conscious experience related to the brain? Could science find out that we actually
have no conscious experiences (if not, why not)?
 E.g. Mind-Body-Problem (also prominently associated with Descartes)
 What are conscious experiences?
What is to think of ourselves as conscious agents with a perspective on the world? What is it
that we might compare to the scientific image of ourselves?
 My focus today (and prominently discussed by the philosophers Hume and Kant)

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Conscious Experience
 Is the phenomenology of
conscious experience an un-
analyzable “feel”?

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Conscious Experience and
Appearances
Appearance
Reality

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Conscious Experience and
Appearances
 By having conscious experiences,
you appear to inhabit a certain
world.
 This world is the world of appearance,
it is characterized by how things
appear to the subject of the
experience.
 Because conscious experience
presents appearances, we can ask:
is the world how it appears to me in
my experience or is it different?

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Conscious Experience and
Appearances
You
The world as it
appears to youConscious
experience

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Does attention affect appearances?
 Gustav Fechner
“The pendulum-beat of a clock [appears to us] no
louder, no matter how much we increase the
strain of our attention upon [it]”*
 William James
“[I]n listening for certain notes in a chord, the one
we attend to sounds probably a little more loud .
. .”**
* Fechner 1889, p. 452-453(quoted in James, 1890, p. 425); ** James 1890, p.425

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Yes, attention does affect
appearances!
Unattended higher contrastAttended lower contrast
From Carrasco, Ling and Read 2004
Look to have the same contrast!
Marisa Carrasco

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Yes, attention does affect
appearances!
“[These] changes in the phenomenology of
perception manifest themselves in experience as
differences in apparent contrast, apparent color
saturation, apparent size, apparent
speed, apparent time of occurrence and other
appearances.” (Block 2010, p. 23).
Ned Block

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Conscious Experience and
Appearances
Two questions:
 What are appearances?
How is, for example, the appearance of a world in experience connected to thinking that
this is how the world is?
 Is experience exhausted by appearances?
Is every difference in the phenomenology of your experience a difference in how the
world appears to you?

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The Appearance View
 Experience is exhausted by appearances.
Every difference in the phenomenology of your experience is a difference in
how the world appears to you.
 Why hold the appearance view?
 The natural connection between having a certain subjective perspective and appearing
to inhabit a certain world.
 The idea that experience is “transparent”, like a window to an apparent world:
 When we reflect on our experiences, we tend to find appearances: what did I
see, hear, smell, taste, and how did it look like, sound like, feel like, …

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Does attention shape conscious
experience only by affecting
appearances?
 The appearance view would say: yes.
 Since the only way anything could make a difference to consciousness is by
affecting appearances.
But…

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Does attention shape conscious
experience only by affecting
appearances?
 Any effect of attention on
appearances, can be replicated
without attention.
 Instead of focusing attention on the
piano, someone could simply turn up
the volume of the piano a little bit!
 But the phenomenology of the
replica experience is different from
the phenomenology of the attention
experience!

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Why the appearance view is false
Appearance Replica
Attention Experience

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Why the appearance view is false

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Why the appearance view is false
 An Argument
 Attention experiences have appearance replicas that present
exactly the same appearances without attention.
 The phenomenology of attention experiences is different from
their appearance replicas.
 So, the phenomenology of attention experiences is not exhausted
by appearances.

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What is missing?
 “[T]he moment one thinks of the
matter, one sees how false a notion
of experience that is which would
make it tantamount to the mere
presence to the senses of an
outward order. […]
Without selective interest, experience
is utter chaos. Interest alone gives
accent and emphasis, light and
shade, background and foreground –
intelligible perspective, in a word.
James 1890/1981, p.
402
William James

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Phenomenal Structure
 Start with the role attention plays for us: it prioritizes some
aspects of our mental lives over others.
 Think of focusing your attention on some project like training for a marathon,
bringing up your children, learning how to play the guitar.
Attention structures conscious experience
so that some of its parts are more central
than others.
 In doing so, it affects the subject’s subjective perspective(and not
how things appear through that perspective)

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Phenomenal Structure
Conscious experiences
are complex. They have
many parts.
The
experience
of the
saxophone
The experience of
the piano
The
experience
of the bass

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Phenomenal Structure
Complex
experiences
are just the
sum of their
parts.
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Phenomenal Structure
Complex
experiences
have structure:
some of their
parts are more
central than
others
Higher attentional
priority

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Phenomenal Structure
… is peripheral to …
The experience of
the piano
The
experience
of the
saxophone

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PhenomenalQualities
covered by
theappearanceview
Phenomenal Structure

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Phenomenal Structure
PhenomenalStructure
Missing from
theappearanceview

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Phenomenal Structure
PhenomenalQualities
Coveredby the
appearanceview
PhenomenalStructure
Missing from
theappearanceview
A holistic feature of
conscious experience.
Characterizing you
complete perspective

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What is Attention?

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Science knows what attention is!
Number of scientific publications
on “Attention”
 2000-2010: 10 833
 1990-2000: 5 649
 1980-1990: 2 496
 ...

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Everyone knows what attention is!
“Every one knows what attention is. It is ….”
James 1890/1981, p. 403-404
 Conscious Experience
 “I mean this [ ]”
 Conscious Engagement with Others
 Infants probably acquire the concept of attention through
acts of joint attention at around one year.
 Ordinary Conversation
 “You will get a better sense for the rhythm, if you focus
on the piano and drums instead of the saxophone.”

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How to react to this?
 What is the relationship the picture of ourselves from this
subjective perspective and the picture of ourselves delivered by
the sciences?
 Reductivism
 Science helps to identify some element of our pre-scientific
subjective perspective with a scientific conception.
 Eliminativism
 Science shows that something that appeared to exist from the
pre-scientific subjective perspective actually doesn’t exist.
 Anti-Reductivism
 Some element of the pre-scientific subjective perspective has
some degree of independence from the scientific perspective.

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Connections to other themes

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Consciousness and Time
 Two questions about consciousness and time:
 What is the temporal structure of conscious
experience?
What, if anything, is there to the metaphor of “the stream of
consciousness”, its “forward flowing” character?
 What is the connection between the temporal
structure of conscious experience, and the temporal
structure of the appearances?
Do they always match up, so that you experience a fast (or slow)
change just if your experience is changing fast (or slow)?
time
Jordan Suchow Silencing Illusion

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Organizing a Mental Life
 Executive attention
Roughly, the capacity to keep focused on long(er) term goals
and projects in the face of distraction
 What is the connection
between the capacity to
structure conscious
experience and the
capacity to focus on long
term projects?
 What is the significance of
attention for strength of will,
and similar phenomena?
Image taken from a repetition of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (Mischel et al. 1972)

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Joint Attention and the Social Mind
 Attention often is not a solitary
phenomenon.
 We often experience someone else’s
attention being focused on us (or on what we do
or say).
 Can we, after all, experience the conscious
experience of others? (though maybe not bats!)
 We often engage in acts of joint attention.
 What is the importance of joint attention for
understanding that different people have different
perspectives?

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