Christopher Mole Attention to Unseen Objects

Can one pay attention to objects without being conscious of them? Some years ago there was evidence that had been taken to show that the answer is ‘yes’. That evidence was inconclusive, but there is recent work that makes the case more compellingly: it now seems that it is indeed possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious. This is bad news for theories in which the connection between attention and consciousness is taken to be an essential one. It is good news for theories (including mine) in which the connection between attention and agency is taken to be essential. 1. A Point of Contention According to one view of consciousness, and of its relationship to attention, a conscious person will normally be conscious of several different things. Some proper subset of these things can be phenomenally foregrounded and cognitively prioritized. The things in that subset will, in virtue of this foregrounding and prioritization, be the things to which that person is paying attention. Such a view entails that unconscious attention is an impossibility, on a par with the impossibility of being the star without appearing in the show. Attention, according to this view, just is the foregrounding and prioritization of consciousness. In a 2008 article I suggested (1) that this view of the relationship between attention and consciousness is quite a natural one, and (2) that the evidence that had been taken to refute it did not do so (Mole, 2008a). Both claims have come under attack in the subsequent literature: evidence has been adduced to show that this view is not as Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21, No. 11–12, 2014, pp. 41–56 Correspondence: Email: chris.mole@ubc.ca C op yr ig ht ( c) Im pr in t A ca de m ic 2 01 3 F or p er so na l u se o nl y -n ot fo r re pr od uc tio n natural as I had supposed (de Brigard, 2010), and to show that the view is not as defensible as I had suggested (Kentridge, de-Wit and Heywood, 2008; Koch and Tsuchiya, 2008). The present article is concerned with the second of these points. It explains that there are now reasons for giving up the claim that I once thought natural. It then considers the philosophical repercussions of doing so. The claim that is at issue might be thought of as the claim that consciousness is necessary for attention. That would not be an inaccurate way to think of it, but — because of the ambiguity between ‘creature consciousness’ and ‘state consciousness’ (Rosenthal, 1986; White, 1964) — I do not think that it is sufficiently precise. The claim at issue is better formulated as follows: For all persons and all things, if the person is attending to the thing then the person is conscious of that thing. This formulation was referred to, in my earlier treatment, as ‘ ’. It will be convenient to continue with that convention here. If were true then the things to which one is paying attention would be a subset of the things of which one is conscious. The door would then be open to the pursuit of a consciousness-first strategy, when one is giving an explanation of attention. One could start with consciousness — supposing it to be explained elsewhere — and could explain what attention is by specifying how some proper subset of the conscious field comes to be foregrounded, so that it qualifies as a locus of attention. If turned out to be false, on the other hand, then any such strategy for the explanation of attention would no longer be satisfactory, since it would fail to account for those instances of attention that occur unconsciously. But, because of that, the door would then be open to the pursuit of an attention-first strategy, when one is in the business of explaining consciousness. No more than one of these explanatory strategies can be viable. Both have their advocates. The consciousness-first strategy for explaining attention has been adopted by Declan Smithies, and by Sebastian Watzl. Smithies has suggested that the thing that needs to happen to consciousness, in order for it to constitute attention, is for the contents of consciousness to be available for ‘rational access’ (Smithies, 2011). Watzl has suggested that consciousness comes to be attention-constituting when a structure is imposed upon it in which some parts are, in a sense that he tries to make precise, more peripheral than others (Watzl, 2011). Both 42 C. MOLE C op yr ig ht ( c) Im pr in t A ca de m ic 2 01 3 F or p er so na l u se o nl y -n ot fo r re pr od uc tio n treat attention as if it were a particular kind of consciousness. They therefore require to be true. The contrary strategy — i.e. the attention-first strategy for explaining consciousness — has been adopted by Jesse Prinz. It is pursued in his 2012 book, The Conscious Brain (Prinz, 2012), and in a series of associated articles (Prinz, 2010; 2011). According to Prinz’s ‘Attended Intermediate Representation’ theory (which he abbreviates to ‘AIR’), consciousness is what happens when attention is paid to stimuli that are represented in a certain ‘intermediate’ way. Prinz’s project therefore depends on rejecting the claim that attention is just one particular variety of consciousness (since if it were then he would be using one particular form of consciousness to explain consciousness itself, and the resulting explanation would be circular). He must therefore reject the approach that Watzl and Smithies have taken. My main business in the present article will be to review the most impressive of the experiments that now provide evidence for the falsity of . Such evidence is, for reasons that have already been indicated, bad news for the explanatory project that has been pursued by Smithies and Watzl. We shall be seeing that it is also unwelcome news for Prinz’s project, as Prinz himself understands it. In so far as there is good news here it will be good news for a theory such as that advocated by Wayne Wu (2011) — or, indeed, by me (Mole, 2005; 2011). According to these theories attention is not essentially related to consciousness (although it might nonetheless be essentially related to psychological processes in which consciousness is normally, but contingently, involved). In these theories attention is understood as being essentially related, not to consciousness, but to agency, broadly construed. I conclude with some remarks on the significance of this.