# Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and How it Shapes Consciousness  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sebastian Watzl]] - Full Title: Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and How it Shapes Consciousness - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the essential role of attention in phenomenal consciousness. Attention is viewed as a unified subject-level mental activity that shapes conscious experience. The relationship between attention and consciousness is explored, with attention being considered necessary for consciousness but not always for making all phenomenal states accessible. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/150930622 - Source File: Structuring mind -The nature of Attention and how it shapes consciousness.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Phenomenal Structure: Center and Periphery ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrx7cdnadw374yner8wcxwg)) > Intelligible Perspectives ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrx8b3x8edfdskbsjj2z4m2)) > Suppose that you are listening to a jazz band. You will have one kind of conscious experience when you focus attention on the sound of the saxophone and a different conscious experience when you focus it on the sound of the piano. You might focus on the subtleties of the melody or on the timbre of the saxophone’s notes; or you might focus on the rhythm of the piece, even if no specific instrument is keeping that rhythm. Differences in how you deploy your attention make a difference to what it feels like to listen to the music. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrxbdtvbj93bvdndq7gx0hj)) - Note: Nice musical example > you might focus on the aftertaste ofdark chocolate in your mouth; focus on the texture of the surface you are touching with your fingers, or on the shape or size ofa coin under your palm; you might focus attention on the fresh air you are breathing and inhale deeply to savor that smell of early spring, or—if you are less lucky—your attention might be caught by the smell of burnt toast in the kitchen. You might focus your attention on a slight pain in your foot, or an itch on your neck. You might trace the outlines of your body with your attention or focus attention on your breathing. You might feel a craving for chocolate and your attention might wander to thoughts about a particular flavor, or the mental image of a chocolate bar you really like. You might ignore that craving and instead keep focused on a practical or theoretical problem to ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrxdgmvak96w9dj1vr1wafx)) > which you are trying to find a solution. In all these cases, and many more, attention shapes consciousness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrxds6nycck58n64sk684fh)) > . An attractive view of conscious experience, I will call it the appearance view, entails that the effects on what you are aware of and how it appears to you must exhaust the contribution of attention to consciousness. According to the appear- ance view the phenomenology of experience is exhausted by the way the world or an aspect of the world appears to the subject. The arguments in this chapter will show that the appearance view is false, because it misses a central element of how attention shapes consciousness. In the chapters that follow, I will provide an account of what it misses. The appearance view only accounts for one type of phenomenal property: phenomenal qualities. It fails to account for phenomenal structure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrxw228t970f494kjq9h18z)) > There is one attentional appearance view, though, that is a bit more attractive. On this view, the phenomenology of attention consists in clarity or determinacy of conscious experience. This view seems to make talk about attention as focusing so appealing: to attend to something is a bit like focusing a camera lens on it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrz5c1tzz5ja1tv5cmd6nmp)) > A range of experiments show, for example, that visual attention to a certain location increases the spatial resolution of vision at that location. In this respect, it brings a stimulus into focus. And it is a consistent finding in many experiments that subjects have better discrim- inatory powers at the focus of attention, where they can detect finer details.50 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrzdmtec6gpmrmntz6ewaqy)) > The determinacy view can be made even more precise by specifying the comparison class. There is, for example, a diachronic version according to which an essential part of the phenomenology of attention consists in an increase of how determinate the properties of the attended item look to be when you begin to attend to it (and a decrease when you stop attending to it). There is a also a synchronic version according to which an essential part of the phenomenology of attention consists in the appearance of more determinate properties at the focus of attention compared to what at that time is outside the focus of attention. The determinacy view could be applied to feature-directed attention (the attended feature looks more determinate than other features) as well as object-directed attention (the features of the attended object look more determinate than the features of unattended objects). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrzj167k9akzewtevs5kyvz)) > , it is important to note that what makes the determinacy view intuitive and what makes the figure/ground view mentioned above intuitive will tend to pull in different directions. On the one hand, attention is supposed to go with increased determinacy. On the other hand, attention is supposed to go with integration into a single object or figure which will often be enforced by neglecting irrelevant detail.5 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrzmy7zts8bmtqpy3trw1ye)) > The third, and in my view biggest problem for the determinacy view, though, is the following counterexample. Suppose you are looking at a screen with only two red dots, one on the left L, and one on the right R. Between you and the screen there is a pane of glass. Now consider the following two scenarios: The Left Attention Scenario. Your visual attention is focused on L. > The Left Determinacy Scenario. You defuse your attention equally across the screen. But the part of the pane of glass in front of L is a lens that sharpens your vision ofL (like glasses for better eyesight). The pane of glass has no such effect on any other part of the screen behind it. > If you are wearing glasses, the left determinacy scenario is easy to get a grip on. It’s like having glasses (or better glasses) only for L. You can (imperfectly) simulate the left determinacy scenario by taking off only the right lens of your glasses. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrzpz0wfrkmhpds7ds410pp)) > 9 Phenomenal Structure Center and Periphery—Fringe, Field, and Margin ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrrx9gmns2s3dt0b2r0068ar)) - Note: Chapter 9 > Attention structures consciousness into what is more central and what is more peripheral. Unlike spatial structure, the center-periphery structure of consciousness is not a structure of how the world appears to the subject through her conscious perspective. It is the structure of her perspective itself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs49fzvb6zw58g11b6g0c1g2)) > [E]xperience [according to empiricism] is supposed to be of something simply given. Atten- tion, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes “experience,” and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale. But the 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.1 We are not just samplers of appearances;2 nor do our brains produce what then exclusively appears as the presence of “an outward order” (James 1981 [1890]). The phenomenal character of conscious experience includes the actively structured point ofview on the appearances. Our experience is organized and therefore an “intelligible perspective.” What it is like for us includes the way we are structuring consciousness into “foreground and background.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs05af2fe2axcgk4940ww3b)) - Note: some cool quotes describing attention > While the appearance view provides an account of phenomenal qualities,it overlooks that these qualities occur in a phenomenal structure that gives shape to the perceptual experiences that are the focus of the appearance view. The appearance view only accounts for the qualitative character of consciousness. By missing phe- nomenal structure it misses that conscious experience presents the world of appear- ances from a structured point ofview. Because we look through our point of view to the world this element of “spontaneity” (James 1981 [1890]) is easy to miss. The center-periphery structure of consciousness is never the object of conscious atten- tion. It is our conscious attention. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs081vbwecs30tyy4hb24tr)) - Note: simple summary of watzl's view > u ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs49spaxc4p8np7xj3m4qjg6)) > Phenomenal Structuralism. Complex experiences are structured by attention so that some of their parts are more central than others. > Phenomenal structuralism accounts for the natural idea that attention has a single phenomenal core, i.e. what I have called the phenomenal uniqueness of attention (p. 165). The type of phenomenal character that is common to all forms of attention is phenomenal structure, and not a type of appearance. The phenomenal structure of experience, of course, is not always the same. It may be simple or complex. There may be one central element or many, and the structure can take various forms including the form ofa complex “attentional landscape.”4 The structure ofexperience is present whether attention is highly focused or divided or distributed. The fact that your experience is structured by relative centrality is what constitutes the phenom- enal property shared by all conscious attention episodes. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0a5as4nm8s7t7g3mkpxrj)) - Note: Watzl's view > Let us call the parts of a complex experience that have such appearance properties the qualitative parts of that complex experience. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0g1b6fn2nfrky9ks4aqh0)) - Note: might complex experiences almost always be very complex? That is , might they almost always have multiple parts? > The subject’s complex experience E is built from qualitative parts like eL and eR. According to phenomenal structuralism the appearance view remained incom- plete because of its overly simplistic account of that building relation, i.e. on the appearance view there is no structure to the way complex experiences are built from their parts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0jfgpgsgk4z854dgbbmt6)) - Note: difference between phenomenal structuralism and the appearance view > The appearance view might, for example, see E as the phenomenally unified mereological sum of simple experiences. We would get something like the following position (where “a + b” depicts the phenomenally unified mereological sum of experiences a and b):5 Mereological Building. E = eL+ eR. > A certain version of the intentionalist interpretation of the appearance view could dispense with the mereological characterization in favor of a characterization of a single phenomenal state with a conjunctive content as follows (where cL and cR now are the contents represented by eL and eR respectively and “x & y” is a conjunctive operation on contents x and y):6 Conjunctive Building. E = experiencing cL & cR. > None of this captures the center-periphery structure of experience. In contrast to these proposals we need structured building. The way a complex experience is made up from simpler experiences is organized. The complex phenomenal state should be represented by an ordered pair where the relevant ordering is provided by a relation ofrelative centrality. Complex experiences are more than the sum oftheir parts. They are structured wholes; more like molecules than like heaps of pebbles. We can represent this as follows: Structural Building. E = eL eR.7 In this account of phenomenal building x1 x2 is defined as: x1 is more central in experience than x2. According to phenomenal structuralism the parts of experience bear phenomenally significant relations to each other. This ordering of the complex experiential episode would be lost when considering only mereological or conjunc- tive building. What the replication argument of Chapter 8 shows is that the ordering is phenomenally significant. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0m76wnsjacv0fb4nb0ewp)) - Note: more details on why Watzl thinks the appearance view fails. –it fails to respect structure/priority > The answer is that the centrality ordering within a subject’s complex experience is a direct phenomenal reflection of the priority ordering that is constitutive of attention. The reason we could find a replica for each effect of attention on the appearances was that all of these are mere effects or correlates of a certain distribu- tion of attention. Therefore, it was possible to replicate the relevant effects in a scenario with a different distribution of attention. Priority structures, by contrast, are not mere effects or correlates of attention. They are partially constitutive of attention. A phenomenal contribution of a certain distribution of attention that is constituted by priority structures cannot be replicated with a different distribution of attention. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0tqr88jhwr2fvz1kqktfv)) > According to the identity mapping view priority relations are phenomenal relations, i.e. relations that can, when they hold, make a difference to what it is like for a subject. The holding ofthese phenomenal relations between the qualitative parts ofa subject’s experience explains why what it is like to have an experience with one distribution of attention is different from what it is like to have an experience with a different distribution of attention. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrs0zzx8pf3qepmxg0x6rf68)) > According to the view I will defend in Chapter 13, phenomenal qualities also depend on phenomenal structure. All phenomenal qualities are restricted phenom- enal properties in the sense that there is something it is like to experience a phenomenal quality only if that quality is embedded in a phenomenal structure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs13cpn04y8kgr4czjtv2akn)) > According to the view I will defend in Chapter 13, phenomenal qualities also depend on phenomenal structure. All phenomenal qualities are restricted phenom- enal properties in the sense that there is something it is like to experience a phenomenal quality only if that quality is embedded in a phenomenal structure. According to this view there is a symmetry between phenomenal qualities and phenomenal structure: neither contributes to what it is like for a subject without the other. Qualities and structure need to be put together to yield conscious experi- ence. On the resulting view, conscious experience consists in the subject’s engaged perspective on an apparent world. Centrality structure is the form ofthat perspective. Phenomenal qualities are its matter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs13fa1h6qqtw2gbqw6y7nb6)) > According to this view there is a symmetry between phenomenal qualities and phenomenal structure: neither contributes to what it is like for a subject without the other. Qualities and structure need to be put together to yield conscious experi- ence. On the resulting view, conscious experience consists in the subject’s engaged perspective on an apparent world. Centrality structure is the form ofthat perspective. Phenomenal qualities are its matter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs4a0a3jrtqqe5btt99n3vfj)) > Arguably, priority relations would then be like temporal or geometric relations: what it is like to experience first a headache and shortly thereafter experience nausea is different from what it is like to first experience the nausea and then experience the headache. The temporal relation between the headache and the nausea makes a phenomenal difference. But, of course, temporal relations make a phenomenal difference only if they are temporal relations between phenomenal experiences. The temporal relation between two unconscious mental states makes no phenomena difference. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3t62frqze178f41y9g5r9f)) > Now consider, as a generalization of the cognitive model, any view on which attention contributes a mode of consciousness that is distinct from the perceptual mode ofconsciousness. Such a view conflicts with what in Chapter 4 (p. 73) I called the dependency claim: in order to attend to something, that thing has to be intentionally given in some attention-independent way (you perceive it, thinkabout it, be angry at it, etc.). Any such alleged mode ofconsciousness therefore would not reflect the nature of attention, and therefore could be instantiated in the absence of attention. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs13tbyjb5b8j97ebk7vd7jv)) > Given that attention can look, as it were, inside propositional attitudes (we attend to objects and properties, but not—at least not often—to propositions; see Chapter 5 Sec. 2.3, p. 99 ff.), the modes of consciousness that attention modifies will have to be non-propositional modes. Specifically, they will have to be exactly the same mental states that I have called the qualitative parts of a subject’s experience. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs13wt9kw41brwty6d2cfn6v)) > First, centrality systems are phenomenally unified in the following sense: the qualitative parts of a centrality system compose a single experience of which they are all parts.14 There is something it is like to experience those qualitative parts together. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs1418zf5rx8aqyhpqbbtb4d)) > is something it is like to experience x1 x2 that is not fixed by what it is like to have x1 and by what it is like to have x2. At the same time what it is like to instantiate a ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs4a5m67ha1rk19a3gckg5v5)) > Second, and following from the same feature of centrality relations, centrality systems are, we might say, phenomenally entangled: what it is like to instantiate a centrality system is not exhausted by what it is like to instantiate the phenomenal qualities of all of its qualitative parts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs141f14xjnv7mwsxms1m9nb)) > William James also observed a second element of phenomenal structure in con- scious thought. Conscious thought, according to James, does not simply move from one topic or content to another. Any topical thought is surrounded by what he calls a fringe or halo of associated images, feelings, dim memories, etc. Here is one way James describes this idea: Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense ofwhither it is to lead. The significance, the value, ofthe image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it—or rather that is fused into one with it and has ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs14ax4v0zfvw50thg8kwqy4)) > become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image by the name of “psychic overtone” or “fringe.”21 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs14b301r8vm26ycqepqerjq)) > Phenomenal structuralism helps to explain these Jamesian ideas. The “psychic overtone” or “fringe” is made of qualitative parts that form the periphery or field of a conscious thought that is at a phenomenal center. What it means for you to think a specific thought (its significance for you) largely depends on the associations that are in the periphery of your field of consciousness when that thought is at its center. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0v0gddwx1fm8whx78891tzr)) > Let us begin by considering that the distinctions between phenomenal center, > phenomenal field, and phenomenal fringe are not yet adequate to capture a central idea in James’ notion of the halo of a phenomenal center. James speaks of the halo as > “surrounding and escorting” the center. This suggests a form of relevance of the halo of a thought to the qualitative part that is at the center. One might plausibly think that not everything that is simultaneously experienced with the conscious thought that Columbus discovered America in 1492 will be part ofwhat surrounds and escorts the center. Consider a slight headache or the visual experience that accompanies my conscious thought. While these are peripheral qualitative parts, one might think that they are merely peripheral to the center, while the escorting images are experientially more intimately connected to my central conscious thought. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3tsxmhrbapknz41v0sha8r)) > Let us therefore add something. Experiences in the thematic field seem to somehow “color” the central experience (consider also James’ metaphor of “bathing” a thought in its psychic overtone). Because of the different surrounding images, the way Columbus is presented to Ashamed in her experience is different from the way Columbus is presented to Proud. Gurwitsch describes this as follows > [T] he tinge derived by the theme from the thematic field [is] the perspective under which, the light and orientation in which, the point ofview from which, it appears to consciousness . . . [the thematic field affects] not that which appears, but the mode in which it appears.27 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3tzvj3svamqt46n5p9td1a)) > The central idea here is that the thematic field affects the way the intentional object of the central experience is presented to the subject. This idea could be developed in a number of ways. Here is a natural one: let us think of the modes of appearance of what is at the focus of attention just as the appearance properties of the relevant phenomenal center. The way Columbus (or his discovery) appears to our subject in her conscious thought about him are the appearance properties of that conscious thought. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3v0t1fg06fgcx3dwxmkwwn)) > Centrality systems, as we have seen, form phenomenally unified and phenomenally entangled wholes. In the closing section of this chapter, I will consider the question whether phenomenal holism follows from this entanglement.31 Before we can answer this question, we must get clear on what the question > actually is. I will assume that both the relevant phenomenal whole (the centrality system) and its qualitative parts exist. Whether holism is true concerns what grounds what (or what metaphysically explains what): does the existence of the qualitative parts ground (or explain) the existence of the phenomenal whole? Or is it the other way around?32 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3v7qakhfptsz53zj199anr)) > I argue that we often have agentive awareness of attending, the structuring of the stream of consciousness, just like we often have agentive awareness of moving our body. When a subject actively moves her finger toward a dot on the wall in front of her, she is normally not just visually aware of the dot, but has a distinctive sense of agency: a sense of moving the finger herself.3 Similarly, when the subject actively directs her visual attention to the dot on the wall, she also has a distinctive sense of agency. While she is visually aware of the dot, she has agentive awareness of the activity of bringing that visual awareness to a central position in her field of 1 Brentano 1973 [1874], p. 22. > 2 I will make no claims about how we gain introspective knowledge of phenomenal qualities. > 3 The character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s movie often seems to lack such a sense of agency for the movements of his arm. Real disruptions of agentive awareness occur in the Anarchic Hand Syndrome (Della Sala et al. 1991, or Marcel 2003). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs46p1xrnbsw0qwbzz1v3nw4)) > We can gain knowledge about the structure of our own mind by, as it were, moving our mind, in the way we know about the relative position of our limbs by moving those limbs. But just like the exact path ofher finger is not revealed in a subject’s agentive awareness ofmoving the finger or limb (the fine-grained adjustments are due to unconscious motor representations),5 so agentive awareness of attending will normally not reveal the fine details of the centrality structure of the phenomenal field. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs46qvkrfa93twdqk0hhpzk6)) > How much detail is accessible introspectively through agentive awareness, I argue, depends on the fineness of grain in the content of the subject’s guiding states. A subject who attends more skillfully to her environment by being able to form more fine-grained inten- tions with regard to her attention, will also—incidentally in Brentano’s sense—gain more detailed knowledge of the structure of her own mind.6 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs46r5aepjv573s5tf3ve5aw)) > As Fred Dretske puts it in a related context: “awareness of the fact that you have a point ofview does not tell us how you know you have a point ofview. It merely restates (using the words ‘aware that’) that you know it. We still haven’t been told how you know it.”9 Dretske’s observation holds not just for fact awareness, but also for intellectual attention. Intellectual attention cannot mediate between the phenomenal structure ofa subject’s experience and her judgment that this experience has that phenomenal structure, because the attentionally prioritized thought is a prioritized non-propositional part of that judgment. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs46w8hk3rvy2mk7evh85ys1)) > If a subject has agentive attention awareness she is aware of creating, maintaining, or changing the centrality structure ofher conscious experience. A ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs47yjk50qkj5f6j2z7k06f2)) > And it is not just the ancients who have had such thoughts. A recent series ofstudies shows that extramission theories are deeply embedded even in our own contemporary ways of thinking about perception. Winer and his colleagues found that up to 80 percent of children in elementary school, and roughly 30 percent of college students believe that vision partly involves an outward-directed causal process.43 These results are extremely robust and persist even after explicit education about the actual causal processes involved in vision. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs48s1exp7ahm10emxkbes5v)) > If I were to direct my attention away from o, I would not see o. So, I can do something to o (direct my attention to it) that makes o visible. But how could something that I do make the object visible? What is the mechanism? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs48zjdpmy99b8e57hhafjv4)) - Note: Why the extramission view seemed intuitive to ancient/medieval philosophers, and small children. > We can further elaborate on this as follows: it is immediately obvious even to naïve subjects, that whether you see or perceptually notice an object depends on whether you have turned your body, head, and eyes in the right direction: you cannot see what is behind your eyes. But it probably is similarly obvious that in many cases (though, not all cases) whether you see an object depends on whether you have focused your attention in the right direction. When the subjects of Winer’s experiments, as well as the past philosophers, now think about the somewhat theoretical question of how perception works, whether something leaves the eye or not, it is natural for those subjects to think about these dependencies: I can see o only if I actively direct my attention to o. If I were to direct my attention away from o, I would not see o. So, I can do something to o (direct my attention to it) that makes o visible. But how could something that I do make the object visible? What is the mechanism? In the case of turning your head, such a mechanism is easy to find: what you do results in a situation where you create a perceptual path between the object and yourself so that it now can perceptually interact with you (e.g. light from the object can hit your eyes). But, now, what about the case of attention? What mechanism could explain why you see something only when you pay appropriate attention? Without the necessary knowledge of physics and psychology, it is very natural to think of this mechanism in analogy to the bodily case: what you do results in a, here more ephemeral, perceptual path between the object and you so that you can see it. And so, in a very natural (though mistaken) train of thought a subject arrives at versions of the extramis- sion view. She might for example think that attention stretches the air between subject and object so as to allow the object to be seen. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs48xmw5rdk01n56tvtx3h1h))