Given that the school year at CMU starts today, this will be my last post (split in two). Thanks to readers for very helpful discussion in the previous posts. Part 2 will be published late Tuesday or Wednesday. [Update: teaching classes today, so will be slower to respond, though I did finish writing my lectures!].

I’m not going to discuss the visual streams as planned. Still, some may be interested, so to voice the claim I would have argued for: parts of the dorsal stream play a central role in visual consciousness. The dorsal stream is not a purely unconscious stream (see here). Ok, moving on to today’s question:

What is introspective attention?

Maybe not what many philosophers have thought.



What follows is work in progress, so there will be many gaps. But I hope there are some new points to be made in what follows on introspection and transparency. I know there are readers who know much more about these issues then I do, so I will be grateful for help!

Attention has a central role to play in philosophical investigation of introspection and of phenomenal concepts, yet philosophers often have little to say about attention even as their theories invoke the idea at crucial points. There are exceptions, of course, among them, Brie Gertler whose work here and elsewhere I strongly recommend.

Let’s focus on introspection of perceptual consciousness. It is very natural to think that introspective attention is simple in its nature, for there isn’t much more to it (at its core) then that it gives us direct first-person access to the phenomenal features of consciousness. In doing so, it can allow for a sort of (near) infallible thought about consciousness. These points are compelling, captured in talk of acquaintance.

But I am suspicious of these ideas.

My goal is to contrast two conceptions of introspective attention: the direct model that gives rise to talk of acquaintance and the transparency model that is altogether different. On the nature of phenomenal properties, choose whichever theory you want, but I it will be helpful to think of them as non-physical properties to maximize the contrast between the two models. OK, here we go.

Transparency

Gilbert Harman notes the following:

‘‘Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree’’ (1990, 39).

Call this the transparency observation. The significance of it has been debated: Does it legislate against qualia, intrinsic features of experience? Does it establish or give evidence for representationalism? I have my doubts, but these are not our topics. Here’s what I take from it:

The capacities called upon in perceptual attention are the same as those called upon in introspective attention.

To see why this emphasis is different from what is generally discussed in the literature, consider two distinct readings of the transparency observation:

Object-Centered: The target of introspective attention is the same target as that of perceptual attention.

Process-Centered: The process of introspective attention and perceptual attention are the same.

I take Harman to focus on the first (what you attend to in introspection is what you attended to in perception), though transparency adherents endorse both. Given their targets (establishing representationalism, eliminating “qualiaphilic” theories), transparency adherents have emphasized the object-centered version, though the two versions are logically independent. On the other hand, opponents of transparency deny both versions, though in engaging their transparency opponents, they focus on the object-centered version as well.

I think this emphasis has obscured some crucial points, and I think there is new insight to be gained by focusing on the process-centered version of transparency. If we refocus transparency then the question becomes:

Is there a single process shared between perceptual and introspective attention such that there are interesting philosophical implications?

There’s Attention and then There’s Attention



There are two stages in introspection where we can correctly talk about attention: (a) the process that fixes introspective thought or (b) introspective thought itself. In general, I shall speak of (b) as cognitive attention and (a) as attention that informs such thought (it could be perceptual or introspective attention). Talk of cognitive attention might sound odd to some of you, as the focus in attention theory has been on (a), but even William James noted in his famous description of attention that thought is a form of attention. We can think of it as a conceptual form of the directedness and selectivity that we often ascribe to attention.

On (a), we have two putative types of attention: perceptual attention informing empirical thought and introspective attention informing introspective thought. So, our question again is this: are they the same process or different?

Direct Theories

Direct theories (or acquaintance theories) are so called because they claim that we are directly aware of phenomenal properties by attending to them. But can these theorists say more about the nature of this form of attention? Where philosophers have provided an answer, it seems clear that introspective attention is different from perceptual attention as investigated by cognitive science.

Here are some properties that I have taken from Brie Gertler’s discussion (see also Dave Chalmers’ discussion for similar claims):

Introspective attention is direct.

It thus allows for a special way of thinking (conceptualizing) phenomenal features, perhaps a special type of demonstrative thought.

The attended phenomenal feature is embedded in the resulting thought.

Gertler’s view is nuanced, and these bullet points don’t do it full justice, but they capture the basic idea. It is the embedding that helps to explain the distinctiveness of concepts of the phenomenal and some of their epistemic properties. Since perceptual attention does not embed, and since this is a crucial feature of introspective attention, as Gertler and Chalmers I think would emphasize, then we do have a distinct form of attention. I suspect that attention as characterized here is what many philosopher have in mind when they speak of introspective attention. If not, then I ask them: what do you have in mind? Please do say…

The Challenge



Why believe that there is any such thing as direct attention that allows for embedding? Two possibilities: (a) theoretical constraints from elsewhere require that we postulate such a faculty and (b) something like introspection itself reveals it. Because philosophers often seem to suggest that we are obviously in a position to directly be aware of phenomenal properties, I want to first question (b), and return to (a) in the second part. For I assume that they are relying on introspection itself to make those claims.

First, a brief aside based on personal experience: As an exercise, find a scientist who works on perception and who is not already up on the vocabulary that we use to describe consciousness. Better if they don’t already work on consciousness. Now, try to get them to recognize that they can directly attend to phenomenal character. I predict that this will be quite hard to do which, if my prediction is correct, reminds us that attention to phenomenal properties is not as obvious as we might think it is. End aside.

Start with Harman’s observation: attend to some physical feature, F, of an object and think about it. Here, you are having a perception-based empirical thought about the world mediated by attention selecting F. Now, turn attention inward: introspect the visual phenomenal character Φ associated with experiencing F, and on that basis, have an introspective thought about Φ. Is there really attention that embeds Φ?

We noted that there are two stages where talk of attention gets a grip: thought and the selective process that leads to thought. When we transition from perceptual attention that serves empirical thought to introspective attention that serves introspective thought, we can note three uncontroversial instances of attention: the perceptual selectivity at the first stage, the empirical thought that it gives rise to, and the introspective thought in the switch.

OK: To the exercise again, and toggle attention back and form between attending to F and then to Φ. Is there really anything that you are are clearly toggling except cognitive attention, namely moving between introspective and empirical thought on the basis of a selective capacity? This is the process-based transparency point.

The transparency theorist has the following suspicion: either direct model theorists identify something that is not there in self-reflection (attention that can embed phenomenal features in judgments) or they are in fact speaking of cognitive introspective attention. Both options are consistent with transparency. So, the question then is whether we have any other reason to postulate the direct model…

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