Disentangling consciousness and attention: a neurophilosophical outlook.

This project investigates the relation between consciousness and attention, a relation which needs to be specified in order to make progress on the problem of consciousness. The central questions are whether there can be consciousness without attention and whether there can be attention without consciousness. Progress on both questions is stagnating, because they are currently posed as if attention were a single phenomenon. This is not the case, as research on attention shows. The problem is that there's currently no satisfying taxonomy of the different attention types, which makes it very difficult for consciousness researchers to translate and integrate findings from the attention literature into their theorising. I will fill this lacuna, by developing such a taxonomy. This will lead to a reformulation of both questions according to the identified attention types. These new questions will then be reassessed on the basis of relevant empirical findings. The result will be a more fine-grained account of the relation between both concepts, which will undoubtedly fuel subsequent theorising and experimentation in the field of consciousness. My results will impact two related philosophical problems, which will also be addressed: the first concerns the 'metaphysics' of attention, or finding its essential features. The other is to assess whether attention can provide counterexamples to representationalism, which states that the character of experience is determined by its content.

Keywords:CONSCIOUSNESS

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of philosophy, Philosophy, Other philosophy, ethics and religious studies not elsewhere classified

Project type:Collaboration project