5 - Attention, Consciousness, and Habitual Behavior

Summary

Discovering the natural basis of consciousness is a central concern of philosophy and cognitive science, and thus whether attention is necessary for consciousness is the hottest topic in research on attention. While in the previous chapter I argued that attention is necessary for conscious perception, I argue in this chapter that it is not necessary for other forms of consciousness, such as "conscious entrainment," which occurs during habitual behavior. I make this case by looking at the phenomenology of conscious entrainment and the science of habitual behavior. Before making this argument I set aside previous reasoning in favor of consciousness without attention, such as arguments for imagistic content, perceptual gist, and phenomenal consciousness. Often these positions are set against the "global workspace theory"—the theory that attention is necessary to bring otherwise unconscious stimuli into the global workspace that is consciousness. Conscious entrainment calls on us to reject this way of thinking about consciousness, and I provide a different "interface" conception: consciousness is one aspect of the relationship between a subject and its world.