3 - Attention, Mental Causation, and the Self

Summary

The existence of the self with its own causal powers is an unpopular idea in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Yet, I find that attention provides evidence of such a self. In this chapter I argue that attention provides room for a particular understanding of the self that aligns with nonreductive materialism, against physicalism. As I discuss, attention provides experiential evidence, as when it seems to us that we effortfully direct our attention; it provides behavioral evidence, as when we identify the difference between endogenous and exogenous attention in others; and it provides neural evidence, as when top-down attention is distinguished from bottom-up attention on the basis of scale. The best way of understanding this evidence, I argue, is that a subject, understood as macro-scale patterns of brain activity, directs attention. One might interpret this through "weak emergence," but I argue in favor of a stronger emergence, known as "contextual emergence": the subject emerges from neural activity in the context of being associated with a body that engages with a world. This subject-centered account is unique among philosophers and better fits the available evidence.