Consciousness and Self-Directed Attention

Abstract

The relationship between external reality and people’s subjective experience of it has been the subject of philosophical inquiry over the past 2,000 years. These efforts reached a peak during the European Renaissance in the debates between adherents of monism vs. dualism over whether or not objective reality and subjective experience are unified or entirely distinct phenomena that can never being fully reduced or understood relative to one another. A manifestation of this debate was the mind–body problem. Is consideration of the physical and mechanistic underpinnings of human physiology necessary for understanding mental experience? Furthermore, is objectivity theoretically possible if subjective mental experience is distinct from objective reality? Questions regarding the nature of human consciousness and awareness of self relative to the external world have tended to be either implicitly or explicitly embedded in these philosophical debates which continue even today.