Abstract
The crux of the dispute on the mutual relations between attention and consciousness, and to which I have referred in this paper, lies in the question of what can be attended in spatial attention that obviously resonates with the phenomenological issue of intentionality (e.g., the noesis-noema structure). The discussion has been initiated by Christopher Mole. He began by calling for a commonsense psychology, according to which one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. In other words, attention is supposed to be a condition which is sufficient but not necessary for consciousness, i.e., consciousness is a necessary concomitant of attention, but attention is not a necessary concomitant of consciousness. Mole seeks to validate his stance with data from psychology labs. His view is, however, partly confronted, for instance, by Robert Kentridge, Lee de-Wit and Charles Heywood, who used their experimental research on a neurological condition called blindsight as evidence of a dissociation between attention and consciousness, i.e., that visual attention is not a sufficient precondition for visual awareness. In this meta-theoretical state of affairs, I would like to focus on the cognitive phenomenon most often referred to as Inhibition of Return (IOR) and suggest that, following its micro dynamics from the perspective of micro-phenomenology, it can be used to actually showcase all of the options on both sides of the argument. One of my leading goals would be also to follow Mole’s attempt to link attention with agency but where we differ is that I wish to heuristically articulate the matter in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of embodied pre-reflective intentionality.
Highlights
The crux of the dispute on the mutual relations between attention and consciousness, and to which I have referred in this paper, lies in the question of what can be attended in spatial attention that obviously resonates with the phenomenological issue of intentionality
Define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.”[1]. Brentano’s claim, and that of Husserl which followed,[2] of the “inexistence” of objects within intentional acts was, challenged by Merleau-Ponty.[3]. According to his notion of pre-reflective intentionality, it is a condition of directing intentional acts towards the Lifeworld rather than being of or about anything specific.[4]. This fundamental issue of the relationship between an intentional act and its object resonates throughout the dispute between Christopher Mole[5] and Robert Kentridge, Lee de-Wit and Charles Heywood[6] on the mutual relations between attention and consciousness, which has been chronicled in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, even though the authors do not choose to explicitly situate it in this context
From the phenomenologist’s purview, it is reminiscent of Virgil’s Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes phrase, with experimental psychologists playing the role of the devious “Greeks.” Giving consciousness a deflationary treatment and accounting for it in terms of attentional processes may only further obfuscate the mutual relationship of both categories in a way that it would be dubbed as the attention-consciousness problem, or perhaps more adequately – the consciousness-attention problem
Summary
According to Brentano’s famous dictum, “[e]very mental phenomenon includes something like object within itself. S/he either employs attention which is already there or reorients attention to the uncued location in order to recognize, i.e., to become “consciously aware” – as Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues put it,[21] referring to Posner – that the stimulus is a target and subsequently voluntarily triggering the reaction If this description adequately reflects the sequence of events, one can discern a gap between disappearance of the cue and appearance of the target when there is attention which is oriented but there is not an object that is being attended. I am inclined to think that following the sequence of events further in the cuing task after the facilitatory effect finishes, one arrives at the standpoint from which the question of the relation between attention and its object in the context of the attention-consciousness problem may appear in still more light It is when the time interval between a cue and a target exceeds approximately 300 ms. If this canonical interpretation is, adequate, I would like to make it a case to be a potential challenge for Brentano’s famous dictum of necessary “in-existence” of particular objects within intentional acts, e.g., attentional ones, and for Kentridge and colleagues’ approach to follow, not explicitly, to claim that spatial attention always has a specific object
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