Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Philosophical Landscape on Attention
- 3 Attention, Mental Causation, and the Self
- 4 Attention, Perception, and Knowledge
- 5 Attention, Consciousness, and Habitual Behavior
- 6 Attention, Action, and Responsibility
- 7 Conclusion
- Appendix A Mental Causation and Its Problems
- Appendix B The Conceptual History of Top-Down Attention
- Appendix C Top-Down Attention and the Brain
- Appendix D Working Memory and Attention
- References
- Index
3 - Attention, Mental Causation, and the Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Philosophical Landscape on Attention
- 3 Attention, Mental Causation, and the Self
- 4 Attention, Perception, and Knowledge
- 5 Attention, Consciousness, and Habitual Behavior
- 6 Attention, Action, and Responsibility
- 7 Conclusion
- Appendix A Mental Causation and Its Problems
- Appendix B The Conceptual History of Top-Down Attention
- Appendix C Top-Down Attention and the Brain
- Appendix D Working Memory and Attention
- References
- Index
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Attending Mind , pp. 35 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020