This thread has pretty much wound itself down, but I did want to add a few more comments.
Nothing like a few more comments to revive a dead corpse.
I hope that I've managed to tease apart the difference between awareness and attention, because I think that the latter is the most important aspect of what we normally refer to as "consciousness".
Already you're going to fast here. The most important aspect of consciousness depends on what we mean by consciousness to begin with.
You will be aware of the distinction between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness. I think you would need to start from that.
So, I think that if we restrict our attention to the easy-enough-to-understand aspect of consciousness, which I think is precisely awareness, then, unsurprisingly, it suddenly looks much easier to understand.
So, awareness, strictly identified as a form of knowledge, knowledge of some species of data, perhaps broadly what Russell called "sense-data", what I would myself rather call "mental data", then attention can be construed as the way the mind, or the brain, focuses awareness on a particular batch of mental data.
That has to be a very important aspect of awareness and of how our mind works, but whether that's the "most important" would be debatable. Unfortunately, this thread "has pretty much wound itself down".
Attention can be construed as the process of foregrounding, and attention/foregrounding is the primary cognitive tool that we use to resolve ambiguous perceptual illusions. It allows us to interpret sensations in terms of a mental model.
Our mental life contains all sorts of things beside sensations. For example, ideas, memories and impressions. And our attention can focus on those as well.
If only illusions can be ambiguous, then there's nothing for the mind to resolve. So, better drop the word "illusion" here.
Also, "resolve" is just a little bit too optimistic. I would rather say that the mind decides on, or the brain produces, a particular interpretation. And, clearly, if it's the wrong interpretation, then nothing will be resolved. And we do sometimes choose the wrong interpretation, especially when our brain has started going down the drain.
And, I'm also unsure as to whether attention is really required to this process of deciding on, or producing, interpretations. I would for example be confortable with the idea that the brain comes up with one interpretation through an unconscious process. I suspect that's what happens most of the time. Sounds economical, and economy is rather critical, I think, to the way the brain works.
That being said, attention is definitely a fact of our mental life. It happens. Our attention will shift from one thing to another. Something we were barely aware of will suddenly become "the focus of our attention", and we will normally become very aware of it.
So, possibly, attention is just the way the brain optimises its operations. Low awareness for most things to be economical, and then there's some kind of a problem and the brain suddenly diverts most of it energy onto it. Sounds effective to me, and effectiveness, I think, would be pretty critical to the way the brain has to work.
My understanding of the somewhat prickly interchange between subsymbolic and speakpigeon was that they were arguing over what causes attention to shift.
I'd would love to see where you got this idea. Could you for example provide the relevant quotes? I think I doubt that very much.
As I see it, some people just don't read too well what's just written on the page in front of their very eyes. It is nothing more then the misinterpretation of one word. I'd say, most people would do well to learn their English properly.
For example, what makes one of the two illusory 3D Necker "cubes" to pop out as an interpretation of the 2D image. My take on that is that the primary driver is emotion. We have no control over emotions and moods in the moment, and that aspect of cognition is essentially what drives our so-called "free will". They determine our goals. Emotional conflicts determine conflicting priorities. Strength of emotion determines priorities.
I'd rather doubt emotion is the kingpin you portray here. No doubt emotion is very important and that it has an operational role in our mental lives. But I think you are really extending the scope of our ordinary notion of emotion. As I see it, an emotion is something I can feel, something I am aware of, and if interpretations are produced by the brain through an unconscious process, then emotions don't play a part at all at this level.
Where emotions could still play a part may be in selecting between two interpretations, but only once they're out there in our awareness space. Once we have competing interpretations, maybe an emotion will make us decide which one is to be preferred, particularly if we allow very low-level emotions to be taken into account. That would make sense to me, yes.
Still, situations where we have competing interpretations to choose from seem to be pretty rare in our daily lives, which, again, seems to me to be rather a good thing and pretty critical to our survival in a complex environment.
Nothing about making choices or decisions is random or "free" in terms of the philosophical debate over determinism. In fact, we can add physical substances, e.g. alcohol, to the brain that change our emotional state and the choices we make. In free will debates, it is an interesting question to address what is "free" about people acting under the influence of drugs and drug addiction.
Free will is what people mean when they talk of having free will.
EB
