Understanding Consciousness: Awareness vs. Attention

[Copernicus]

People spend a lot of time discussing the nature of consciousness here. I would like to explain to some aspects of it that you are aware of but may not have paid sufficient attention to regarding this subject.

Consider what differentiates the meaning of word pairs like "see" and "look" or "hear" and "listen":

1) The boy saw/looked at the radio.
2) The boy heard/listened to the radio.

The verbs "see" and "hear" describe acts of awareness. The verbs "look" and "listen" describe acts of attention to awareness.

The brain is a machine that continuously receives and interprets different types of sensations. It is aware of these sensations subconsciously, but it selectively pays attention to them. Awareness of the simultaneity of sensations gives meaning to words like "here" and "now". That awareness of simultaneous sensations is what we understand the present tense of verbs to refer to. Words like "then" and "there" contrast the present with a remembered simultaneity or "situation". So the mind "situates" reality on the basis of comparing and contrasting its ongoing sensorium with memories and imagination. Situated awareness is always a part of the "background noise" in our stream of consciousness.

To understand what consciousness is, you have to consider how attention works. Different types of unattended awareness (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, etc.) are going on all the time in a brain, but they are "subconscious". They take place in the dark, so to speak. When the mind focuses attention on some singular instance of awareness, it is like shining a flashlight on something in the dark. Suddenly that thing springs into the foreground. This flashlight of consciousness can be focused anywhere on background "subconscious" awareness, so who is holding that light and why does that agent illuminate different places in its sensorium or running train of thought?

I have more to say, but I'll pause here and let folks mull that over. This is the point where people start thinking about free will and agency. What is paying attention to different pieces of this chaotic hodgepodge of awareness roiling around in the brain? What continuously changes the contrast between foreground and background? I'll give my take on it later, but that is the question I want to put to you. Think about what you do when your attention moves from one thing to another.

 

[untermensche]

To say that a sensation is sub-conscious, or not available to consciousness is not to say the brain has constructed something out of it and is aware of some product.

The only products of sensation may be those available to consciousness.

If it is not potentially available to consciousness there is no need to turn it into a product.

 

[Copernicus]

To say that a sensation is sub-conscious, or not available to consciousness is not to say the brain has constructed something out of it and is aware of some product.

The only products of sensation may be those available to consciousness.

If it is not potentially available to consciousness there is no need to turn it into a product.

The primary focus here is the difference between awareness and attention. You can be aware of something, e.g. a toothache, without paying attention to it. By that, I mean that you can direct your attention elsewhere, causing the toothache to fade into the background noise.

This contrast exists not only for awareness, but also for volition. That is, you can catch a ball or play a piano on autopilot, so to speak. You can also make yourself consciously aware of your movements by focusing attention on them. You don't think about everywhere you are moving your feet when you dance, but you can, if you want to. In complex, coordinated movement, you are not consciously aware of every decision your body makes to achieve the overall effect of a bodily movement. Most of it takes place at a what I call a "subconscious" level. That said, I will also admit that awareness and volition are more or less attended to. That is, there may be different degrees of attention. (To continue the "flashlight" metaphor, the brain has lots of flashlights with different levels of luminosity.)

Another example of this contrast between awareness and attention is the Yoga technique of "conscious relaxation" (See, e.g., http://flowingwithchange.com/conscious-relaxation-anywhere-anytime/). In this technique, one lies down and consciously relaxes body parts by systematically focusing attention on each body part and then deliberately making it go lax until the entire body is relaxed.

 

[untermensche]

At one time the musician had to focus very closely on what they were doing. But after some practice they were able to accomplish the task with less attention.

This is a phenomena of practice. What is the relationship between practice and the need of attention?

Some can accomplish things with less practice than others. If they are young they may be called prodigies. But with a practice, and it may entail years of practice, another person may be able to do it better. The hare and tortoise analogy.

We all at one time had a hard time walking. But since it has been practiced so much we do not need to attend so closely.

In terms of looking at whether awareness is necessary to accomplish a task we should look at novel tasks. Looking at tasks that been practiced is cloudy.

 

[Copernicus]

Unter, I am finding it hard to relate what you are saying here to what I have been saying, and I don't know whether your disagreement comes from a lack of attention or a lack of awareness. Practice is useful in instilling habits, but I was talking about actual perception and actual execution. Attention and awareness are key concepts in any discussion of the nature of consciousness. Planning and practice are about future behavior, not actual behavior. All you seem to be saying is that people have to pay attention and practice in order to acquire motor skills.

 

[untermensche]

I directly addressed your comments:

...you can catch a ball or play a piano on autopilot, so to speak...

What you call "autopilot I call a well practiced activity.

Nothing automatic.

The activity can be controlled with a very low level of attention because a lot of practice has occurred.

No "subconscious", just plain old consciousness able to control with a low level of awareness.

And again, if you wanted to study the relationship between functional activities and attention and level of awareness you should look at novel activities to see if any can be accomplished with a low level of awareness or low attention.

 

[fromderinside]

Clearly it has been shown she can attend to several things at a given point in time whilst it is just as well demonstrated that she is aware of only one of those attendings. For instance a sound may arouse her who then proceeds to become aware of a situation. Sound can be sensed and processed while she is sleeping while obviously it is not usual for touch to be processed while she sleeps since to do so would probably awaken her.

Sensing is pretty easy to objectify in an normal awake person. She need only be directed to attend to the state of affairs after a signal, say a light is briefly turned on then required to report whether she heard a sound or felt a touch or experienced tension on her arm to demonstrate one attends to those things. It is more clear that her awareness that there is as sound, a touch or a pull depends on the magnitude of the event by examining probabilities of 'detecting' a signal when there is a signal versus reporting a signal when there is no signal present.

It is also possible for there to be other events to which she attended to be ongoing at the same time her awareness is directed to a particular mode by getting the observer to report those events which were ongoing as well. Her awareness can be moved from one to any of a number of other events to which she has been attending simply by asking her whether she recalls concurrent events.

Senses are processing information, attending, whenever one is awake. But individual senses need directing to assure she is aware of what this or that sense is processing. Summarizing attending is the processing of information via various modalities while being aware is a mode where things can be integrated and articulated.

 

[Copernicus]

Clearly it has been shown she can attend to several things at a given point in time whilst it is just as well demonstrated that she is aware of only one of those attendings...

Before I try to respond to this, can you identify the antecedent for the pronoun "she"? I find it a little hard to follow your point, because I keep wondering who you are talking about. And are you responding to my post or unter's? I'm guessing that you may have edited the text and inadvertently deleted the antecedent reference.

 

[DBT]

Attention is awareness, it is a state of awareness focused upon an object of interest.

 

[ruby sparks]

When the mind focuses attention on some singular instance of awareness, it is like shining a flashlight on something in the dark. Suddenly that thing springs into the foreground. This flashlight of consciousness can be focused anywhere on background "subconscious" awareness, so who is holding that light and why does that agent illuminate different places in its sensorium or running train of thought?

The way I tend to think about this, and I accept I'm only an interested non-expert, is that the attention is generated by the system in response to both internal and external stimuli and processes. At some point, activity (probably electro-chemical activity) crosses a 'threshold'.

An example of where external stimuli might be the main influence is where an external stimulus apparently has to be of a certain duration and/or intensity before we consciously register it, even though our brain is responding prior to that, according to certain neuroscientific experiments at least. But as we know, the brain can also generate its own processes (eg there is apparently more internally-generated information than external information involved in vision, I believe). In broad terms then, there are few if any processes which are not a blend of internal and external (and as an externalist I consider the skull a physical but not a cognitive boundary anyway).

I know this is all a bit vague and I am using certain words loosely ('information' and 'threshold' for example). But basically, imo, attention just switches on automatically. There is no agent holding a flashlight, obviously. There is no agent at all. Agency is just a word we use to describe a capacity of the overall system, and 'agent' is a user-illusion.

 

[ruby sparks]

ETA: As to the types of things which might 'trigger' attention, I'd be guessing, but as well as activity of a certain duration or intensity, I might add the unfamiliar, unlearnt or unexpected (unpredicted), or anything particularly to do with survival or a related priority. Is this what goes on when I can (sometimes) drive for miles and miles, usually along a familiar route, without being aware of it, but will (hopefully or usually) snap to attention if a dog suddenly runs across the road in front of my direction of travel? Is this why I will more likely wake if someone says my name than if they say something else at the same volume?

Which would give us at least three triggering criteria, intensity, duration and pattern/type.

If I were to venture even further out on an amateur limb, I would wonder if conscious attention is or isn't more resource-hungry, and if it's the former then it might be something only resorted to when necessary or useful by a system that is geared, in evolutionary terms, to achieve as much resource-efficiency as it can.

 

[Juma]

read ”thinking, fast and slow”

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

 

[ruby sparks]

read ”thinking, fast and slow”

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Thanks. I'd often seen that on the bookshelves and thought about buying.

Have ordered it now.

It looks like it's for the layman but then, that's me.

 

[Subsymbolic]

read ”thinking, fast and slow”

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Thanks. I'd often seen that on the bookshelves and thought about buying.

Have ordered it now.

It looks like it's for the layman but then, that's me.

Just remember that system one and system two might have more traditional names...

 

[Copernicus]

Juma, I have not read that book, so I cannot discuss it here. Worse, I can't figure out its relevance to the topic, so I would ask as a courtesy that you to explain the point or move the discussion to another thread.

 

[Copernicus]

Attention is awareness, it is a state of awareness focused upon an object of interest.

Then what is the difference between subliminal awareness and attention? There is always an "object" of awareness, because it is fundamentally a relationship between an observer and an object. However, I've pointed out that the brain is simultaneously aware of a great many sensations, but it focuses on only one at a time. Hence, the flashlight metaphor. What you seem to be saying here is that the flashlight is the same thing as what its beam illuminates.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is that attention is the process of "foregrounding" an instance of awareness. When we illuminate something, we cause it to stand out from the background. So what I'm saying is that there are lots of different instances of "awareness" taking place simultaneously in the background. The brain focuses attention by making an instance of awareness (a sight, a smell, a sound, a touch, etc.) appear in the foreground, leaving others in the background.

When the mind focuses attention on some singular instance of awareness, it is like shining a flashlight on something in the dark. Suddenly that thing springs into the foreground. This flashlight of consciousness can be focused anywhere on background "subconscious" awareness, so who is holding that light and why does that agent illuminate different places in its sensorium or running train of thought?

The way I tend to think about this, and I accept I'm only an interested non-expert, is that the attention is generated by the system in response to both internal and external stimuli and processes. At some point, activity (probably electro-chemical activity) crosses a 'threshold'.

An example of where external stimuli might be the main influence is where an external stimulus apparently has to be of a certain duration and/or intensity before we consciously register it, even though our brain is responding prior to that, according to certain neuroscientific experiments at least. But as we know, the brain can also generate its own processes (eg there is apparently more internally-generated information than external information involved in vision, I believe). In broad terms then, there are few if any processes which are not a blend of internal and external (and as an externalist I consider the skull a physical but not a cognitive boundary anyway).

I know this is all a bit vague and I am using certain words loosely ('information' and 'threshold' for example). But basically, imo, attention just switches on automatically. There is no agent holding a flashlight, obviously. There is no agent at all. Agency is just a word we use to describe a capacity of the overall system, and 'agent' is a user-illusion.

I agree with you that nobody is holding the flashlight. I would describe it differently in that I think it important to distinguish between the central and peripheral nervous systems. You seem to be describing signals sent from the periphery as "external stimulus". Also, I don't find it helpful to go into low level details on how nerves function. What is important is to acknowledge that perception is necessarily active, not passive. So information from the peripheral system is "interpreted" by matching it against properties of models created by the central nervous system. What we perceive are the interpretations created by the central nervous system.

There is no better way to explain this than to focus on a simple illusion such as the Necker cube, a two-dimensional line drawing that evokes an ambiguous 3D image:

View attachment 14104

The point is that we are aware of all of the lines in the drawing, but we impose a perception of a right-leaning or left-leaning cube, depending on how we shift our attention. There are two squares in the image. If we think of the "face" of the cube as the square on the left (i.e. "foreground" that square), then we perceive a left/down-leaning cube. If we foreground the square on the right, it becomes a right/up-leaning cube. In either case we still retain awareness of the square in the background, but it is part of the background.

ETA: So, if we can agree that "nobody" is holding the flashlight, what causes it to move around? What causes shifts in attention?

 

[DBT]

Then what is the difference between subliminal awareness and attention?

Subliminal implies that awareness is barely at the threshold of consciousness, an experience of impressions, associations and feelings, while attention is the full focus of awareness upon something of interest... attention can be steady for some time or may wander from article to article, ie, something draws your attention away while you are focused onto something of interest.

 

[Kharakov]

Attention is awareness, it is a state of awareness focused upon an object of interest.

Wow. I could focus on that sentence. Starfish!

 

[Copernicus]

Then what is the difference between subliminal awareness and attention?

Subliminal implies that awareness is barely at the threshold of consciousness, an experience of impressions, associations and feelings, while attention is the full focus of awareness upon something of interest... attention can be steady for some time or may wander from article to article, ie, something draws your attention away while you are focused onto something of interest.

OK, let me try this again, maybe from a different angle. Please let me know if you disagree with any of this. An act of "awareness" is logically just a relationship between a perceiver and an object. Verbs like "hear", "see", and "touch" refer to acts of awareness. It is not necessarily a conscious act, because the mind monitors lots of sensations that are subliminal. You say "barely at the threshold of consciousness", but that suggests to me that you think of consciousness as scalar--that it can be less than fully conscious. (I am attempting here to explain how consciousness works, so it is important to acknowledge at least this much for me to get the point across.) So there must be some sort of process for moving the act of awareness up and down that scale, right? "Attention" is a different semantic operator. It refers to the process of moving the act of awareness up the scale. It "illuminates" or "highlights" the act of awareness. It puts the act of awareness in the foreground, leaving all the other acts of awareness in the brain somehow dimmer or grayed out. Verbs like "listen", "look", and "feel" denote acts of awareness that are highlighted by this process of "attending" to awareness. Does that make sense to you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to decompose the semantics of awareness and attention--to stop conflating them into a single process.

So we can at least explain optical illusions like the Necker cube as cases of shifting attention. That is, one sees a different "cube" illusion, depending on which square in the image one puts into the foreground as the face of the cube. Would you agree to that characterization?

 

[DBT]

Then what is the difference between subliminal awareness and attention?

Subliminal implies that awareness is barely at the threshold of consciousness, an experience of impressions, associations and feelings, while attention is the full focus of awareness upon something of interest... attention can be steady for some time or may wander from article to article, ie, something draws your attention away while you are focused onto something of interest.

OK, let me try this again, maybe from a different angle. Please let me know if you disagree with any of this. An act of "awareness" is logically just a relationship between a perceiver and an object. Verbs like "hear", "see", and "touch" refer to acts of awareness. It is not necessarily a conscious act, because the mind monitors lots of sensations that are subliminal. You say "barely at the threshold of consciousness", but that suggests to me that you think of consciousness as scalar--that it can be less than fully conscious.

Consciousness is a broad term that refers to a collection of features and attributes. We may be watching something on TV, for example, but miss what was said because of a lapse of attention, a distraction, we remember the visual part clearly but can't recall the dialogue...or upon waking we may be still half asleep so it takes a moment to recall what day it is and what what we were supposed to be doing today, then it comes rushing in, we are fully awake, which is to be aware or conscious, shifting focus on matters that require attention. Attention being a distinguishable feature or attribute of consciousness.

(I am attempting here to explain how consciousness works, so it is important to acknowledge at least this much for me to get the point across.) So there must be some sort of process for moving the act of awareness up and down that scale, right? "Attention" is a different semantic operator. It refers to the process of moving the act of awareness up the scale. It "illuminates" or "highlights" the act of awareness. It puts the act of awareness in the foreground, leaving all the other acts of awareness in the brain somehow dimmer or grayed out. Verbs like "listen", "look", and "feel" denote acts of awareness that are highlighted by this process of "attending" to awareness. Does that make sense to you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to decompose the semantics of awareness and attention--to stop conflating them into a single process.

I generally agree with your description, but I am not conflating the two terms. I don't see an absolute separation, so I am pointing out that we cannot be attentive without being aware. Of course, attention is distinguishable aspect or feature of being aware. Overlap if you like, to be conscious is be aware, to be attentive to be focused upon an object of interest, which is to be aware of that object at the exclusion of other things. Like the focusing of a zoom telescope, the object of focus being sharp and clear while the background is slightly out of focus.

So we can at least explain optical illusions like the Necker cube as cases of shifting attention. That is, one sees a different "cube" illusion, depending on which square in the image one puts into the foreground as the face of the cube. Would you agree to that characterization?

View attachment 14116

I do agree.