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".
OK, so here's where you fundamentally misunderstood what I said. I said that ATTENTION, not AWARENESS, was the most important aspect of consciousness. Attention (an act of foregrounding or highlighting) plays a role in motor, as well as sensory, behavior. It is the mechanism that allows us to resolve ambiguous perceptions such as optical illusions. If you want to understand how consciousness emerges in the machine that we call a "brain", then you need to pay attention to attention.
You misunderstood.
The only sensible way to interpret what I said is that attention is an important aspect of awareness but probably not the most important one.
I can appropriately repeat myself here: "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."
And here, the one word was "that".
Not a great start.
EB
Actually, the antecedent to "that" was not clear to me until you clarified it with an underline. In fact, I took it as a reference to the idea expressed by the sentence rather than the specific word "attention". But you are the expert on what you intended to say, and I am happy to stand corrected. Moreover, you did go on to acknowledge the difference between "attention" and "awareness", even if you felt yourself somewhat in disagreement with what I have been saying. That is an important distinction to make. The problem is that people tend to conflate attention and awareness. What I tried to point out to you--and you still may have missed--was that "attention" was also relevant to motor behavior (volition), not just perceptual behavior.
BTW, condescending lectures about reading English aren't helpful, especially from someone whose native language is not English. In French, demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are often less ambiguous because of gender agreement. So you may be less sensitive to the ambiguity of pronoun reference. Even native speakers of English have trouble with it.
Psychologists need an operational definition for "attention", so eye movement can be taken as an indicator of "attention".
Sure they do, but that's what
fromderinside should have explained and failed to do, that psychologists had to use their own in-house, private, definition of "attention", and that this had very little to do with attention as we all think of it. And all this apparently without even realising that's what they're doing.
No, I don't think that fromderinside needed to explain what was obvious from reading the article. And here again, I remind you that "attention" applies to motor behavior, not just perceptual. Eye movement is a good indicator of an act of "attention". Please also recall that I have equated "attention" with a process of foregrounding or highlighting. That is very important, because it is a key aspect of subliminal and supraliminal cognition. Another way to understand what I am getting at here is that there are degrees or levels of consciousness. Individual events of "attention" in a brain may not be events that people are consciously aware of. I felt that that was something of a given in fromderinside's article.
And you're doing something similar by extending the scope of "emotion" to unconscious processes. All this apparently without even realising that's what you're doing.
Lots of people just do things without realising what they're doing.
Some people should do well just to wake up.
Although in Washington state maybe it's time to go to bed.
EB
We are not always consciously aware of emotional conflicts that go on in our heads, and I think that you would probably agree, if you gave it some thought. I was somewhat surprised that you seemed not think that emotion had much to do with motivating decisions or behavior, but I suppose you are more intent on being disagreeable than understanding. At least, that is the impression I get from some of your snide comments. Consciousness is not a binary concept. We are more or less conscious of things, not just conscious or unconscious. So any account of what consciousness means needs to approach it as a scalar concept. A state of grogginess is not one that is fully conscious or fully unconscious. Acts of awareness, attention, and volition can occur at any level of consciousness, including the subliminal.
Well, you do "see" two different cubes in the Necker illusion, don't you? You don't see them simultaneously, but sequentially. Your perception shifts between the two visual interpretations. When it shifts, that is ambiguity resolution. To say that "the mind decides on" or "the brain produces" is somewhat trivially true, so why would you "rather" not talk about the awareness/attention dichotomy that has been the topic under discussion?
Well, hold on there. The brain does a lot of "unconscious" things all at once. Attention, awareness, and volition are cognitive processes in a mind, and brains produce minds. So it is trivial to keep using "brain" as a metonymy substitution for "mind". That does not help us understand how cognition works. It is more helpful to establish the behavior of cognitive components of consciousness, if we are truly interested in understanding what it means for a physical machine such as a brain to produce it.
Perception can "
shift between the two visual interpretations" without attention as we usually understand it playing any part in the process. I don't see how it would be sensible to claim that the attention of the subject shifted if the subject is not even conscious his attention shifted. So, here again, like for the term "emotion", I think you are extending the scope of the term ""attention" to include unconscious processes, without making it clear that's what you're doing. What kind of attention are you talking about? Well, that's precisely that which you've failed to make explicit, just like those bright scientists did in the paper discussed by
fromderinside. So, at least, you're in good company.
Actually, I think that those scientists were perfectly correct to think that consciousness is a very fluid thing, but you seem to have a more rigid view of it. They weren't just deciding to take that position. It seems to be based on a broad range of experience found in virtually every scientific study of perception. Most perceptual activity is subliminal. All they were saying was that researchers should be more careful about distinguishing acts of attention from instances of awareness. I am fully in agreement with that. What I am doing a little differently from them is that I am overtly linking the concept of "attention" with foregrounding (or highlighting) behavior. Attention is a relationship between foreground and background. Awareness is a relationship between perceiver and object.
There's a more general point to be made. Scientists could very easily, and I think definitely should, invent their own terminology to talk about their scientific results. This would stop this recurrent problem whereby, first, non-scientists are mislead as to the significance of scientific results, and, second, at least some very confused scientists think sensible to chastise the non-scientists for talking non-sense by failing to parrot scientific talk. Instead of talking of 'attention' for an unconscious process, which actually makes no sense, one could talk of 'unconscious focus' for example. Instead of talking of 'emotion' for an unconscious process, which again makes no sense, one could talk of 'unconscious impulse' or 'spur'.
I don't think anything is to be gained by anybody by having very confused scientists keep denying any value to what non-scientists say about their experience of life.
EB
SP, your general point really applies to most conversations that occur in everyday language. They normally contain a healthy amount of negotiation over the meaning of words and phrases. We see that all the time in these online discussions. Scientists normally write for other scientists, so they share a more general understanding of the subject matter that renders such clarifications unnecessary in all cases. If they write for the general public, then they do need to clarify their language for that context. I think that fromderinside's article was a perfectly relevant contribution here precisely because it cautioned against conflating awareness (perception) with attention (foregrounding). Eye movement is an important indication of attention, so I think that their use of that telltale was spot on. That most cognitive acts of perception, awareness, and volition are subliminal seems fairly obvious to me, but the problem is our tendency to conflate concepts such as awareness and attention in everyday usage of those words. If we are ever to solve the "hard problem", then we really need to pay attention to fine distinctions of that sort in animal cognition.
(Note to SP: I haven't had time to review your interchange with fromderinside after your last reply to me. This was written offline and pasted here. I'll read the other posts when I have the time.)
Gödel, Escher, Bach, which, not surprisingly, had a lot to say about perceptual illusions. However, being a linguist, I would start from the perspective of the recursive structure of linguistic phrases--the mechanism that allows us to construct sentences. And I would show how "attention" plays a fundamental role in building up phrase structure. None of this is something that I invented out of whole cloth. It is an approach to cognition that has a lot of scholarly precedent. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), this venue is far too casual to get into serious details on such a subject.
