Let me tell you about my friend Jayden: these days, Jayden gives a lot of her attention to community work. Jayden has always paid attention to what matters morally over anything else. Her attention somehow just tends to be drawn to the suffering of others. Her own achievements, by contrast, are not very salient to her. Over the years, at work and elsewhere, Jayden has acquired a great capacity to control the focus of her attention. It is, for example, for her fairly easy to ignore any insult that life throws at her. Maybe that is because she trains her attention in daily routines she has developed for herself.
In your mind, you now probably have a rough picture of Jayden’s life and her outlook on the world: Jayden is similar to some people you know and very different from others, you may think.
I am impressed by the fact that we learn so much of a person like Jayden, by only talking about attention. If you look at my description of her again, you will see that the only things I have told you concern what she pays attention to, how she pays attention, what is salient to her, and what her mental focus is.[1] In my little story I haven’t used any of the terminology that philosophers often use to describe the mind: no mention of her beliefs, thoughts, desires, feelings, emotions, intentions, her experiences, or what she sees, hears or perceives in some other way. Reflect for a moment on how much we learn about a person by only learning about her attention. This tells us something about the central role attention has in our conception of the mind.
What exactly did we learn about when we learned about Jayden’s attention? In some way, it seems that we did learn something about how Jayden thinks, about what she does, and what her intentions, desires, experiences, and feelings are. Attention is somehow intertwined with all these other aspects of the mind. One reason why you might want – and need – a theory of attention is that you are, like me, impressed by the significance of attention, and yet also feel the need to sort out how attention is related to the other aspects of the mind, to experience, and to action.
That is one reason why I wrote Structuring Mind: to develop a general theory of attention that vindicates the claim that attention has a central place in the mind. The main idea is that in order to understand attention we need to think about the structure of the mind, about how the different parts of the mind are connected to each other. When I told you about Jayden’s attention you learned a set of holistic, general facts about how her mind is organized.
Another reason why I wrote Structuring Mind is that I felt that a unified framework was needed to bring together a very disparate set of approaches to studying attention.
For example, you might have gotten interested in the philosophy of attention from the perspective of cognitive science. You may feel that while attention is an important topic in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, what exactly it is remains elusive. A satisfactory mechanistic account of attention is hard to come by (if you don’t feel this way yet, then the first chapter of Structuring Mind is intended to get you to have that feeling!).
Or you may be interested in the theory of consciousness or the theory of action, and have heard of questions about whether attention is necessary or sufficient for consciousness or intentional action. What are we to make of such ideas? Without a theory of attention, it will be hard to find out the answer.
Or you maybe you became interested in attention because you see how it is – as I like to say – engineered: we walk through worlds of mental manipulation. Just think of the carefully constructed design of a modern supermarket that carefully steers your attention to the various products (or all electronic devices, social media, search engines, and basically everything else in modern life). More metaphorically, attention engineering happens in policy framing, and in how media hypes get pushed by various political actors. If your approach to the mind is by thinking about the socio-political forces that shape and manipulate it, then attention is a natural entry point.
Finally, you might get to attention by starting from normative questions. When and why is attention engineering a bad thing? Generally, you might be interested in virtues and vices of attention and the role of attention for a morally and epistemically well-calibrated life. You may wonder: why have norms of attention not been much on the philosophical agenda?
In Structuring Mind, I develop a framework that can serve as a common ground for connecting both various strands of the empirical study of attention in psychology and the neurosciences, as well as philosophical applications of attention. In my posts in the next days I will sketch that framework. I think that part of the appeal of the framework is that it helps to get different approaches to attention to talk to each other. I my posts I hope to bring out a bit of how it does that. Equally interesting, though, is that even while details are left open, the framework also provides some surprising and interesting results. The one I develop in some detail in the second half of Structuring Mind is how it lets us rethink some central aspects of conscious experience. I will get to that in my last two posts.
—
[1] All of these descriptions are closely related to each other: they are rough synonyms or, as I show in the book, they can be easily defined in terms of each other.