Book

Other Work in Progress

• Phenomenal Qualities are Relations to Particulars
  In preparation
  Does having a perceptual experience as of a particular object or event, like a tomato or an explosion, imply that there is some particular object or event of which you have an experience or of which you are aware? A negative answer to this question is almost universally accepted. Defenders of that view appeal to the possibility of hallucination and argue that these are the cases where someone might have a perceptual experience as of some particular object or event, without being related to a particular object or event, because there is no such object or event to be aware of or be related to. Against this consensus, this paper presents an extended argument for the positive view and shows how the view might be correct. The upshot of my argument is that there is no convincing reason not to think of all hallucinations as extreme cases of illusion. On the view I will suggest each simple perceptual experience (a phenomenal quality) can be analyzed as a three-place relation between a subject, a particular object or event, and a way that object or event appears to the subject
• Perceptual Guidance
  In preparation
  Perceptual experience seems to present us with a certain environment. Our experience tells us what there is. In this respect experience is like belief. In this paper, I argue that perceptual experience also tells us what to do. It doesn’t merely inform us, but also guides us. In this respect experience is like desire or intention. I rest my argument on the case of perceptual saliency. Some experiences are more salient than others and guide our attention to the salient object or event. Perception tell us what to focus on. In this paper I develop an account of experiential saliency, and discuss how the guiding function of experience can be integrated with its informing function. I end with some suggestions for how the guiding function performed by experiential salience may ground the notion saliency that figures in theories of bounded rationality, communication, and linguistic development.
  [Slides]
• Mind-wandering: Vice, Virtue, or Both?
  With Adrienne Prettyman, in preparation
  Our mind tends to wander. Given the prevalence of mind-wandering shown in much recent research a variety of questions arise. On the one hand, there is the psychology and neuroscience of mind-wandering: what are the neuronal underpinnings of mind-wandering and what causes specific episodes of mind-wandering? More and more progress is made on both of these questions. On the other hand, there are questions about the significance of mind-wandering. These are our focus here. Does mind-wandering serve any purpose in our mental economy or is it, by contrast, the use-less side-product of other processes with negative effects at best? While recent empirical studies claim to find negative emotional effects of mind-wandering we argue that these effects are probably restricted to specific forms of mind-wandering. Other forms of mind-wandering, we argue, should be viewed in a more favorable light. They contribute to creativity and problem solving, and are closely tied to an important intellectual virtue: open-mindedness.
  [Poster]
• Can Intentionalism Explain How Attention Structures Consciousness?
  in preparation
  According to intentionalism the phenomenal character of consciousness is determined by the bearing of intentional attitudes toward contents. Can intentionalism account for the phenomenal contribution of perceptual attention? Intentionalism has two components. The content component, and the attitude component. Intentionalists thus can locate the phenomenal contribution of attention either in the content or in the attitude (or in both). After briefly reviewing arguments against the content strategy developed by myself and others elsewhere, I here argue against the attitude strategy (Pautz 2010, Speaks 2010, Wu 2010). I will argue that even if a version of the attitude strategy can explain that perceptual attention operates within and not on top of perceptual experience (a problem pointed out also by James Stazicker), it has no account of the distribution of attention across the field of consciousness and of variations in the objects of attention (which range from objects, to properties and states of affairs). The attitude strategy cannot explain how attention structures consciousness.
• Attention and the Subjective Point of View
  under review
  Suppose that in the garden of appearances (see Chalmers 2006) everything is as it appears to you in conscious experience. The garden reveals its nature in consciousness. Yet, there is a price: you don’t get the capacity of attention, and thus you cannot focus attention on anything nor is your attention ever drawn to anything. In this paper I argue that in this garden an important element of subjectivity would be absent: you would be no more than a bundle of appearances. The paper has two goals: first, I show that something is missing in the garden of appearances by appeal to an argument I call “the counterpart argument”. Second, I provide an account of what is missing. Besides phenomenal qualities, there is phenomenal structure that gives shape to our experiences. This structure, I argue, is central to a subject’s point of view on the appearances.
  [Draft]
• NEW!! Is Attention an Object-Directed Attitude?
  forthcoming in: Non-Propositional Intentionality, eds. M. Montague and A. Grzankowski, Oxford University Press
  I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away from an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. I end by speculating how the picture developed here might help to account for other non-propositional aspects of mentality.
  
  (other contributors in this volume include: J. Bengson, T. Crane, I. Dickie, G. Forbes, A. Grzankowski, M. Johnston, U. Kriegel, P. Ludlow, M. Moffett, M. Montague, G. Oddie, J. Searle)

Publications

• DRAFT ONLINE!! Can Intentionalism Explain how Attention Affects Appearances?
  Forthcoming. In: Themes from Block, eds. A. Pautz and D. Stoljar, The MIT Press
  Recent work in psychology shows that attention affects not just perceptual processing, but the way the world appears to a subject in perceptual experience. For example, a Gabor patch appears to have a higher contrast with attention than without attention. Yet, while differences in appearances are naturally thought to imply differences in the representational content of perception, Ned Block has argued that some of these effects cannot be understood in this way. He argues that intentionalism, according to which the phenomenal character of perception is determined by its representational content, cannot explain how attention affects appearances. The first goal of this paper is to show that Block’s argument can be viewed as an instance of an argument type I call Arguments from Arbitrary Phenomenal Variation (AAPV). Block’s argument thus has the same structure as the argument against intentionalism based on the conceivability of spectral inversion. The second goal of the paper is to consider responses to AAPV systematically. I show that many of the responses to the spectrum inversion argument look much weaker for the attention based argument. On the other hand, some forms of intentionalism remain untouched by Block’s argument. The most plausibly form, I suggest, is one on which phenomenal content is mostly illusory.
  [Final Draft]


• Review of Axel Seemann's collection “Joint Attention. New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience”
  2012. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
  Review of a new collection on Joint Attention.
  [Online]


• Review of Eric Schwitzgebel's “Perplexities of Consciousness”
  2012. Mind , advanced access, with Wayne Wu
  In this review of Eric Schwitzgebel's "Perplexities of Consciousness", we discuss the book's arguments in light of the role of attention in introspection.
  [Official Version][Final Draft]


• Silencing the Experience of Change
  2012. Philosophical Studies, online first, doi: 10.1007/s11098-2012-0005-6
  Perceptual illusions have often served as an important tool in the study of perceptual experience. In this paper I argue that a recently discovered set of visual illusions sheds new light on the nature of time consciousness. I suggest the study of these silencing illusions as a tool kit for any philosopher interested in the experience of time and show how to better understand time consciousness by combining detailed empirical investigations with a detailed philosophical analysis. In addition, I argue specifically against an initially plausible range of views that assume a close match between the temporal content of visual experience and the temporal layout of experience itself. Against such a widely held structural matching thesis I argue that which temporal changes we are experiencing bears no close relation to how our experience itself is changing over time. Explanations of the silencing illusions that are compatible with the structural matching thesis fail.
  [Online]


• Review of Christopher Mole's “Attention is Cognitive Unison”
  2011. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
  A relatively detailed review (~ 4000 words) of Christopher Mole's (2010) book "Attention is Cognitive Unison". I suggest that Mole makes a good case against many types of reductivist accounts of attention, using the right kind of methodology. Yet, I argue that his adverbialist theory is not the best articulation of the crucial anti-reductivist insight. The distinction between adverbial and process-first phenomena he draws remains unclear, anti-reductivist process theories can escapte his arguments, and finally I provide an argument for why no personal level adverbialism can provide a complete and unified theory of attention. Despite my disagreements, I have learned a lot from engaging with Mole's book. It's a central contribution to the new philosophical literature on attention.
  [Online]


• The Philosophical Significance of Attention
  2011. Philosophy Compass, 6 (11): 722–733, doi: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00432.x
  What is the philosophical significance of attention? The present article provides an overview of recent debates surrounding the connections between attention and other topics of philosophical interest. In particular it discusses the interplay between attention and consciousness, attention and agency, and the role attention might play for the theory of reference and in epistemology. The article provides an overview of the logical landscape: it clearly distinguishes the various questions concerning – among others – how attention shapes the phenomenal character of experience, whether it is necessary or sufficient for consciousness, or whether it plays a special role in the best philosophical theory of action or conceptual reference. The article points out various interdependencies between particular answers to these questions, as well as how these answers might depend on the metaphysics of attention (like whether attention may come in degrees, or whether it is fundamentally a personal level or sub-personal phenomenon). Together with its companion piece (“The Nature of Attention”) this article, thus, may serve as an introduction to the philosophy of attention.
  [Online]


• The Nature of Attention
  2011. Philosophy Compass, 6 (11): 842–853, doi: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00433.x
  What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations.
  [Online]


• Attention as Structuring of the Stream of Consciousness
  2011. In: Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays , eds. Mole C., Smithies D. and Wu W., Oxford University Press
  This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest.
  [Semi-final draft] [the book]


• Rokem A., Watzl, S. Gollisch T., Stemmler M., Herz A.V.M., and Samengo I., Spike-Timing Precision Underlies the Coding Efficiency of Auditory Receptor Neurons
  2006. Journal of Neurophysiology, 95: 2541-2552
  Sensory systems must translate incoming signals quickly and reliably so that an animal can act successfully in its environment. Even at the level of receptor neurons, however, functional aspects of the sensory encoding process are not yet fully understood. Specifically, this concerns the question how stimulus features and neural response characteristics lead to an efficient transmission of sensory information. To address this issue, we have recorded and analyzed spike trains from grasshopper auditory receptors, while systematically varying the stimulus statistics. The stimulus variations profoundly influenced the efficiency of neural encoding. This influence was largely attributable to the presence of specific stimulus features that triggered remarkably precise spikes whose trial-to-trial timing variability was as low as 0.15 ms— one order of magnitude shorter than typical stimulus time scales. Precise spikes decreased the noise entropy of the spike trains, thereby increasing the rate of information transmission. In contrast, the total spike train entropy, which quantifies the variety of different spike train patterns, hardly changed when stimulus conditions were altered, as long as the neural firing rate remained the same. This finding shows that stimulus distributions that were transmitted with high information rates did not invoke additional response patterns, but instead displayed exceptional temporal precision in their neural representation. The acoustic stimuli that led to the highest information rates and smallest spike-time jitter feature pronounced sound-pressure deflections lasting for 2–3 ms. These upstrokes are reminiscent of salient structures found in natural grasshopper communication signals, suggesting that precise spikes selectively encode particularly important aspects of the natural stimulus environment.
  [Online]


• Menzel R., Greggers U., Smith A., Berger S., Brandt R., Brunke S., Bundrock G., Hülse S., Plümpe T., Schaupp F., Schüttler E., Stach S., Stindt J., Stollhoff N., and Watzl S., Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory
  2005. PNAS, 102 (8): 3040-3045
  By using harmonic radar, we report the complete flight paths of displaced bees. Test bees forage at a feeder or are recruited by a waggle dance indicating the feeder. The flights are recorded after the bees are captured when leaving the hive or the feeder and are released at an unexpected release site. A sequence of behavioral routines become apparent: (i) initial straight flights in which they fly the course that they were on when captured (foraging bees) or that they learned during dance communication (recruited bees); (ii) slow search flights with frequent changes of direction in which they attempt to “get their bearings”; and (iii) straight and rapid flights directed either to the hive or first to the feeding station and then to the hive. These straight homing flights start at locations all around the hive and at distances far out of the visual catchment area around the hive or the feeding station. Two essential criteria of a map-like spatial memory are met by these results: bees can set course at any arbitrary location in their familiar area, and they can choose between at least two goals. This finding suggests a rich, map-like organization of spatial memory in navigating honey bees.
  [Online]
  
  (This paper in biology has received some discussion by philosophers and psychologists. Among others see discussions in: Pylyshyn (2007), Rescorla (2009), Carruthers (2009), and Tetzlaff and Rey (2009))

Current Research Projects

• Organizing Mind. From Experience to Action and Belief
  A project on executive attention and executive control, extending my work on the role of attention to cover cross-temporal organization
  You are an organizer of your own mental life. You structure your experience into foreground and background; you select among the various options that present themselves; and you stick to goals and plans in the face of distraction. This research project deals with the question of how the mind is organized (over time), with the question of whether having a mind in part consists in having a certain organization, and with the question of how we ought to organize our minds.
  
  The project lies at the interface of philosophy of mind, theory of action and epistemology, and draws on empirical research in psychology and the neurosciences. Its goal is to articulate and defend, on the one hand, a thesis about the metaphysical structure of the mind that starts with organization and the agent qua organizer. The project will investigate the organization of agency by looking into the way executive attention structures our activities. On the other hand, the project aims at integrating an epistemological framework with that metaphysics. As a central case study the project will consider the role of belief within how agents organize their minds. I suggest that epistemic norms, i.e. the norms for belief, centrally are instances of norms for organizing the mind, and should be discussed in that context.

© 2012 Sebastian Watzl
Template design by Andreas Viklund