Abstract
The American neuroscientist Christof Koch, working with his group at Caltech, has spearheaded the important thesis that consciousness and attention are not as closely fused as is almost universally claimed. The usual statement is that attention to a stimulus in the external world is necessary for consciousness of that stimulus to arise in a subject. More may be needed for that consciousness to arise, but at least attention must be directed to that stimulus in order for there to be any chance of consciousness of the stimulus. This implies that consciousness is to be searched for in the interstices of attention. Koch claims that this is not the case. In particular he and his colleague Tsuchiya (Koch C, Tsuchiya N, Trends Cogn Sci 11(1):16–22, 2007) wrote that consciousness could arise in a subject without them paying attention to the relevant stimulus. This claim was based on several subtle experiments, which clearly we need to analyze in some detail in order to investigate this important claim.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Lau and Dr. Rahnev for letting me see their paper (Rahnev et al. 2009) before publication as well as for helpful communications concerning other aspects of the subject.
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Taylor, J.G. (2013). Attention Versus Consciousness: Fused or Independent?. In: Solving the Mind-Body Problem by the CODAM Neural Model of Consciousness?. Springer Series in Cognitive and Neural Systems, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7645-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7645-6_3
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