Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community.

Carolyn Dicey Jennings is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist at University of California, Merced. In her book The Attending Mind, she lays out an attempt to unify the concept of attention. Carolyn defines attention roughly as the mental prioritization of some stuff over other stuff based on our collective interests. And one of her main claims is that attention is evidence of a real, emergent self or subject, that can't be reduced to microscopic brain activity. She does connect attention to more macroscopic brain activity, suggesting slow longer-range oscillations in our brains can alter or entrain the activity of more local neural activity, and this is a candidate for mental causation. We unpack that more in our discussion, and how Carolyn situates attention among other cognitive functions, like consciousness, action, and perception.

- Carolyn's website.

- Books:- The Attending Mind.

- Aeon article:- I Attend, Therefore I Am.

- Related papers- The Subject of Attention.

- Consciousness and Mind.

- Practical Realism about the Self.

0:00 - Intro12:15 - Reconceptualizing attention16:07 - Types of attention19:02 - Predictive processing and attention23:19 - Consciousness, identity, and self30:39 - Attention and the brain35:47 - Integrated information theory42:05 - Neural attention52:08 - Decoupling oscillations from spikes57:16 - Selves in other organisms1:00:42 - AI and the self1:04:43 - Attention, consciousness, conscious perception1:08:36 - Meaning and attention1:11:12 - Conscious entrainment1:19:57 - Is attention a switch or knob?