Much of the online discussion revolved around whether a connection between consciousness and attention might point to some utility of consciousness, since attention plainly has great utility. My reply was mainly to point out compelling reasons to doubt that the required tie between consciousness and attention actually holds. Since attention is neither necessary nor sufficient for a state’s being conscious, attention cannot be part of what it is for a state to be conscious. That’s enough to undermine Prinz’s AIR theory, and the utility that attaches to attention doesn’t carry over to consciousness.

As I noted at one point in the online discussion, even if attention and consciousness were coextensive, that by itself would not show that any utility attaches to consciousness. If mental states are F if, and only if, they are G, there might be utility to their being F, but not at all to their being G. It might be, e.g., that whatever factors led to the state’s being F (e.g., occurring attentively) also led to its being G (e.g., occurring consciously).

This point generalizes. It may seem that all planning or reasoning of some particular sort is conscious. But even if that were so, it would not by itself show that utility attaches to consciousness, as against the intentional content of the planning or reasoning. We would have to show that the utility actually attaches to consciousness, not to the intentional content. An argument for some utility of consciousness must meet higher standards than mere suggestive coextensiveness.

Let me then close with a few remarks about why it’s so inviting to attribute utility to mental states’ being conscious. When a phenomenon is poorly understood, there is a temptation, pioneered with damaging scientific effect by Aristotle, to try to get a grip on the phenomenon by appeal to some utility it may have. The poorer our understanding, the greater the temptation to invoke utility.

We should resist this temptation and be suspicious of its apparent fruits. Even if a particular phenomenon does have utility, we can get a serious explanation of it only by seeing how that phenomenon arises and operates. Utility may stem in part from the way something operates, but it’s dependent also on the effects it has on other things, and exploring that may well be independent of anything about the phenomenon itself.

This is one reason for the search for some utility of consciousness, since many still see consciousness as poorly understood. But there is in addition another reason, special to consciousness, which stems from a tendency to rely exclusively or primarily on first-person access to learn about our mental functioning.

Being in mental states of various sorts plainly has enormous utility. Human life would be impossible without our elaborate mental functioning, and the same goes in varying degrees for other animals. And relying solely on first-person access encourages assimilating mental states to conscious mental states, tthereby leading to assimilating the utility of mental states to the utility of mental states’ being conscious.

First-person access is of course crucial to understanding human mental functioning. But mental states are accessible in both first- and third-person ways. The pain I consciously feel is a state you may well know I’m in, and the thoughts and desires I introspect are states you can often independently tell are operative within me. And mental states that occur without being conscious are accessible only in the third-person way.

So we can’t infer from the utility of being in mental states to the utility of those states’ being conscious. Indeed, even if all mental states were conscious, that would hold, given the earlier argument against relying on coextensiveness.

We must instead ask what utility attaches to the property of a state’s being conscious independently of any utility that attaches to the state’s other mental properties, in particular, its representational character. I argued in my talk that whatever utility conscious thoughts and volitions do have attaches not to their being conscious, but rather to their representational properties. I’ve argued elsewhere that the same holds for conscious qualitative states–that whatever utility they have attaches to them independently of their being conscious.

In my last two posts, I spoke of images of animals attracting attention independently of issues of change detection. I now have the reference to the study I was thinking of: Fei Fei Li, et al, “Rapid natural scene categorization in the near absence of attention,” PNAS 7/9/02; thanks to Hakwan Lau. Their finding isn’t, as I’d wrongly remembered, that animals attract attention, but “that subjects can rapidly detect animals or vehicles in briefly presented novel natural scenes while simultaneously performing another attentionally demanding task.” In any case, this finding is independent of change detection, and it shows that images of animals play an enhanced role in processing.