Wayne Wu

How are agency and consciousness intertwined? This entry focuses on visually guided bodily action where visual attention serves as an anchor for visual phenomenology in action. The emphasis is not to denigrate mental actions (see Soteriou, this volume) nor is it due to a coarse visuo-centrism. Rather, much of the detailed empirical work relevant to our topic has been done on vision and the visual guidance of motor movement. I focus on this literature to help us understand conscious intentional agency in an empirically informed way. Against empirical arguments to the contrary, I contend that a common sense picture of consciousness in action is tenable: conscious vision guides action and thus contributes centrally to the phenomenology of visually-guided agency.

This is a forthcoming response to Dicey Jennings and Nanay (2014) Analysis which criticizes my arguments that attention is a necessary part of action. I present a succinct version of my argument that the Many-Many Problem is a necessary condition on action, and I locate attention, roughly as James conceived of it, within the structure of action.

Edit: I corrected the earlier version which referred to Carolyn incorrectly as "Dicey Jennings". References should be simply to Jennings.

Please see the PUBLISHED VERSION in Analysis. This was an earlier draft that I am leaving up as there are readers of this paper. However, the published version is a better paper.

This is a response to arguments by Jennings and Nanay to my claim that action requires attention. I argue that (a) the purported counterexamples involve attention and (b) that the authors have not correctly interpreted my argument, specifically on the idea that a preset one-one mapping is compatible with a Many-Many Problem. I do mention intentional inaction as one area where a problem might arise for my view.

This paper discusses the role semantic content might play in informing computations needed to produce visually-guided movement (reach and grasp). We discuss visual computations needed to generate such action and how a case can be made for one type of cognitive penetration between action semantics and visuomotor action computations. Please also see my "Against Division" for more on the visual streams.

This paper is a brief, critical review of the claims that attention is necessary for perception, whether conscious or not. I focus largely on attention as a gatekeeper for perceptual consciousness, a claim that many endorse but which I argue against. I also make remarks about attention as limiting unconscious perception.

In this paper, I argue that visual attention is cognitively penetrated by intention. I present a detailed account of attention and its neural basis, drawing on a recent computational model of neural modulation during attention: divisive normalization. I argue that intention shifts computations during divisive normalization. The epistemic consequences of attentional bias are discussed.

We critically review two models of AVH in schizophrenia: (a) self-monitoring theories and (b) spontaneous activation accounts. We provide some arguments against (a), argue that (b) should be the default account, and propose schemas for experiments to assess the two explanations.

This paper critically examines the idea that our representations of our body expand during tool use. It focuses on work in human neuropsychology patients inspired by electrophysiological recordings in non-human primates suggesting that somatosensory receptive fields expand with tool use. I argue that the work in crossmodal extinction can be explained without appeal to the expansion of sensory fields. Rather, tool use changes how we attend to the space around us. If this attentional account is correct, it undercuts one way of explaining what it might be to see peripersonal space (the near space around our bodies) *as* peripersonal.

What is attention? What is its role in consciousness? Watzl's book answers these questions with a simple idea: Attention structures the mind. The idea is fleshed out in this ambitious two-part work, the first providing a metaphysics of attention as an activity of ordering the mind in terms of priority, the second providing a conception of attention as organizing consciousness by centering the conscious field. Watzl has thought deeply about these issues, and the results are carefully explicated in this compelling and complex book. It provides the most comprehensive philosophical discussion of the functional and phenomenal aspects of attention currently available in monograph form. The first part presents Watzl's priority structuring view of attention. Chapter 1 argues against reducing attention to neural or computational processes. Rather, attention is a subject-level, mental activity, a process structured by an internal form with two salient features, guidance and priority (Chapters 2 and 3): To attend to O is to be guided to put the mental state representing O at the top of a priority structure. Priority structures are explicated in chapters 4 and 5 and a variety of intuitive claims about attention are analyzed in terms of it. Chapters 6 and 7 unpack guidance in passive and active attention respectively. Watzl argues that " passive " attention is guided by relevant mental states that have imperatival content that the subject should prioritize those very states. This identifies psychological salience. In active attention, guidance is through states tied to executive control. In part two, Watzl shifts to consciousness. Chapter 8 argues that the phenomenal contribution of attention is not reducible to appearances (e.g. representational content) but concerns phenomenal structure, a notion explicated in Chapter 9 in terms of the center and periphery of the conscious field. Chapter 10 then adduces phenomenal salience, the conscious correlate of psychological salience, to explain the flow of consciousness. This aligns phenomenal structure with the metaphysical structure in Part One. An account of awareness of attention as a type of agentive awareness is explored in Chapter 11. Chapter 12 deals with issues of attention as necessary and sufficient for consciousness while the final chapter argues for the provocative thesis that attention is necessary for consciousness because it explains the unity, perspective, and subjectivity of consciousness. There is no consciousness without the phenomenal structure that attention imposes. This chapter is especially thought provoking, but it is a long way to get there, as the book, while engagingly written, is dense and intricate. Fortunately, Watzl's introduction provides road maps for readers who might want to read in a more piecemeal fashion. Watzl's priority structuring account is situated in a venerable strand of work on attention which connects it to agency. We find this connection in William James's well-known characterization of attention: It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought....It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others (James 1890, 403, my emphasis).

Takes a very skeptical stance on "mineness/ownership/disownership" as a phenomenal feature of experience, with focus on action. Worries about the conception of introspection that is driving how we deal with introspective reports. Argues that mineness is all in the judgment with focus on delusion of control in schizophrenia.

This is an excerpt from a draft of an SEP entry on the neuroscience of consciousness. It focuses on binocular rivalry, but I have included the current introduction (which will certainly be rewritten) and a discussion of two questions regarding consciousness. I think research on BR has been fruitful, but it is not so clear to me that it has been fruitful in understanding consciousness vis-a-vis our two questions even if it is a standard example of detailed consciousness research. So, this is a request for some feedback from those who are interested in the area. Please note that as an SEP entry, it has to be short, so of course, some details are lost (I have opted for more details on research that I think more clearly addressing consciousness).

This is an outline for an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Neuroscience of Consciousness. Giving an overview of relevant work is an impossible task as there is so much of it. The goal here is to be as general as possible but to then delve deeply. Thus, the focus is restricted to two questions which are then unpacked by focus (largely) on mammalian vision (though other forms of consciousness are considered in passing). Obviously many topics left out. This is posted to solicit thoughts about additional topics, but *please consider the frame of the entry via the two questions*. I think clear questions are crucial to imposing transparency on any discussion of consciousness. Of course, do raise other questions that you think important, but do articulate those questions.

Continues to press the case on the standard self-monitoring account of AVH in schizophrenia, particularly those that focus on inner speech. Focuses on the explanatory framework that guides work in this area including issues about describing the phenomenology of AVH, the validity of introspective reports, and the mechanisms and principles needed to tie brain to behavior. Again, it is argued that while dominant, the inner speech model is perhaps the least plausible of the models under consideration.

This paper focuses on introspection of perceptual consciousness and attempts to draw on empirical work on attention to provide a psychologically realistic model of introspection that is then used to explain certain properties of introspection. A key issue concerns unpacking introspective reliability. I claim that we can fix conditions of introspective reliability as rigorously as any experimental condition in cognitive science. Worries about the use of introspection in philosophy are raised: it is far less rigorous than it needs to be.