Attention is then where things get escalated because more thought and focus is needed. — apokrisis

I've been away for a couple of weeks and am catching up with threads. I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. My best-known source is the 2015 book by Montemayor and Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention and Conscious Attention. Their arguments derive from the evolution of different forms of attention, the earliest forms being prior to any form of 'consciousness'. (They also wrote a sequence of articles in Psychology Today at the time)

Those who defend the view that attention is identical with consciousness must either say that any animal capable of navigating and selecting features from the environment is conscious, or claim that these basic forms of information processing do not deserve the name 'attention'. Because of the evolutionary considerations we are using as theoretical background, as well as the broad consensus that these basic forms of attention are empirically confirmed, we find both options highly problematic. — Montemayor and Haladjian

A question worth bringing up is to ask, why is it that we think that the ID or super-ego would have a sort of will of their own?

Because our will is not a discrete whole, it is fragmented by times, contexts, desires, moods, objects, others.... but we imagine our self one.

The anorexic is compelled not to eat or to bulimia by very strong urges, which they do not understand.

Why and how neurosis compels neurotics to act the way they act is what interested Freud and Lacan.

Actually Bulimics demonstrate increased neuroticism after treatment. Contrary to that, Bulimics are highly orderly and conscientious, with extremely high disgust sensitivity. Similar to OCD sufferers.

That's interesting, what kind of treatment? Psychotherapy?

My understanding is that Cognitive Behavior Therapy is kinda standard today.

Point was that neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait, and there are problems with its excess and deficit, like there are with all of the other fundamental personality traits. It's not that all mental illness is reduced to sensitivity to negative emotions or anything...

But yeah, it was CBT. I looked it up because it seemed to both imply things that I didn't like, and was counter to my understanding of the personalities of Bulimics from what I've heard. Though I understand that it was a passing comment that wasn't super important to the thrust of what you were saying. I just didn't like it, and wanted to point out that neuroticism isn't related to mental illness in and of itself.

The reason people seek help is because they are not happy with themselves, the way they are acting. Anorexia and bulimia are dangerous, someone can end up dead. I think we are all neurotic to a certain extent, but we are not all compelled by urges to hurt our self.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is quick, cheap and it works to the extent that the symptoms vanish...which is 'good enough for government work' but it is not a causal explanation, also these problems may not be gone, they may morph into something else also bad.

The problem with psychotherapy (which is causal) is the length of time it takes, the cost, and I think, finding the therapist that has the right skills and right empathy.

So you are meaning by semi conscious to be asleep and not meaning an automatic or habitual level of responding? What gives?

I still feel like you're implying that neuroticism, which is simply sensitivity to negative emotions, is in itself problematic... is blindness to negative emotions preferable? It's basically shy people.

Its excess leads to depression, phobia, anxiety and panic disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse. Not Bulimia. That's caused by orderliness, and like a perfectionism, and high disgust sensitivity. Surely many things, and I'm sure that neurotics can be bulimics, but there is no obvious pathway, or correlation that I'm aware of.

I still feel like you're implying that neuroticism, which is simply sensitivity to negative emotions, is in itself problematic... is blindness to negative emotions preferable? It's basically shy people.

The point has to do with intensities. A shy person, is very different from someone who is agoraphobic, who can't leave the house because they are deeply afraid. People who experience high intensity neurosis don't behave normatively, and some of them can pose a threat to themselves.

I don't follow your statement that Bulimia is caused by orderliness, "like a perfectionism, and high disgust sensitivity." Why do you think this is the case. Traditionally anorexia and bulimia have been thought of as symptoms characteristics of a kind of neurosis displayed in binge-purge cycles.

I got that from listening to Jordan Peterson, but I just did a google search, I found an abstract that said that neuroticism increased after treatment, and another one that correlated the big five personality traits (which is all the rage now) with it and found no correlation. Look it up.

Lots of stuff has traditionally been considered such and such by psychology. These days they consider there to be problems with the excess or deficit in any of the big five traits. Or upsides and downsides to them all, and these to be genetic, and everyone, when pushed hard enough will break where they are most susceptible to breaking based on their balances of those traits.

You also should understand that what is considered healthy, and sane is up for debate, and not agreed about by everyone. They're theories. If just being happy all of the time is the goal, then neuroticism may be the enemy, but then just taking drugs all the time, if that causes happiness ought to be fine.

You also should understand that what is considered healthy, and sane is up for debate, and not agreed about by everyone.

Fine, but when it can lead to death or an inability to go outside or other hurtful behavior, I think we as society need to ask wtf.

The question is why perfection or the compulsive need for order is demonstrative of bulimia. If many who suffer from bulimia also demonstrate similar compulsions then why is it this case?

Because of the state of their lives, as being really really clean and organized. The observation that they find skin, muscle, fat to be gross, but bone to be all white and pristine. That's what he said, I don't have all of the facts. I just googled it, because it was contrary to what I was hearing, and google seemed to confirm that.

Yeah, I'm not denying that neuroticism can lead to particular disorders, but also that it is considered a fundamental personality trait with strengths and weaknesses, and not problematic in itself. Just look up the "big five personality traits".

Not into the big 5.

The following from Bruce Fink's book on Lacan:

it is not so much that the individual in questions 'wants' to eat, for example, but that it is uncontrollable, uncontainable

For Lacan it is a question of desire versus drive (which is thoughtless), where the drive cuts though the dialectic of desire, and desire 'is put into effect (or activated or affected) in the drive"

To binge is to give in or up on desire, which causes guilt, reinforced by one's version of what one thinks is expected, which leads to bulimia or anorexia, in an endless cycle.

I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. — mcdoodle

I would say this "dissociation" is a function of how we choose to approach the task of explanation. Talking about consciousness is really coming at things in terms of phenomenology - what seems reportable as the contents of experience. And then talking about attention (and habit) is talking at a mechanistic level about the brain mechanisms that might produce those "contents".

So what I would object to in Montemayor/Haladjian's approach (and Koch/Tsuchiya) is that they are trying to turn the quest for consciousness into another part of the brain mechanism story. They are collapsing the phenomenal level to the functional level. They are buying into the dumb representationalist idea that consciousness is indeed "an output", a display of data once all the information processing is done.

Now I've been defending the science that approaches the brain as an information processing device. It wants to pull the machine apart and identify the mechanisms that serve the functions.

So attention is the selective filter that enhances or amplifies or focuses states of information. Habit is the short-circuiting of this extended processing that instead sees fixed routines being emitted when triggered by simple cues. It is all very clunky, but it is also a way to attempt to tie the functional and the phenomenal levels of explanation together. We can point to some very concrete lab data we have constructed by jabbing electrodes in a kitten's head, and then say this was what was going on as the kitten seemed to be making a conscious discrimination in some behavioural task.

So this is the way mind science proceeds. It is forced into a dissociation where it tackles the brain with the baldest mechanical metaphors - the information processing paradigm - and then hopes to connect that back to a phenomenal account, the "first person" point of view.

Naive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind then start protesting that the science is revealing all this information processing machinery and yet not giving us the further thing of the display of the information processed. Therefore more machinery remains to be discovered. We need to have seperate neural mechanisms to do the processing and the displaying.

I am trying to speak instead to an organismic paradigm - one that is founded now in semiotics or a theory of meaning. Life and mind are understood in terms of a modelling relation. Consciousness is embodied or enactive in being in dynamical interaction with a world. Instead of being dualistically split in the usual way - treating the mind as both a phenomenal substance and a bunch of brain circuits at the same time - it is a holistic approach that treats everything as "sign processing". :)

So I do defend the scientific understanding that has resulted from 100 years of treating consciousness as elaborate information processing. Reductionism employing mechanical metaphors has produced a ton of concrete results that tell us "what is going on in the brain".

But then you have to understand the conceptual limitations built into those same results. And seeking to reduce consciousness to brain representations - claiming you have discovered a dissociation that needs to be corrected by further mechanistic reduction - is the opposite of what you want to be doing.

So I am instead with the semiotic camp who seek to shift from an information processing paradigm to a sign processing paradigm.

I had a quick look at Montemayor/Haladjian's stuff and it felt like something out of the 1970s. I saw Haladjian is indeed a recent student of Zenon Pylyshyn and that made me smile, Pylyshyn being a famous information processing hardliner during the mental imagery war of the late 1970s.

Anorexics aren't Bulimics in the sense that they're obsessed with being thin, but they don't binge and purge.

That seems pretty general, and non-descript. The more general something gets, the truer it gets because it applies to more things, but sacrifices content in the process. The higher level of abstraction we get, the less we say about something. Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Yes but I was talking about intentions. And it was my usage you were attacking. If you want to talk about intentionality, then that is a different subject. — apokrisis

You said:

Instead, arriving at a state of attentional focus is a process of evolving development. It begins with the vague potential of the many different attentional outcomes that could be the case, and then arrives eventually - half a second later - at the outcome, the state of intentionality, which appears to have the best fit for whatever are the challenges or opportunities of the moment. — apokrisis

And also:

Attention forms a generalised intent (that being the novel part), habit puts that into words (that being routine skill), and then attention can sign off on the final utterance - or at least come up with hasty self-correction having spotted something wrong with the way the words just came out. — apokrisis

So it should be clear that it was you making the category error, not myself. You talked about how "intentionality", and "a generalised intent" forms from attention, but when I took exception to this, you insisted you were talking about particular intentions.

In regards to habit or attention, they are both intentional or goal directed in a general sense. One is just intentions learnt and fixed while the other is the forming and particularisation of intentions. — apokrisis

Great, I'm glad that you see it this way. So we should avoid saying that intentionality, or generalized intent, is formed by attention. In reality, both attention and habit are formed through intentionality.

So something vague like a discomfort leads to the intention to look closer. And yet something vague like a discomfort attracts your attention so that you might develop a suitable intention.

Hmm. See your problem? — apokrisis

No I don't see any problem here. It is quite clear that intention develops from the more general toward the more particular. I'm hungry, I intend to eat. I look in the fridge and see some ground beef, so I intend to eat hamburger. I decide to turn on the BBQ and intend to eat grilled hamburgers. Intention is always there, whether it's in the more general, or more particular form.

So the facts you think significant are ones that are already accommodated. — apokrisis

I take it we are in agreement then. It is incorrect to say that intentionality, or generalized intent is formed from attention. It is correct to say that things like attention and habit are formed with intention. So when I find you speaking in this incorrect way in the future, you should not object when I correct you.

So it should be clear that it was you making the category error, not myself. You talked about how "intentionality", and "a generalised intent" forms from attention, but when I took exception to this, you insisted you were talking about particular intentions. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are still not getting it. I said the process of attending leads to a particular state of intention. So it brings intentionality - our general long-run state of orientation to the world - into some particular focused state. And then in doing that, the particular attentional/intentional state should be understood not as something already fleshed out and action specific, but instead a fixing of limits, a production of a state of generalised constraint on action.

From that generalised constraint on action, a habit level of performance can take over. Strict bounds have been set that allow the lower brain to fire off automatically and unthinkingly. Permission to fire has been granted the frontline troops. Attention then gets reserved for monitoring performance in terms of being there to pick up errors, problems, significance, or whatever else might prompt the need for a re-focusing of the prevailing state of intent.

I appreciate this is a dynamical and complex tale. But that is how it is. The general and the particular are always going together as this is a hierarchical systems view of causality.

Attentional level thought and intention forming is there to deal with time horizons of seconds to minutes. Habit level emitted responses are there to deal with action by the split second. So attention creates the mindset. Habit takes that as its context and does its rapid fire thing. Attention then kicks back in to refocus as much as seems necessary when habit generates an alert telling that it is either faced by the unexpected or it has come upon something already flagged as important.

All of that flying along and making sense of the world from a self-centred point of view is what we would call intentionality. It is not a function of the brain but a characteristic of life and mind.

However we can talk also of intentions - some focused mindset that exists at some point of time. That would be intentionality particularised.

No I don't see any problem here. It is quite clear that intention develops from the more general toward the more particular. I'm hungry, I intend to eat. I look in the fridge and see some ground beef, so I intend to eat hamburger. I decide to turn on the BBQ and intend to eat grilled hamburgers. Intention is always there, whether it's in the more general, or more particular form. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you yourself said you had to notice that you were hungry. So attending to a feeling was a first step. And from there flowed an action plan, an intention to actually do some particular thing. Choices can only form following attention. Although faced with the same situation often enough, those choices do become habits. I know its confusing.

I take it we are in agreement then. It is incorrect to say that intentionality, or generalized intent is formed from attention. It is correct to say that things like attention and habit are formed with intention. So when I find you speaking in this incorrect way in the future, you should not object when I correct you. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm not yet getting you understand a word I say.

You are still not getting it. I said the process of attending leads to a particular state of intention. So it brings intentionality - our general long-run state of orientation to the world - into some particular focused state. — apokrisis

Actually, you said that intentionality is formed by "attentional" focus. Attention forms a generalized intent. When I pointed out to you that this is inconsistent with the rest of your statement that this attentional focus requires effort by the brain, (implying that general intent exists prior to this) you said that what you really meant is that particular intentions are formed in this way.

However we can talk also of intentions - some focused mindset that exists at some point of time. That would be intentionality particularised. — apokrisis

All right, so let's proceed with a clear distinction between intentionality and particular intentions, intentionality being prior to, and necessary for focusing the attention, and a focused attention is what is associated with particular intentions. We still need to deal with the process of how intention focuses the attention. Since habit is described as coming about from this focus, we cannot turn to habit to understand this process.

But you yourself said you had to notice that you were hungry. So attending to a feeling was a first step. And from there flowed an action plan, an intention to actually do some particular thing. Choices can only form following attention. Although faced with the same situation often enough, those choices do become habits. I know its confusing. — apokrisis

Ok, we have here "attending to a feeling". Do you agree that this is a focusing of the attention in an inward direction, toward an internal object (the goal), and that this should be distinguished from focusing the attention on an external object (sensing)? In the one case we attempt to filter out all the vagueness of the general intentionality to focus on a particular intention, and in the other case, we attempt to filter out all the vagueness of the environment to focus on a particular thing.

Would you agree, that the latter is a description of consciousness, being aware of one's surroundings, and being capable of focusing one's attention on particular aspects of one's environment? And do you agree that the former is a description of being self-conscious, self-aware, being aware of one's inner feelings, and being capable of focusing one's attention on particular aspects of these inner feelings?

I think it is necessary to put this distinction in relation to the distinction between habit and attention, which you refer to, in order to properly understand the living activities. That is because we need to understand the role of introspection in relation to habits, to understand the capacity to break habits.

But here's another thing to consider. if the internal focus of one's attention is required for the living being to produce a new goal, and therefore a new activity, then the internal focus (self-consciousness) is what is responsible for the living being's capacity to move, and the external focus (consciousness) is simply a habit. How would you describe self-consciousness?

And then in doing that, the particular attentional/intentional state should be understood not as something already fleshed out and action specific, but instead a fixing of limits, a production of a state of generalised constraint on action.

From that generalised constraint on action, a habit level of performance can take over. — apokrisis

The model you describe outlines the forming of habits in relation to attention, but it does not address the breaking of habits.

No, I'm not yet getting you understand a word I say. — apokrisis

Actually the issue being addressed is whether or not you understand what you're saying. You said something, and when I pointed to the inconsistency, you declared that you meant something else. We could take it for granted that I would not understand what you were saying, when you didn't say what you meant. The question is why would you not say what you meant in the first place. It appears like either you didn't understand what you were saying (mistaken), or you were actively trying to deceive.

It appears like either you didn't understand what you were saying (mistaken), or you were actively trying to deceive. — Metaphysician Undercover

That would be the modus operandi: if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

Thanks for the longer explanation, apo. I think then that what's puzzling is your paradigm:

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual. And in humans, both would have then have the extra feature of being linguistically structured. — apokrisis

I don't understand how this fits with your explanation of your holistic position. Put simply, attention does not correlate with consciousness, and habit does not correlate with non-consciousness, so how does attention/habit help us understand conscious/non-conscious? You seem to have pressed for a more mechanical metaphor than the information-processors Montemayor/Haladjian. I don't grasp how spinning semiotics into the mix makes your approach more respectful of the phenomenological than theirs.

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↪Nils Loc Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty are all similar to the myth of Psyche and Eros (Eros' mother Venus is the wicked queen/evil stepmother/malevolent fairy.)

If I remember correctly, none of these characters had living mothers. Freud's & Lacan's psychological systems revolve around the desire for the mother. Lacan changed Freud's Oedipal analysis because of the mother problem. Lacan thought that both male & female babies, identified with and desired the mother, that both male & female infants feel a sense of castration (anxiety...leading to freedom) due to their natural separation from the mother.


I'm not familiar with your version of Venus, I thought she was Aphrodite goddess of love, beauty...and Eros, her son by Ares.

I guess there are multiple ways to analyze those stories. They all present a conflict between weak/good femininity and strong/evil femininity. The innocent girl finds a hidden ally in nature.

The caretaker of an infant isn't always its mother and isn't even always female, so is it appropriate to interpret Lacan as speaking of caretakers in general when he says "mother?" And how eurocentric do you think Lacan was? How much is he analyzing a particular culture as opposed to the psyche... and is that all psychologists ever do... analyze the psyche as it appears in a certain culture?

He has some very intricate symbolic expression and complexes, but yes he talks about maternal caretakers (but that gets away from the fairy tale)

I think he would say that his three registers or orders: the 'real,' the 'symbolic', and the 'mirror'/imaginary are how all psyches ordinarily come to interpret the world

I am not sure how far he would go beyond that. Norms are diverse, and perhaps how norms evolve or emerge, and how society structures of norms might be appropriate for his analysis.

Freud's system was very masculine, even though women provided his deepest insights, Lacan in rethinking Freud still has a masculine streak, just not as bad as Freud. There have been some attempts at a feminist rereading of Lacan, but I have not read any of the books, just some articles.

Cool. I'm still struggling to make sense of his notion of alienation (due to the power of language to set out the real). Alienation from what? Is it just a sense of alienation?

I had a friend who dreamed of and wrote a story about a person who had no language.

Lacan's concept of the real, is how a child experiences the world immediately within a context , this immediacy is lost (for the most part) with the achievement of language, which mediates our experience of the world. Language enables the child to begin to understand the 'symbolic'.

So, then perhaps alienation from the immediacy and the intimacy which it experienced pre-linguistically. The real is not lost, we have become unconscious of it, it is still there, just unable to speak.

The real is not lost, we have become unconscious of it, it is still there, just unable to speak. — Cavacava

Which creates an intriguing role for unconscious content. I'm reminded of Rumi's 'In the depths of our hearts the light of God is shining on a soundless sea with no shore'

It also brings in the mystery associated with the advent of speech in individuals and in the species as a whole. I'm thinking of Chomsky's view that the abrupt onset of fluency in toddlers indicates that it can't be learned piecemeal. Lots of details... I've yet to organize it. :)

Actually, you said that intentionality is formed by "attentional" focus. — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually I said a state of intentionality.

And when I was talking about a generalised intent, I was explicit about that meaning a general constraint in regard to the particular actions to be supplied by rapid habit level machinery. The point being that intentionality of course cashes out as finality, and hence the causality of constraints.

You lost me with your claim that attention and consciousness, habit and non-conscious, cannot be related. Just too contrary.

You lost me with your claim that attention and consciousness, habit and non-conscious, cannot be related. Just too contrary. — apokrisis

Oh, I only said that they do not correlate, with my intended meaning being, they cannot be correlated without substantial exceptions - I didn't mean that they 'cannot be related' at all, that would be silly. Habit is often conscious, and attention is sometimes unconscious and certainly is often ascribed to creatures whom we don't normally call 'conscious' : that's my point.

Well my point was consciousness is a confused folk psychology term. And that is why neuroscience tries to sharpen things by tieing what we sort of mean in the standard socially constructed folk view to constructs, like attention and habit, which are defensible as the objects of laboratory research. When we talk about attention, there is an information processing argument to explain what that is and identify it with actual brain architecture.

That is why it is better, in my opinion.

As to habit being often conscious, that just confirms the haziness of consciousness as an explanatory construct. There is a good reason why the word is barely used in neuroscience research. You might as well be talking about souls or res cogitans.

Of course what gets done by habit can also be the subject of our attention and become reportable - fixed in working memory and contemplated as something that just happened. Yet that demonstrates the essential dissociation. We act fast and automatically as that is efficient when we know what we are doing. And then "consciousness" or attentional level reportability comes that split second after the fact. We can introspect and form a memory of that automatic action we just performed.

And as I have also explained, the actually important relation between attention and habit is that attention produces some general state of intentionality ahead of every moment of action. So it creates some general state of mental constraint - I want to get around this next corner in my car to reach my destination - and then all my well learnt driving habits can slot into place in automatic fashion.

I don't need to have reportable awareness of exactly what to do to coordinate my hand on the gear shift, my foot on the clutch. Fuck the detail, let it take care of itself. Achieving the goal, getting the next step to where I'm going, is what I need to focus on.

So the folk psychology term of consciousness has huge problems once you try to apply it in science. It confounds biology and sociology in believing things like introspection to be a biological function rather than a linguistically structured skill. It makes the big mistake of thinking awareness to be a running realtime representation of reality rather than having this complex internal temporal structure. It makes a big mistake in creating this homuncular self that is then witnessing the representation.

So consciousness - and all its crew: unconscious, non-conscious, subconscious, preconscious, semi-conscious - is a very familiar social construct that just ought to be junked so we can start over again on a better metaphysical and scientific basis.

But no hope of that of course.

Medicine is no folk craft. A person can be paralyzed and conscious.