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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.
0:00 - Intro
12:15 - Reconceptualizing attention
16:07 - Types of attention
19:02 - Predictive processing and attention
23:19 - Consciousness, identity, and self
30:39 - Attention and the brain
35:47 - Integrated information theory
42:05 - Neural attention
52:08 - Decoupling oscillations from spikes
57:16 - Selves in other organisms
1:00:42 - AI and the self
1:04:43 - Attention, consciousness, conscious perception
1:08:36 - Meaning and attention
1:11:12 - Conscious entrainment
1:19:57 - Is attention a switch or knob?
