From information to consciousness through attention and integration

• Applicant: Dr. Azenet Lopez Lopez
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 507914398

Standing at the top of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, you feel the cold creeping into your very bones. Your smartphone says the temperature is -4°C, with a feeling of -10°C. Both you and your smartphone are registering temperature information, but this only really “feels like something” for you. Why is this? How come this information turns into the felt sensation of coldness for you, but not for your phone? This question taps into a standing problem in philosophy: explaining how our conscious mental life fits within the physical world. A plausible answer, coming from the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is that your brain brings together information from different sources, and this information reaches consciousness because it is integrated. Although illuminating, this cannot be the full story. One key ingredient is missing: attention. The main objective of this project is to explain how integration and attention, together, are the basic building blocks for understanding how consciousness arises out of information processing in physical systems. Attention is widely acknowledged as essential for one specific kind of consciousness, namely access consciousness. The IIT, in turn, is offered as theory of phenomenal consciousness, the kind of consciousness constituted by qualitative feelings such as the coldness of cold. Although phenomenal consciousness is generally regarded as dissociable from attention, there is reason to think that this is a mistake, as I have argued in previous work. I previously proposed that attention brings information into consciousness by enhancing it above a threshold. In this new step, I build on this idea by clarifying the interactions between enhancement and integration of information. To do this, I will focus on the IIT and will discuss specific ways how my suggested account of attention supplies solutions for core conceptual and empirical problems currently faced by this theory. This philosophical project relies on the analysis of concepts and their logical relations (centered on those of integration, enhancement, and consciousness), the engineering of ameliorated ones when needed, and the matching of this a priori work with data from recent studies in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In this respect, the proposed theoretical framework can guide and inspire future empirical research, thus contributing to the mutual information between the different approaches to the study of consciousness. Two significant upshot of this project are: (1) it will clarify the relations between consciousness, attention, and access to information, thereby throwing new light on how to use first-person reports to investigate phenomenal consciousness scientifically, and (2) it will provide minimal guiding principles for bringing diverse theories of consciousness into a coherent unified picture, which is a fundamental step towards understanding the place of consciousness in the physical world.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants