Episode 34: Awareness, Attention, and Globally Accessible Information

ATTENTION! Richard Brown and Pete Mandik shine their spotlights on the philosophy of mind of attention and awareness. Many philosophers of mind endorse the Transitivity Principle, the view that if you have a conscious state, you must be aware of that state. But what is the best account of the relevant notion of awareness? Is attending a kind of awareness? Further, is it a kind of awareness that is distinct from the awareness one has in virtue of perceiving, thinking about, or sensing something? Does it suffice for being aware of something that information about it is globally accessible to an embedding system? Would global availability suffice for a higher-order awareness of one’s own mental states, or would it only suffice for a first-order awareness of environmental or bodily items? Along the way we also get into some methodology and metaphilosophy, especially as regards the question of to what degree philosophical and scientific theorizing should be constrained by folk theory.