ABSTRACT
Intuitively, there is a close connection between consciousness and attention. Intuitive phenomenology abundantly suggests that consciousness and attention are intimately linked but intuition also suggests that they are quite distinct. The classic characterization of attention comes from William James who in his Principles of Psychology wrote: Everyone knows what attention is. James description immediately raises central questions about the relation between attention and consciousness. Questions about the nature of attention and its relation to consciousness are intrinsically fascinating. A number of experiments reveal that attention is a rather peculiar beast and its link to consciousness is far from clear. Prinz's AIR theory equates consciousness with a kind of potential to be attended to. It is an audacious neo-empiricist theory that struggles to deal with all the experimental results. The question of whether an attention-based theory of consciousness can solve the generation problem is also addressed.
