Attention in Motion

Abstract

Motivated by its critical relevance, this thesis concerns itself with the issue of attention. Through phenomenological study, it seeks to understand what it is to consciously attend to something, or rather what it is like to do so. I begin by justifying an account of attention as the structuring of conscious experiences through peripheral relations around a focal center (Sebastian Watzl’s Structuralism). Yet, revisiting Husserl’s early manuscripts, I argue that this account renders attention static and neglects its phenomenologically intuitive dynamism: a turning-toward motion that results from an interplay of pulling forces we experience. In response, I propose Field-Theoretic Structuralism. The framework adds a primitive of structural relation — depth — that spatializes the attentional structure as a three-dimensional manifold permeated by a gravitational-like force field. Phenomenal objects acquire a weight and exert pulls on the attentional space that impact how contents are structured, while the subject’s volition to sustain focus acts as a resisting force that maintains intended structural relations. To conclude, I detail how attention is to be thought of as a continuous configuration of conscious experiences in a relativistic space of competing force fields and I explore the limitations and scalability of the latter to account for more complex factors influencing attentional dynamics. The thesis forwards a unified, phenomenologically grounded model of attention and a conceptual tool for examining how attention is shaped and contested in our present day.