Abstract

There is presently an ongoing debate about the relation between attention and consciousness, fuelled by results from paradigms which probe the interaction between these two faculties, such as the attentional blink, object substitution masking and change blindness. Simulations of these paradigms were shown recently to be able to provide an explanation of them from a single overarching control model of attention. This model furthermore allows exploration of how consciousness might be created as a copy of the attention movement control signal, and indicates the complex possibilities inherent in attention. The paper develops this theme and presents a set of questions and their possible answers arising from the need for the existence of a set of inner selves associated with different attention copy signals in different modalities to provide a unified phenomenological experience. The paper concludes with a set of comments on the Hilbert questions of the Special Issue