Attention is the mental act of attending to something--either something that you’re doing or something that is happening, or a combination of the two: something that is happening because of what you or someone else is doing. Paying attention is one of those acts philosophers call a basic act, because you don’t pay attention by doing something else in the way you hit the ball by swinging the bat. It only makes sense to tell Dorothy to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain if she has the ability to direct her attention elsewhere and ignore the real Oz. To pay no attention to X usually requires paying attention to Y instead, such that X fades or disappears from or simply never enters the stage of conscious experience. You may fail to hit the ball because you get distracted and fail to pay attention to what the pitcher is doing. But getting distracted is just paying attention to another thing.
Often we see or hear or notice something even though we aren’t trying. If I turn my open eyes to the nearby window, I can’t help but see numerous long needle pine trees in the gopher tortoise preserve behind my yard. I notice the trees immediately and I realize that it is trees I see and even without counting I realize I’m seeing more than five trees. But if you asked me to count the trees, extra attention would be required. At a glance, without attending to what I see when I look out the window, I also may not realize that there is a pileated woodpecker clinging to the trunk of one of the trees.
You can learn a lot about persons by learning what they typically direct their attention toward. We attend to what we notice, what we care about, what we’re interested in. We can pay attention to a wide range of items: e.g., objects (snake, car, face), written or spoken statements, movements, sense experiences (sounds, tastes, feels, pains, pleasures), memories, thoughts, ideas, and information (the news, stock market reports, the cholesterol numbers on a blood test). We can pay attention to details or just the gist of a story we read or hear.
It’s also hard to see how we could accomplish any goal at all if we lacked the capacity to pay attention to some things while ignoring others at the same time. This capacity must have come in handy for our prehistoric ancestors, who could hardly have survived if they had stopped to smell the roses while fleeing from those lions, tigers and bears. Focus is the key. We can focus on the task at hand or on a long term goal, but in either case we are directing our attention away from the many things that may distract and divert us from efforts to achieve our goal.
It’s no surprise that “Pay attention!” is often coupled with “Be careful!” We have to pay attention to the results of our actions if we’re going to get what we want--or to avoid what we don’t want. I once got lost after dark while trying to get back to the city parking garage in St. Augustine, Florida. Turns out I was on the right street but walking the wrong direction, which I discovered when I asked a friendly policeman.
Noticing is one way to pay attention, and you may not realize that you see or hear something before you notice that it is there--even though you are attending to sights and sounds. For example, consider the time my wife and I were driving from Miami to Key West and pulled off of US1 for a break. It was early afternoon and the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. While my wife made a phone call, I walked along edge of the parking lot which was twenty feet above waterline and about the same distance from the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Scattered along the shore were thick stands of bright green foliage between me and the water. As I stood staring at this foliage and taking in the panorama of sea and sky, and after maybe five minutes of looking directly at a thick patch of leaves, a small brown patch caught my eye. Looking at the patch for several minutes, my attention was rewarded when I realized I was looking at the head of a three foot long iguana. I then saw the iguana’s head move and was able to make out its banded body and tail which were the precise shade of green as the surrounding leaves.
Did I see the iguana before I realized that I was looking at it? Or did I only see the iguana when I noticed it and realized what I was seeing? Is there a sense that you can see something even though you don’t believe that you see it?
This interesting question can be expanded to a general question about sense experience and knowledge: Is it possible to experience something you don’t believe in? I think the answer is yes, as I think three examples demonstrate.
Example One: A PhD ornithologist believes on good evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct, but then one day is canoeing in the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia and for a mere instant sees a large bird fly high above through an opening in the trees. She simply assumes that she has seen a pileated woodpecker--common in the swamp--although in fact what she saw was a juvenile ivory-billed. Thus, she sees what she does not believe exists.
Example Two: The ancient Greeks did not believe in the existence of hydrogen or oxygen, and certainly did not believe in the existence of H₂O, although they tasted, felt and saw H₂O often. So they experienced H₂O without believing in it.
This H₂O example raises some interesting questions. I recall that at least some philosophers have held the view that it makes no sense to say that someone sees an object X unless that person has the concept of X. For example, a person could only see a cellphone if he had the concept of a cellphone. So, on this view, if you got in a time machine and went back to Archimedes’ home and showed him your iPhone 12, “Archimedes sees a cellphone” would be false.
This view ties the experience of X to the experiencer’s ability to understand and perhaps to say that it was X that he saw. How, say the dissenting philosophers, can someone be experiencing an X when they don’t even possess the idea of an X? Maybe the piano produces an image in the two-year-old but this is not enough, they say, for the child to have an experience of a piano, because to have an experience of a piano is to have an experience that is distinctively and specially about a piano. The two-year-old child--assuming it doesn’t know what a piano is or what it is for--does not know what it is seeing.
That’s the view anyway, but it goes against a widespread understanding of how perception and experience work. I think most people would say that you can have an experience of something even if you do not realize that your experience is of that thing. Which brings me to
Example Three: Suppose that Mary, a small town girl, was given up for adoption at birth by her unwed mother to a local town couple who raised her but do not know the identity of her father. Mary also does not know who her father is. Most of us would say, I think, that Mary’s ignorance does not prevent her from seeing her father when she sees him weekly behind the counter of a local grocery store--even though she and he are unaware of his paternity.
It makes sense to say that Mary sees her father only because--as readers of the story--we are able to take the spectator point of view. We can look at her experiences from the outside and see them for what they really are. If we approach Mary’s experience from the inside, her experience of the grocer and her experience of her father feel the same. It is only the external fact of her father’s identity-- not the internal character of her experience--that make her experience of seeing the grocer identical to the experience of seeing her father.
This discussion has interesting implications for discussions of the experience of God. I have heard many of my friends—believers and nonbelievers—say that they have never had a direct or even identifiably indirect experience of God. Yet, analogous to the ancient Greek’s experience of H₂O, they could be experiencing God unawares. John Henry Newman, for example, believed that the voice of conscience--when true--is always the voice of God. So, just as Mary sometimes sees her father unawares, all of us on Newman’s account sometimes experience God speaking to us about right and wrong. And, just like Mary, we might not realize what’s going on.
I enjoyed this tremendously. You must have caught the news last week regarding the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which you referenced the subject as an example above? The news caused my mind to think back to 2006 or 2007 when the "recorded" sound of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker got everyone excited (I believe it was a recording, but my memory might not be correct). I am going to be very interested and excited to see where this recent Ivory-billed news leads scientists. I have not looked into it since the news, but can you imagine if it is proven. What a comeback story!