Although abundant studies about how attention works at a neurological level exist today, as Sebastian Watzl observes, the problem of what attention is remains practically untouched. Attention is an elusive phenomenon, familiar to us all in a way, but hard to ground in a formal definition. So, this book is a welcome contribution to a better understanding of the matter; not only because of the specific data and insights it gathers, but even more for the common assumptions it questions from the available literature. The, perhaps even more elusive, nature of consciousness is addressed too in Structuring Mind, highlighting the relation between attention and the former.        

Watzl provides a rigorous philosophical analysis that professionals from various disciplines may find useful as well. I found one particular statement very relevant for future research: that in order to find out what attention is, one must know first what it is being looked for, far beyond from just looking at a group of cells that can be measured with an apparatus. The way of approaching the problem of attention and consciousness in this book relies heavily on a subject-level analysis (aka personal-level analysis), which is similar in more ways to philosophical studies of belief than it is to an explanation based on a neuronal correlate (at a sub-personal level).

The proposed explanation for the nature of attention and consciousness makes use of the available resources from different disciplines, such as recent neurological studies, analytic philosophical accounts, phenomenology, everyday intuitions, and psychological research, to name some. However, such multidisciplinary approach is well unified because the author constructs his ontology piece by piece, with the aim of presenting a clear concept of attention and consciousness, consisting mainly in a structure whose function is to organize and prioritize the mental assets.

The discussion I found more attractive, and that might interest professionals from different backgrounds, poses a challenge to the not-uncommon view of attention as a mere way of limiting the information overflow. It is an elegant account, from Chapter 5, that captures the everyday intuitions about how attention works, it considers psychological studies, and more importantly, it recovers the explanatory force from the rival posture, that is, it also accounts for the known fact of there are constraints on the computations that the mind can track at the same time.           

Regarding issues that might appeal the most to philosophers, the first three chapters constitute an opportunity to reflect on a possible application of structuralism in the mind, where the nature of reification, relations and mental assets are discussed. There is a tendency to reject many sub-personal and computational theories as a possible explanation for most of the issues discussed in the final chapters; however, one could concede that they are not completely dismissed, especially where there is a risk of losing insight about the phenomenon. Contributions from phenomenology are especially relevant regarding consciousness, in the second part of the book.  

Structuring Mind is a very systematic piece which constantly draws resources from previous chapters within the same book. Although it is possible to read a set of chapters and still get an approximate idea of the content (for example, Chapters 8, 9 and 10 for the relationship between attention and consciousness) as the author suggests, it is highly advisable to read the book in the intended order to get the most of it.

The oeuvre itself is more likely to be appreciated in all its detailed discussion by philosophers familiarized with debates about the mind; a considerable amount of the content considers objections against specific philosophical assumptions. I suggest that readers interested in only some of the specific topics of the book still take the time to read the Introduction and Chapter 1, since a great deal of the terminology is clarified there, including some terms coined specifically for this debate. However, the topic itself, the information available and the approach to the problem will be appreciated by researchers, clinicians and people from a general philosophical background.  

  © 2018 Aline Maya Paredes