Attention

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “attention” bother me because it mislead people away from its biological basis.
There are several concepts there that could look good to an AI maker but to the human brain study on how do humans do think about it’s own features, makes no sense at all.

The simple the better. Our brain is filled with features that amplify our survivability capacity. This is the main feature of attention.
At the very beginning there are things like:
“Some of the most influential theories treat the selectivity of attention as resulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to process the complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli.”
Well, to survive you will just need one solution to any problem proposed. Its not an limitation. It is for AI for sure…because it do not think about its own survivability.

Consciousness and Attention.
The article subdivide Attention in two branches when it state that:
“The instances of attention differ along several dimensions of variation. In some of its instances attention is a perceptual phenomenon. In other instances it is a phenomenon related to action. In some instances the selectivity of attention is voluntary. In other instances it is driven, quite independently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience of attention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty of giving a unified theory of attention that applies to attention’s voluntary and involuntary instances, and to its perceptual and enactive instances, makes attention a topic of philosophical interest in its own right.”

Then the article approaches Consciousness and the order of the presentation mislead people to think that the division of attention in different forms is derived from Consciousness, or a feature of consciousness, logical thinking.

Attention happens before consciousness. It is a priori. Yes it can be modified by logical thinking to several forms but it will always be in front of consciousness.

For example:
Godzilla just showed up in front of several people.
Some people will pee, shit themselves and froze. Its commonly called panic. Other people will(after peeing and shitting themselves) get into beyond that mental state and they’ll automatically shut down part of it’s own brain, turning off Logical Thinking, Facial recognition, Olfato(Smell capacity) and some other things and RUN.
In this brain mod, that i’ll call survival mod, you are not conscious, you’ll not remember it fully because your brain its not recording it in your Hippocamp but you do have FULL ATTENTION. You do have tunnel vision because of your mental state but attention never shuts down.
So you can lost your consciousness and your attention will remains active because your survival depends of it and it is more important(to the brain as feature) than consciousness and/or Logical thinking.

In resume, what’s bothering me is the most basic aspect of what attention really is it’s not there and the way Attention as a concept is presented make people’s mind go away from the basic concept.