PERCEPTUAL ATTENTION1

Introduction
The role of attention in perception is to situate us with worldly objects. This situatedness
which attention grounds us in is its irreducible contribution to our experience of the world.
There are some preliminary aspects of attention that should be made handy at the very
beginning. In the contemporary literature on the psychology of attention, two aspects of
attention are drawn, they are called endogenous and exogenous attention [ CITATION Eli06 \l
1033 ].

Endogenous attention is a voluntary system that corresponds to our ability to wilfully monitor
information at a given location. In many cases, shifts of special attention are under the control
of the observer daring attention at will from one location to the next (endogenous). In
contrast, the environment pulls our attention towards an event making attention automatic
and reflexive controlled by the environment (exogenous). Thus, hard-wired and automatic
aspects of attention are exogenous whereas intentional deliberateness with a goal is described
as endogenous attention.
Clearly on one hand there is a top-down effect in attention just as on the other hand there is a
bottom-up and automatic functionality of attention. The distinction between these two is
philosophically loaded and as Ganeri (2017) points out:
it takes for granted an orthodox view in the philosophy of action that philosophers have begun
to question, that the causal theory of action provides adequate foundations for a theory of
mental action. (p. 63)

A scholarship is recently emerging which takes the human body itself to be attentive right
down to the molecular levels to attention guiding indexicality of subjective phenomenon such
as language and cognition in an uninterrupted flow [ CITATION Sam20 \l 1033 ].
These two distinctions in attention praise the issue of interaction between the processes that
are controlled to function in a cross-modal fashion within the cortex reminding Ganeri of the
Cartesian metaphor for the cognitive mind. Thus, Ganeri offers a Buddhist philosophy of
mind which employees a new distinction with two roles of attention in conscious experience
by focusing on the Theravada philosopher Buddhaghosa. In this paper, I will try to introduce
and situate Buddhaghosa’s attentionalist approach to matters perceptual.
Attention is not synonymous with looking or hearing etc [CITATION Eli06 \p 43 \l 1033 ] . Thus,
attention need not always be categorical or even directly perceptual. It is also important for a
theory of attention to account for hallucinations and illusions. Attention in this regard goes
beyond the phenomenological witness and practical will [CITATION Jon17 \p 4 \l 1033 ]. Just as
the scope of error is beyond sense impressions, attention being primordial has a much greater
operative scope than things sensational or conscious.
This further suggests that processing determines thought, especially demonstrative thought
and that the content of demonstrative thought is determined by perceptual attention.
1
Rahul Dutt Gautam
M.Phil. Philosophy Term Paper for the optional course ‘The Debate on Conceptualism Vs Non-Conceptualism’,
Delhi University, Department of Philosophy.
Philosophers such as [ CITATION Cam02 \l 1033 ], (Peacocke, 2001), [ CITATION Joh94 \l 1033 ],
and (Raftopoulos, 2009, 2015) have argued various theories of conceptualism and non-
conceptualism; Buddhaghosa’s take on perceptual attention is anti-reductionsist and
subscribes to a non-authorship view of perceptual processes. In the next section, I will try
situating his and other older views upon modern discussions in the philosohphy of perception.
Section I
Helmholtz (1867) holds that there is no necessary connection between attention and fixation.
There will always be peripheral breakthroughs that will always bypass fixation. According to
William James, [visual] attention is characterized by focus, margin, and fringes (1890). These
fundamental and common-sensical insights hold in general and quotidian cases largely,
because attention is not strictly an empirical phenomenon. With a culture of acknowledging
the preliminary characterization of attention prior to scientific and empirical advancements,
this section will traverse a long journey back to Grammarians, early Buddhist and Nyaya
philosophers to structure the debate using modern explanatory tools and labels which are
seemingly discussing the same issue. An instance of showing the value of these qualitative
assessments of our phenomenology can be charted out in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad (BU
hereafter):
We say: ‘I didn’t see; my attention (manas) was elsewhere. I didn’t hear; my attention
was elsewhere.’ For it is through the attention that one sees and hears. Desire,
decision, doubt, faith and lack of faith, steadfastness and lack of steadfastness, shame,
reflection, and fear—all these are simply the attention. Therefore, even when someone
touches us on the back, we perceive it through the attention.
(BU 1.5.3)
We find a familiar notion of attention in Alva Noe who regards perceptual content to be
infiltrated by our actions and attentional efforts [ CITATION Alv04 \l 1033 ] . In this paradigmatic
case of attentional blindness, BU is trying to suggest that sense organs and the sensorimotor
faculties are not irresponsible or distinct modules when it comes to perceiving and attending.
For Alva Noe, neuroscience research cannot help us to explain our phenomenal experience.
They both challenge the singular role of the nervous system in categorizing perception or
attention adducing that there is some other activity or a group of activities taking place which
involves a new definition of the subject. For BU, this definition will be that humans are
beings with a compact mass without any limit which is to say that the limits of space
containing the parameters of perception. BU denies space to have partaken in perceptual
attention at all which is the reason it disregards the capacity for any intentional or conscious
representation to any particular biological jitter or firing, such capacity is held only by a
compact mass that cannot be limited to any event in space and time.
For Alva Noe also, we are not restricted by the nervous activity alone either but there is a
limitation upon the subject of being within a limited space or being spatially attended. Thus,
for both BU and Alva Noe, attention precedes consciousness (I mean by consciousness here
as an individual position-centric conscious perceiver) in a familiar fashion opening up a
debate as to how various thinkers holding very different metaphysics of the self might collide
with each other. There are many crossmodal overlaps between McDowell’s Kantian blend of
sensibility and understanding (McDowell, 1994), that comes so close to Bhartrihari’s
linguistic scheme of defending cognitive impenetrability [CITATION Jon17 \p 85 \l 1033 ]. It is
with such observations in mind that I attempt to show the theoretical benefits of taking these
historical philosophies into account in the table2 below
Philosopher Non-conceptual Conceptual Self Phenomenology First
s Representation Representation Attention,
s s Then
Consciousness
Dignaga ✔ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖
Nyaya ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖
Buddhaghosa ✔ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✔
Bhartrihari ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖
Augustine ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖

The phenomenological model without a self shows how important a role attention plays for
Buddhaghosa in perceptual experience. Another common element in all their models, except
Buddhaghosa, is that they endorse the endogenous and exogenous distinction of attention. On
the contrary, his model views space as containing representations as object files that are
coordinated, placed, and provided to experience by attention. The self has no direct role to
play with any of these processes as we will see two out of three similes of Buddhaghosa for
perceptual attention in the third section as discussed by Ganeri (2017). In the second section,
I will discuss the role of self/subject in perceptual attention which supervenes upon theories
of conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike.
Section II
For Dignaga, perception and inference are impenetrable. Thus, perception is never mistaken
because it is not conceptual in the first place (kalpanapoham). Thus, there is no need for any
correctness condition inbuilt in perception as Peacocke argues. 3 Nothing in our experience is
to be defined or understood, forget explanations [ CITATION Jon17 \l 1033 ]. In this light, it is
important to discuss the role of self-representation because the attribute of phenomenal
content is in a quandry. For Dignaga, perception is not to perceive the truth of the object but
the object of perception, the former is another sort of cognition entirely. A mental
representation has two features then, intentional aspect and reflexive subject-specific aspect.
Peacocke (2014) discusses self-representing at three levels. A mental representation in
relation to a subject that is conscious but do not self-represent at all (motile bacteria
swimming towards sugar), subjects who self-represent only non-conceptually (animals for the
most part), and subjects who employ concepts at the first-person level for judgments and
beliefs (humans for the most parts). Dignaga’s account would place us in the animalistic
category of self-representation and critique Peacocke for the ascent to the third kind in the
spirit of denying the authorship view of the mental event. Buddhaghosa wants to maintain the
activity of cognition not through any mental doership or authorship to encompass every
possible instance of cognition with or without conscious adjunct. He will focus on the
functional role of attention.

2
The content of the table is largely prepared and listed according to the format of the section. There can be
variety of different views regarding these philosophical ascriptions as the schools and thinkers have diverse and
evolving takes on these matters.
3
Although later Dharmakirti adds a non-defective (abhrantam) qualification for perception.
Take the case of paining human arm wherein the person slept on his arm for the whole night,
leading to a blockage of supraspinatus in the arm area. The cause of his pain in the morning
after waking up cannot be ascribed to the supraspinatus nor the arm nor to the sleeping
position since the person was not conscious but to the something which was working in the
morning and the night holding with it both motor and conceptual capacities merged into one
another. In this case, this continuous something is defined by Buddhaghosa as attention which
is working without any self-specifying content retaining the relation directly with the external
object. Thus, the object files for him are quite distinct and active than object files are
generally understood pertaining to a theory of embodied attention [CITATION Jon17 \p 267 \l
1033 ] wherein the self does not author the mental content in its storage, processing, or
retrieval. Buddhaghosa provides an isomorphic simile to make the point:
A man with his head covered goes to sleep at the foot of a fruiting mango-tree. A ripe mango
detaches from its stem and falls to the ground, passing his open ear. Awakened by the sound,
he rubs his eyes and looks around. Then he reaches out, grabs the fruit, squeezes it, smells it,
and eats it. Here, sleeping at the foot of the mango-tree is akin to being in the untasked state
(bhavangȧ). The moment of the ripe mango falling from its stem and passing his open ear is
akin to the moment of the object coming into contact with the sense faculty. The moment of
waking up because of the sound is like that of an instruction (avajjana) from orientation to
one of the five sense-doors, disturbing the untasked state. The moment of the man’s rubbing
his eyes and looking around is akin to that of primary visual acknowledgement (cakkhu-
vinñãṇ̄a) fulfilling the function of merely seeing (dassana). The reaching out of his hand and
grabbing the mango is as that of ‘receiving’ the object [into early vision]. The pressing it is as
that of ‘examining’ the object [locating spatial boundaries]. The smelling it is as that of
[categorically] ‘determining’ the object. Eating the fruit corresponds to experiencing the
flavour (rasa) of the object in the activity of ‘running’ (javana). (Fount 271-2)

The function of the object is to be in sense contact, the function of avajjana is to disturb the
untasked state towards it, the function of cakkhu-vinñãṇ̄a is to cause seeing, the function of
reaching for the object is that of early vision, the spatial attention towards the object is useful
for the further step of determining the categorical perception or later vision. Buddhaghosa
further states the most important point here:
Here, however, there is no agent (katta) or author (kareta) who says, ‘Let you be the untasked
state, you be sense-door instruction, you be seeing, you be receiving, you be examining, you
be determining, you be running.’ (Fount 271-2)

Thus, the denial of authorship view is clear on Buddhaghosa’s part. An ascertainment of

attention is preconscious and that event is certainly not preattentive (Raftopoulos, 2009, p.
352). Thus, the files in the background are not being ascertained by consciousness but
attention wherein the javana or as it is commonly translated in psychology as impulsion or
working memory runs across the object file time and again wherein it orders it (anuloma) and
finds in its feature’s conceptual stores the overtones of previous files for an object [CITATION
Jon17 \p 44 \l 1033 ]. One can clearly see how this diverges sharply from Campbell’s
conscious attention account of perceptual experience (2002). Another salient point is that
there is no author to the whole event which can self-reflexively represent it, thus, there is a
whole series of unconscious and even remote stimuli that can cause representations once it is
ascertained that attention is subliminal upon perceptual content. To give an account of this
subliminal attention and non-authorship view, the next section will look into another simile
Buddhaghosa employs.
Section III
The philosophy of attention that Buddhaghosa gives a theoretical subsidy is all for bringing
the mind into the cognition-perception borders but it does so with a challenge to the next
frontier i.e., the ontological nature of attention as prior to its role in perception. Thus,
cognitive attention is prior to awareness, and Campbell's thesis is rejected that top-down
mode is responsible for conscious reference in perceptual attention (2002) if not object-
identification. The amodal notion of attention as provided by Nyaya-Vaisheshika
philosophers files the perceptual content after it is received amodally from various senses to
awareness and then integrated at the level of conscious judgment and beliefs [CITATION
Jon17 \p 176 \l 1033 ]. Buddhaghosa gives a cross-account of the same. In the mango simile,
the role of three modalities (looking at the mango, squeezing the mango, tasting the mango)
which together in a very embodied fashion charts the trajectory of perceptual attention by
disturbing (avajjana) the untasked state of deep sleep till determining the reference through
ordering (anuloma) by the attention. Ganeri calls this subliminal orienting which is
unmediated by any author at any level of linkage or integration as object files (2017, p. 176).

The notion of disturbance (avajjana) and the ordering (anuloma) is characterized in the
following simile by Buddhaghosa:

A spider spreads his web in five places on a path, making a net, and settles down in the
middle. Now if an insect, grasshopper or mosquito comes into contact with the web
outstretched in the first place the spider is disturbed from where it sits, comes out, runs along
the web, kills the insect, drinks its juices, and then returns to its place and sits there again. It
will do likewise if the taut webs in the other places are struck.
Here the filaments outstretched in five places resemble the five senses. The spider sitting in
the middle is consciousness (citta). The striking of the threads by the insects is the moment
when the sense is struck by the object. The stirring of the spider sitting in the middle is the
orienting at the sense doors disturbing the mind’s default state. The spider running along the
thread is the cognitive process. The spider’s sucking the juices from the insect’s head is the
time when a ‘running’ (javana) over the object takes place. The spider’s running back and
sitting again in the middle is the support of the cognitive process in the heart-base. (Fount
279).

The sensory surface is hit later by the objects, primarily, the objects hit the heart-base or the
cortical and other biological areas involved in the functioning of the working memory
(javana) necessary for object identification, at the least. This supramodal nature of perceptual
attention is like a continuous note playing before and after the mosquitos, insect or
grasshopper come in contact with the web which is to say that attention is pervasive and prior
to both sensations and consciousness not as an amodal substantial self but an inter-connected,
centreless capacity of orientation and ordering of perceptual content. Ganeri observes that
these two similes show that perceptual attention is intermodal and supramodal (2017, p.
178).4
Conclusion
Although Raftopoulos (2009) uses experimental models, Buddhaghosa uses similes as his
explanatory model which ambitiously provides a structural correspondence to the explanans.
4
The third simile is not discussed in this paper which discusses the transmodal feature of perceptual attention.
This isomorphism between the simile and its phenomena acts as the bridge which inter-
relates a complex theoretical structure, in this case, attention, with two further qualifications
– it does it without doing away with the phenomenology via reduction of experience to the
perceptual physics and his explanative similes, extending to his broader theory of attention,
do not ascribe to authorship view of attention. The authorship view takes perceptual attention
to have some conscious deliberation or subject-specificity in perceptual events. Instead, on
the non-authorship view, perceptual attention is said to have heart-basis (hadaya-vatthu)
which is to say the physical basis of the mind and not the muscular organ whose purpose is to
observe and get affected by the perceptual event. This physical basis is multiply realizable for
many cognitive datums in an embodied interaction for Buddhaghosa (Ganeri 2017, p. 31).
Buddhaghosa states:
The heart-basis has the characteristic of being the (material) support for the mind-element and
for the mind-consciousness-element. Its function is to observe them. It is manifested as the
carrying of them. (Path, Chapter 14)

Within this context, it must also be suggested that early vision is cognitively penetrated and
this penetration holds a very different ontology of concepts that penetrates perception. Ganeri
summarises Buddhaghosa on this point:

While orienting to a stimulus is not cognitively penetrated by the residue of past actions, early
attentional selection is already affected by the traces in one’s psychology left by past habits
and practices: what is noticed in early vision is subject to ‘top-down’ influence. (2017, p. 45).

This goes against Pylyshyn (1999) and Raftopoulos (2009). With the same stroke and almost
scandalously, this goes against Campbell because the perception of a categorical object need
not be conscious, attention is enough to exercise the top-down influence on perception. This
again is symptomatic of the non-authorship view of perceptual attention because attention is
taken to be a conscious mental activity whereas in this account the stream of consciousness
itself:
is a wave, each wave rising up to capture an attended view on the world and then sinking to a
default status before rising again in an oscillation between the untasked state and tasked
activity (Ganeri 2017, p. 46).

The more foundational error which Buddhaghosa will find us making is our subscription to
the authorship view of cognition i.e., there is a singular and continuous author to our
capacities and their exercises. For Buddhaghosa, we would be making experimental errors in
the discussion/concluding sections because there we show our authorship views most openly.
For instance, Raftopoulos (2015) suggests that the first stages of visual perception are free
from any content or memory. Here the view of memory and content is taken to be based on
the notion of a certain linguistic or at least conscious signatures of that process, these
signatures being a certain “sensation”, “knowing”, “reference”, “feeling”, “rasa”, or “object
borders and edges” which Dignaga calls the “akara” of the object that is consciously
perceived by a subject.
In the first simile, Buddhaghosa shows the theoretical extent of perceptual attention for
unconscious stimuli, challenging Campbell’s thesis of conscious perceptual attention (2002).
In the second simile, he shows the empirical extent of perceptual attention for our
explanatory models for the data we have which is used by Pylyshyn (1999) and Raftopoulos
(2009, 2015).
For Buddhaghosa, a sleeping person is not conscious but attentive to remote stimulus and our
trying to base orientation to a particular form of conceptual brain state instead of another,
say, edge detection due to its supposed nonconceptualism and the preliminary exertion of
selective capacities, which is a brain state too, is to draw a line in what is basically a dynamic
surface with an embodied history and ontology. The attention working in sleep is working
equally in other states as well and the authorship view in which the force of language tries to
distinguish various psychophysical states of the person to establish their claims on various
debates.
Translations
These translations all contain cross-referencing to the pagination in the Pāli Text Society
edition, the pagination used in this book.
Path (Visuddhimagga): Ñāṇamoli, Bhikkhu (1991), transl. The Path of Purification:
Visuddhimagga by Bhadantacariya Buddhaghosa (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 5th
edn).
Fount (Atthasalin̄ı): (1) Ñāṇamoli, Bhikkhu (ms.), transl. The Fount of Meaning (Atthasalin̄i)
by Buddhaghosa Acariya (Island Hermitage Library, Dodandūwa). Partially typed, partially
handwritten, ms. on Asl. 36–144.
BU (The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad): [ CITATION Alv04 \l 1033 ]Sanskrit Text, English
Translation, and Commentary. Swami Sivananda. Shivanandanagar, Distt. Tehri-Garhwal,
U.P., India: Divine Life Society, 1985.

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