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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Every conscious creature is attentive.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Certain conscious states—such as global affective moods, pain, or oceanic meditative absorption—involve no selective focus on any particular object.
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    • 2.William James distinguished 'focal' from 'fringe' consciousness, acknowledging that peripheral awareness lacks the directed selectivity definitive of attention.
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    • 3.If consciousness can include non-selective, field-like phenomenal states, then some conscious creatures have experiences that are not attentive in any meaningful sense.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Ned Block's distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness allows that a creature may have rich phenomenal experience without the functional selectivity attention requires.
      ?

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    • 2.Creatures with severely degraded frontal and parietal cortices—structures implicated in attentional control—retain phenomenal consciousness according to Christof Koch and Francis Crick's neural correlate research.
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    • 3.Therefore, phenomenal consciousness and attentional structure are empirically and conceptually dissociable, undermining the claim that every conscious creature is necessarily attentive.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Any mind lacking an attentional structure would lack a particular perspective on the world.
      ?

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    • 2.Having a subjective point of view is characteristic of conscious experiences.
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    • 3.A mind without attentional structure would not be the mind of a creature with a subjective point of view.
      ?

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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.