Declan Smithies has argued in favour of a position according to which everything that is attended to is consciously attended to. He claims that all instances of attention must be consciousness-involving, on the grounds that (1) all such instances must have a connection with their subject’s ‘rational-access’ to the contents of her experience, and (2) there is no connection to rationality in the case of processing that is wholly unconscious. Smithies’ view is, therefore, that attention is essentia