Prinz’s Neurofunctionalism: Attention Engenders Experience
Philosopher Jesse Prinz accounts for consciousness with two main claims: first, consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate stage; and second, consciousness depends on attention. “Attention” is Prinz's focus in that it “changes the flow of information, allowing perceptual information to access memory systems.”
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Jesse J. Prinz
Philosopher
Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor at CUNY, known for his work in philosophy of psychology, ethics, and advocacy of empiricism and experimental philosophy.
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
Consciousness arises when attention makes perceptual information available at an intermediate processing stage.
How It Works
Attention binds features into a unified, viewpoint-based format and passes it to working memory.
Distinguishing Idea
Only perceptual content—not thoughts or intentions—can be conscious; all consciousness is sensory.
Neural Basis
Consciousness depends on synchronized neural firing during attention-driven information flow.
Challenging Dualism
Claims a fully materialist, empirically grounded theory can solve the hard problem.
Prinz’s Neurofunctionalism: Attention Engenders Experience
Philosopher Jesse Prinz accounts for consciousness with two main claims: first, consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate stage; and second, consciousness depends on attention. “Attention” is Prinz's focus in that it “changes the flow of information, allowing perceptual information to access memory systems.” Neurobiologically, he says, “this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience” (Prinz, 2012).
Attended Intermediate Representation
What Prinz calls “attention” is a particular process of making an integrated representation of a stimulus' multiple properties, as perceived from a given point of view, available to working memory—and it is this process, and only this process, that generates consciousness. “Intermediateness,” as Prinz's term of art, locates the critical transformation when representations are “integrated into a point-of-view-retaining format that gets made available by this 'attention process'” to working memory. This is why Prinz's theory earns the appellation, “Attended Intermediate Representation Theory” (Mole, 2013). (Note: Prinz's theory could be classified under Higher-Order [Representational] Theories.)
Consciousness as Perception
In exploring the limits of consciousness, Prinz states, “We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self.” His strong assertion is that “All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allow for flexible behavior.”
Thus, Prinz provides “a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism,” and he argues that “materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem” (Prinz, 2012).
Prinz encourages a direct, head-to-head competition, as it were, between his neurofunctionalism and David Chalmers's hard problem (Mole, 2013). “Where he [Chalmers] sought to synthesize two decades of dualist argumentation, I [Prinz] try here to synthesize two decades of empirical exploration” (Prinz, 2012; Mole, 2013).
Whereas Chalmers famously declares that “no explanation given in wholly physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience,” Prinz counters that there is now “a satisfying and surprisingly complete theory [contained entirely within materialism] of how consciousness arises in the human brain” (Prinz, 2012).
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