Philosophy: Attention and the Size of the Conscious Field

Several philosophical views of conscious experience have emerged. Two such views are the rich view and the thin view. On a rich view of conscious experience, there is constant experience in several modalities; for example, you have constant tactile experience of your shirt on your back, constant auditory experience of the background rumble of traffic, constant visual experience of the tip of your nose. On a thin view of consciousness, there is no experience without attention; that is, when you aren't paying attention to such things, they drop out of consciousness entirely, so that they form no part of your stream of experience—not even vaguely, peripherally, amorphously—no part of your phenomenology, no part of what it's like to be you.

There is, of course, perceptual processing ...