I have argued in several places for an emergence-based view of mental control (see, e.g., Jennings 2022). In such an account we exhibit mental control through the control of parts of ourselves by the whole. In attention, for example, the collection of all of our interests determines which of two competing interests gets prioritized. One nice thing about this account is how easily it can scale up to the social level. We might call emergent attention at the social level “collective attention.” The collection of interests shared by a group of people would, in this case, jointly determine which of the competing group interests finds expression. This might, for example, help us to make sense of how groups decide between alternate possibilities, as discussed by List (2023). As this approach depends on the structure of relations between the parts, it does not assume the existence of collective experience or intentionality, distinguishing it from most other accounts of collective cognition (e.g. Seemann 2009). In this talk I will discuss the evidence for collective attention and how it intersects with recent digital technologies.
Jennings is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Merced, where she has worked since 2013. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow with Bence Nanay at University of Antwerp in Belgium, having graduated with a PhD in Philosophy and an MA in Psychology from Boston University in 2012. Jennings works on the topic of attention from the perspective of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with two recent books: The Attending Mind (2020) and Attention and Mental Control (2022). In these books she argues that attention provides evidence of a self or subject that is able to direct and control their own mind. Jennings has recently extended this work to examine the phenomenon of Collective Attention, which will be the topic of this lecture.