Atención y conciencia visual

Some philosophers and cognitive scientists think that attention is necessary for visual consciousness. They normally accept this requirement on the basis of systematic studies of perceptual pathologies, such as unilateral neglect, or based on psychological experiments of intentional blindness in which individuals with intact perceptual capacities allegedly don′t experiment at the conscious level features which are present in their visual fields but not attended. In this paper I will suggest that the inattentional blindness strategy is insufficient and do not force us to accept that attention is necessary for visual consciousness for two reasons. First, the empirical evidence available is consistent with alternative interpretations that do not appeal to the necessity of attention. Second, there are good reasons to think that attention and visual consciousness are independent. If this is so, then possibly there are modes of consciousness that do not require attention.