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Published works

📄 Vicarious attention, degrees of enhancement and the contents of consciousness.

Key points:

The psychology and the neuroscience of attention and consciousness support three claims: attention is necessary for consciousness, a degree of informational enhancement is necessary for consciousness of a specific content, and attention is an informational enhancer.

These three claims ground a framework with the potential to further explain and make empirically testable predictions about the relations between attention and consciousness.

Three puzzling cases, where attention makes targets disappear from consciousness, can be explained by supplementing the framework with the notion of vicarious attention.

📖 Information Gating and the structure of consciousness

Ph.D. dissertation (summary here; full text here).

Key points:

A popular view in the philosophy of attention is that attention is not a specific brain mechanism or a specific psychological function. I argue that this is a premature position.

Attention is an informational enhancer and a flexible gatekeeper. These features make it the most fundamental mental act.

Attended contents reach consciousness only when they are enhanced above a threshold.

📖 Metaphysical and modal dependence in priority monism: Two challenges.

M.A. dissertation (full text in Spanish here).

Key points:

Say "the Whole" = a concrete object whose parts are all the concrete objects of the world, and "a whole" = a concrete object with parts, short of the Whole.

If the Whole is more fundamental than its parts, then either no whole is metaphysically dependent on its parts, or no whole has intrinsic properties.

A view that says that the Whole is more fundamental than its parts, that some wholes are metaphysically dependent on its parts, and that some wholes have intrinsic properties, is an inconsistent view. Jonathan Schaffer's priority monism is one such view.