This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is a
hot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity of
theories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery of
a form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention would
require a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example,
understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding,
at least three forms of consciousness have been argued to exist without
attention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenal
consciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on the
question of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I here
present a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful:
conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form of
consciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimes
absent.