This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is ahot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity oftheories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery ofa form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention wouldrequire 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 withoutattention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenalconsciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on thequestion of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I herepresent a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful:conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form ofconsciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimesabsent.
