Attention, Consciousness and Genuine AI

In his book The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence(2023), Carlos Montemayor proposes, among other things, an account of genuine artificial intelligence (IA) in terms of the notion of attention. This notion, when disconnected from problematic notions like phenomenal consciousness, can account for epistemic agency, which is a central feature of intelligent behavior. This paper questions, on the one hand, whether attention really suffices for epistemic agency and for AI. On the other hand, it is also argued that we cannot completely disentangle phenomenal consciousness from questions about the nature of intelligence, epistemic agency, and attention. After all, we may need to deal with deeper metaphysical questions.