Cognitive Science

The flow experience as the phenomenological aspect of a cognitive theory of attention

Term paper for PHIL 3422: Philosophical issues in Cognitive Science

In this essay we present an argument that the subjective experience of flow is the phenomenological aspect of a cognitive process that maximizes Shannon entropy of information transmission. This process provides a substantial enough channel for pertinent information to facilitate the operant task at hand, while minimizing the overall channel size of all information. As the information requirements of a task change dynamically, so does the channel size that this process provides. In folk psychology terms this would be known as ‘attention’.