Consciousness and Aboutness: What's the Connection?

You’re looking at a red apple. It looks round, shiny, and red. But here’s something weird: your experience of that apple has two puzzling features at once.

First, there’s what it feels like to see the apple. The redness has a certain quality to it. The shininess catches your eye. There’s something it’s like to be you, looking at that apple right now. Philosophers call this consciousness or phenomenal character — the “what-it’s-like-ness” of experience.

Second, your experience is about something. It’s about that apple over there. When you think about San Francisco, your thought is directed toward San Francisco. When you want a sandwich, your desire is about a sandwich. This aboutness — the mind’s ability to point at things, to be of or about things — philosophers call intentionality.

Here’s the puzzle that this article is about: Are these two features of the mind connected? Is every conscious experience necessarily about something? And does every kind of aboutness require consciousness? Or can you have one without the other?

Two Strange Ideas That Get Things Started

Let’s start with two weird facts that make philosophers scratch their heads.

First weird fact: You can think about things that don’t exist. You can think about unicorns, about a meeting that never happened, about Atlantis. Your thoughts can point toward things that aren’t there. A road sign can’t point toward a city that doesn’t exist — it can only be wrong or misleading. But your mind seems to be able to aim at things that have never existed at all. This is strange. What kind of “pointing” is that?

Second weird fact: You can perceive things without being conscious of them. This actually happens in people with a condition called “blindsight.” They have damage to the part of their brain that handles vision. When you show them something, they’ll say they don’t see anything — no visual experience at all. But if you force them to guess what’s there, they guess correctly. Their brains are picking up visual information and using it, but there’s nothing it’s like for them to see. Their vision has aboutness without consciousness.

So here’s a genuine question: What’s the relationship between these two things — the feeling of experience, and the pointing of aboutness?

Consciousness: The Feeling of Experience

When philosophers talk about consciousness, they don’t just mean being awake (as opposed to being asleep). They mean something more specific: the experiential quality of mental states.

When you see something red, it looks some way to you. When you hear a crash, it sounds some way. When you feel pain, it hurts some way. Even when you’re just thinking about how to solve a math problem, there’s usually something it’s like to be doing that thinking — a certain effort, a certain feeling of figuring things out.

This “what-it’s-like-ness” is what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. It’s the subjective character of experience. And it’s surprisingly hard to describe without using the experience itself. You can’t really explain what it’s like to see red to someone who has been blind since birth. They might understand all the facts about wavelengths and color perception, but they won’t know what it’s like.

Some philosophers think consciousness is quite narrow — just sensations and feelings, like the raw feel of pain or the color quality of red. Others think it’s much richer — that even your understanding of a sentence, or your “aha” moment when you solve a puzzle, has its own distinctive feel. This debate matters for the big question of this article.

Intentionality: The Aboutness of Mind

Intentionality is the mind’s power to be about things. It’s the “of-ness” or “directedness” of mental states.

When you think about your best friend, your thought is about that person. When you fear something, your fear is about that thing. When you want ice cream, your desire is about ice cream. Even when you perceive something — when you see a tree — your visual experience is about that tree.

One helpful way to think about intentionality: mental states have “conditions of satisfaction.” A belief is satisfied when it’s true. A desire is satisfied when it’s fulfilled. An intention is satisfied when it’s carried out. A perception is satisfied when it’s accurate. The content of the state — what you believe, what you desire — determines what would count as satisfaction.

This is where the weirdness comes in. A thought can be about something that doesn’t exist. You can believe in Santa Claus, and your belief is genuinely about Santa — but there’s no actual Santa for it to be about. How is that possible? How can your mind point at nothing?

Philosophers have argued about this for a long time. Some say the object of your thought exists in your mind somehow. Others say thoughts can just be about things that don’t exist (which seems contradictory). Still others say that when you think you’re thinking about something that doesn’t exist, you’re really just thinking about a description — you’re not really relating to an object at all.

The Big Split: Can You Have One Without the Other?

For much of the 20th century, many philosophers in the English-speaking world thought consciousness and intentionality were basically separate things. Consciousness was just raw sensations — feelings, aches, colors — that didn’t point at anything beyond themselves. Intentionality was about meaning, understanding, and thought — which didn’t require any particular feeling.

This view came partly from the idea that consciousness is “inner” and private, while meaning and understanding must be public — expressed in language that other people can check. If you think about it, it seems plausible: a dog feels pain (consciousness) but maybe doesn’t have complex thoughts about the world (intentionality). A computer might process information (intentionality) but doesn’t feel anything (consciousness). So maybe they come apart.

But starting in the 1980s, more philosophers started challenging this separation. They argued that conscious experience itself is intentional — that it’s about things. When you see a red apple, your visual experience isn’t just a blob of redness; it represents the apple as being red, round, and located in space. The experience has content. It tells you (or presents to you) something about the world.

This view is called intentionalism. It comes in different flavors.

Three Big Questions

Once you start thinking about how consciousness and intentionality might be connected, three big questions come up.

Question 1: Can consciousness be detached from the world?

When you hallucinate a pink elephant, your experience has intentionality — it’s about a pink elephant — even though no pink elephant exists. But what about normal perception? When you actually see a real apple, is your experience essentially tied to that actual apple? Or could you have the exact same experience (the same “what-it’s-like”) if you were a brain in a vat being fed electrical signals that perfectly simulated the apple?

Some philosophers say that normal perception is a relation between you and the actual object. The apple is literally part of your experience. If the apple weren’t there, you couldn’t have that experience. This means your experience of the apple is not “detachable” from the world.

Other philosophers say the experience could be the same whether the apple exists or not. What matters is the internal state of your mind. The intentionality of your experience doesn’t depend on whether there’s actually an apple out there.

This matters because it affects how we understand what minds are. If minds are essentially connected to the world, then you can’t understand the mind without understanding its environment. If minds are detachable, then you could in principle have a mind floating free from any world — which raises all sorts of questions about what minds really are.

Question 2: Are there basic forms of intentionality that don’t involve concepts?

When you see a chair, you see it as a chair. But do you need to have the concept “chair” to have this visual experience? Or can you have a more basic kind of seeing — seeing the shape and color and position — that doesn’t require any conceptual thinking?

Some philosophers think perception has its own kind of content that’s different from thought. This content is “non-conceptual” — it’s more like a picture than a sentence. A picture can show details you don’t have words for. Similarly, your visual experience might present the world in a way that’s richer and more detailed than what you can describe in concepts.

Other philosophers think all intentionality (even in perception) involves concepts. To see something as red is to apply the concept “red” to it. This view makes consciousness more intellectual — more like thinking.

This debate connects to the question of whether animals and babies have conscious experience. If consciousness requires concepts, then maybe very young babies and many animals don’t really experience things — they just process information unconsciously. If consciousness doesn’t require concepts, then pain and pleasure are real experiences even for creatures that can’t think about them.

Question 3: Is consciousness always self-consciousness?

When you’re having an experience, are you also aware that you’re having it? Is there a kind of built-in self-awareness that comes with every conscious state?

Some philosophers say yes. They think that for a state to be conscious, you have to be conscious of it — maybe by having a thought about it, or by “sensing” it internally. This is called the “higher-order” theory of consciousness: a mental state becomes conscious when another mental state (a thought or perception) is directed at it.

Other philosophers say no. They think you can have conscious experiences without being aware that you’re having them. When you’re completely absorbed in a movie, you’re having all sorts of visual and auditory experiences, but you might not be thinking about the fact that you’re having them. The reflection comes later.

A related question: Does every conscious experience involve a sense of self — a feeling that you are the one having the experience? Some philosophers argue that even in ordinary perception, there’s a subtle awareness of yourself as the subject of the experience. Others say this is only present when you explicitly reflect on your experience.

Why Any of This Matters

You might be wondering: Why should anyone care about these abstract questions?

Here’s one reason: They affect how we think about what minds are, and who (or what) has them.

If consciousness is essential to having a mind — if without it you just have information processing but no real understanding — then the question of whether artificial intelligence could ever really think depends on whether it can be conscious. And that depends on what consciousness is and how it relates to intentionality.

If intentionality requires consciousness, then computers that process information without any subjective experience aren’t really thinking — they’re just shuffling symbols. But if intentionality can exist without consciousness, then maybe AI could genuinely think without ever feeling anything.

These questions also matter for ethics. If consciousness is what makes life valuable — if the badness of pain and the goodness of pleasure come from their “what-it’s-like-ness” — then we need to know which beings are conscious to know what matters morally. Do fish feel pain? Do plants? Do unborn babies? These questions are connected to the philosophy of consciousness.

And they matter for understanding ourselves. What kind of beings are we? Are we essentially minds that happen to be connected to bodies? Or are we essentially embodied creatures whose minds can’t be separated from our physical existence in the world? The answers to these questions shape how we understand our lives, our relationships, and our place in nature.

Nobody has settled these questions. Philosophers still argue about them. But that’s part of what makes them interesting — they’re genuine puzzles about the nature of reality and our place in it, and thinking about them carefully can change how you see everything.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in the debate
Consciousness	Names the “what-it’s-like” quality of experience — the subjective feel of being in a mental state
Phenomenal character	The specific way an experience feels from the inside (the redness of red, the sting of pain)
Intentionality	The aboutness or directedness of mental states — the way they point at or are of things
Intentionalism	The view that consciousness and intentionality are essentially connected — that conscious states are always about something
Separatism	The view that consciousness and intentionality can come apart — that you can have one without the other
Conditions of satisfaction	What would make a mental state “work” — truth for beliefs, fulfillment for desires, accuracy for perceptions
Higher-order theory	The view that a mental state becomes conscious when another mental state is directed at it (like a thought about a sensation)
Non-conceptual content	The idea that some mental states (like perception) can represent the world without requiring concepts or language

Key People

Franz Brentano — A 19th-century philosopher who revived the idea that all mental states are “directed at” objects; his lectures inspired both phenomenology and modern philosophy of mind.
Edmund Husserl — Brentano’s student who founded phenomenology; he argued that consciousness always has a structure of being about something, even when that something doesn’t exist.
Jean-Paul Sartre — A French philosopher who argued that consciousness is nothing but the awareness of objects — it has no “inside” content separate from what it’s conscious of.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty — A French phenomenologist who emphasized that consciousness is fundamentally bodily — we perceive and understand the world through our living bodies.
Daniel Dennett — A contemporary philosopher who argues that consciousness isn’t what it seems — he thinks the “what-it’s-like” view is confused, and minds are just complex patterns of information processing.
David Chalmers — A contemporary philosopher who argues that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality (like mass or charge), and that it can’t be reduced to physical processes.

Things to Think About

If you were a brain in a vat being fed simulated experiences that felt exactly real, would you be having genuine experiences? Would your mental states be about anything real? Does it matter for how you should live your life?
Do you think animals (like dogs or octopuses) have conscious experiences? How would we ever know for sure? What would count as evidence one way or the other?
Imagine two people: one who feels pain but doesn’t know it (like someone in blindsight), and another who thinks they’re in pain but isn’t actually feeling anything (a delusion). Which situation seems weirder? Does this tell you anything about the relationship between consciousness and self-awareness?
Some philosophers think that if a computer could perfectly simulate human conversation, it would be genuinely thinking. Others think it would just be manipulating symbols without understanding. What would count as “real understanding”? Does it require consciousness?

Where This Shows Up

Artificial intelligence debates: When people argue about whether AI can really “think” or “understand,” they’re arguing about whether intentionality requires consciousness.
Animal ethics: The question of whether fish or insects feel pain is a question about which creatures have conscious experience — and therefore moral significance.
The hard problem of consciousness: Scientists can explain what the brain does when we see red, but they can’t explain why there’s something it’s like to see red. This puzzle drives research in neuroscience and philosophy.
Dreaming and virtual reality: When you dream or use VR, your experiences seem to be about things that aren’t real. This raises questions about how the mind can be directed at the non-existent — a core puzzle about intentionality.