The emergence of mental content: An essay in the metaphysics of mind

Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mental states. According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a mental state's intentional content is constituted by its causal embeddedness in an organism, vis-a-vis that organism's environment. I argue that theories of this sort fail to explain how we could know the intentional contents of our mental states. As an alternative to causation-based theories of intentionality, I develop a consciousness-based theory of intentionality, as follows. Phenomenal properties are experiential aspects of consciousness. Among the various types of phenomenal property (sensory, somatic, conative, and so on) are phenomenal-intentional properties , or P-I properties. P-I properties are experiential aspects of consciousness whose natures consist in the presentation to the subject of an intentional content. In perception, imagination and cognition, P-I properties bind together to form modes of presentation of all of the intentional contents we can entertain. Along with the rest of the phenomenal domain, P-I properties emerge from the physical systems on which they depend, but are not reducible to, constituted by or realized in the states of those systems.