Notes

1) How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness?FAMILIARITY: "As human beings we typically observe familiarity between two members of the same family or even between members of our social groups
familiarity is a generic feeling in which a situation, event, place, person or object directly provokes a subjective feeling of recognition which we then believe to be a memory. As a result, we recognize "it". The aspect of familiarity is thus a scalar phenomenon...There can be greater or lesser degrees of familiarity.ut it is important to see that non-pathological forms of consciousness come to us under the aspect of familiarity....

The aspect of familiarity

It is a characteristic feature of non-pathological states of consciousness that they come to us with what I will call the `aspect of familiarity'. In order for me to see the objects in front of me as, for example, houses, chairs, people, tables, I have to have a prior possession of the categories of houses, chairs, people, tables. But that means that I will assimilate my experiences into a set of categories which are more or less familiar to me. When I am in an extremely strange environment, in a jungle village, for example, and the houses, people and foliage look very exotic to me, I still perceive that as a house, that as a person, that as clothing, that as a tree or a bush. The aspect of familiarity is thus a scalar phenomenon. There can be greater or lesser degrees of familiarity. But it is important to see that non-pathological forms of consciousness come to us under the aspect of familiarity. Again, one way to consider this is to look at the pathological cases. In Capgras's syndrome, the patients are unable to acknowledge familiar people in their environment as the people they actually are. They think the spouse is not really their spouse but is an imposter, etc. This is a case of a breakdown in one aspect of familiarity. In non-pathological cases it is extremely difficult to break with the aspect of familiarity. Surrealist painters try to do it. But even in the surrealist painting, the three-headed woman is still a woman, and the drooping watch is still a watch

UNİTY : The unity of consciousness is mainly comprised of two sub units:
horizontal and vertical. Horizontal unity is the organization of conscious experiences through
stretches of time. For example, when I am speaking about something or thinking something, in
due course I am aware of what I have been stating throughout or what I had started with at the
beginning. On the other hand, the conscious experience has a vertical unity when someone is
simultaneously aware of the diverse features of conscious states. For example, one can be
simultaneously aware of his watching the programme on television and taste of the food, and
feeling pain in his leg, etc.4


INTENTIONALITY is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. There is a conceptual connection between consciousness and intentionality.
Our conscious experiences are always about something, i.e.whenever we are conscious we are conscious of something. So there is an aboutness or
directedness involved in the form of conscious experiences. And the representation of these
conscious experiences reveal the intentional feature of the states. For Searle, all our conscious
experiences are not intentional in the sense that there may be conscious experiences which are
not about anything particular. For instance, one’s feeling of sudden joy may not have any cause
and thereby the person may not be able to cite the intentional referent of his happiness.
These conscious experiences vary from person to person. There is a subjective feeling
attached to one’s conscious experience. We see varieties of things in the world, but whenever we
see them we see them from our point of view. That is, each one of us sees the things from a
different perspective. Searle writes, “My experiences, unlike the objects of the experiences, are
always perspectival. They are always from a point of view. But objects themselves have no point
of view.

2) Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious.Background he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense.

3))