This is an interesting essay, but as someone who agrees with Brentano that intentionality is the mark of the mental, I have to disagree with the second half of

This is an interesting essay, but as someone who agrees with Brentano that intentionality is the mark of the mental, I have to disagree with the second half of this passage: > Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something -- it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular. I have no way to prove this, but I firmly believe that even in extreme states of consciousness, we are still conscious of something, in the sense that our attention is directed somewhere... our mind is always attending to something in particular. That "something" could be a bizarre fragment of a bizarre experience, but it's still something. I don't believe it's possible to be conscious without our attention being directed somewhere, even when the content of our experience appears to be maximally diffuse and unfocused. (In those cases, the content just is the object of our attention, the thing we are conscious of.)