Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 104 of 138
Not all consciousness is intentional
This feature, whereby many of my experiences seem to refer to things beyond themselves, is the feature that philosophers have come to label “intentionality.” Not all consciousness is intentional, and not all intentionality is conscious, but there is a very serious and important overlap between consciousness and intentionality, and later we will see that there are, in fact, logical connections between the two: mental states that are in fact unconscious have to be the kind of thing that could in principle become conscious. For a number of reasons, ranging from brain damage to psychological repression, they may be in fact inaccessible to consciousness, but they have to be the sort of thing that could be part of a conscious mental state. An example of a conscious state that is not intentional is the sense of anxiety that one sometimes gets when one is not anxious about anything in particular but just has a feeling of anxiousness.