A phenomenological account of consciousness begins from a first-person reflection on consciousness that puts out of play our everyday or natural-scientific preconceptions about consciousness and the world and describes the structural features of our consciousness of the world.

Phenomenal consciousness is the feeling of what it’s like to be you. Information-processing systems, such as attention, provide the contents to consciousness. The purpose of consciousness is still debated philosophically, since attention is so closely tied to it.

The core doctrine in phenomenology is the teaching that every act of consciousness we perform, every experience that we have, is intentional: it is essentially “consciousness of” or an “experience of” something or other. All our awareness is directed toward objects.