The persuasiveness of Searle's and Ludwig's arguments depends heavily on demonstrating the failure of alternative accounts of the job that they enlist consciousness to do (such as secure 'aspectual shape,' or ownership).
The Miriam story is very deep, but suffice it to say that there is a certain point at which one's consciousness expands to such a degree that it can no longer be contained by the heart and mind alone and one's entire being needs to be utilized to capture the moment.
He argues that phenomenal consciousness in its various forms supervenes (not conceptually or metaphysically but only as a matter of nature's laws) on functional organization, and that this permits us to envisage ('non-reductive') ways of explaining consciousness by appeal to such organization.
Furthermore, the people's consciousness has developed to such an extent that they talk openly about topics such as honor killings, rape, and the ineligibility of war criminals to stand for election.
Anchoring: Combat feelings of isolation by "anchoring" your consciousness to fixed values or ideals, such as "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future".
To adopt view (a) is to accept some intentionalizing strategy with respect to consciousness, such as is variously represented by Carruthers, Dennett, Dretske, Lycan, Rosenthal, and Tye.
According to such critics, consciousness may have interesting functional characteristics but its nature is not essentially functional.
In the beguiling "Oracle Night", however, Paul Auster has taken the inherent self-consciousness of a novelist narrator to such painstakingly layered extremes that the strategy seems anything but lazy.
