![]() and it would have meant that they shared in the knowledge of their plot to kill Caesar. Thus Brutus and Cassius could have been said to have been “conscious” on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. Until Locke’s time, it had retained the same meaning of its Latin counterpart: roughly “knowing together” in the sense of conspirators. In fact, Locke was the first thinker to employ the term “consciousness,” in its modern sense. They are in Bodies, we denominate from them, only a Power to produce those Sensations in us: And what is Sweet, Blue or Warm in Idea, is but the certain Bulk, Figure, and Motion of the insensible parts in the Bodies themselves, which we call so.īy “ideas,” Locke refers to what we might ordinarily call “perceptions” and what contemporary philosophers call “ qualia.” This passage from Locke, therefore, represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of the hard problem of consciousness. There is nothing like our Ideas, existing in the Bodies themselves. The Ideas of primary Qualities of Bodies, are Resemblances of them, and their Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves but the Ideas, produced in us by these Secondary Qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. ![]() In Locke’s own words from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690: In Descartes’ estimation, this psychophysical transmutation in the conarium was sufficient to explain how physical processes of res extensa could produce psychic experiences in res cogitans-a sufficiency largely dependent on Descartes appeal to a benevolent God, who “surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong while using it correctly.” Several decades before, the meteoric physicist Galileo Galilei had tacitly introduced this explanatory gap between qualities and bodies which Descartes assumed, and for which the philosopher John Locke would provide the most memorable formulation as the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Descartes, for instance, after presenting the body as an aggregate of mechanical interactions between physical components, offered the philosophically unsatisfying solution that the pineal gland explains how the animate soul interfaces with the mechanical body. While they present a similar problem, however, the early-modern Frenchman and the post-modern Australian pursue different solutions to it. “Moving forward on the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies. All my paper really contributes is a catchy name, a minor reformulation of philosophically familiar points, and a specific approach to dealing with them. Chalmers himself acknowledged this lineage:Īny number of thinkers in the recent and distant past…have recognized the particular difficulties of explaining consciousness and have tried to face up to them in various ways. ![]() Indeed, Chalmers’ formulation adopts essentially the same metaphysical underpinnings that Descartes set forth in the seventeenth century. ![]() Neither Chalmers nor Nagel is the first thinker to pose the question of how immaterial perceptions relate to material objects. The hard problem of consciousness by no means sprang forth fully armed from the minds of contemporary philosophers.
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