ABSTRACT
What would Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz have said about today’s problem of consciousness? Some philosophers claim that Leibniz was one of the fi rst to argue that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between our knowledge of matter and our knowledge of consciousness, and that he thought this posed a problem for materialism (see, for example, Churchland 1995: 191-2; Kriegel 2015: 49; Seager 1991; Searle 1983: 267-8). This is supposed to be the point of the famous passage in the Monadology , in which Leibniz argues that perception is ‘inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons’:
It seems as if Leibniz is arguing that no matter what we know about the material structure of an object, we will never be able to explain why it is conscious; and this ‘Mill Argument’, as I will call it, therefore seems like an early version of Joseph Levine’s (1983) explanatory-gap argument.
