ABSTRACT
What did Berkeley say about the problem of consciousness? In the opening passage of the second of the Three Dialogues , Berkeley seems to make a classic statement of the problem of consciousness:
His interlocutor agrees that no such explanation is possible and they move on to a di erent topic. But the conclusion we are meant to draw from this explanatory gap is not that consciousness is a mystery we can never explain, but that the standard formulation of the hard problem is a mistake because it has false presuppositions. Berkeley does not have the tools to solve the hard problem but instead has a collection of views upon which the hard problem does not arise.
