ABSTRACT
The ‘modern’ problem of consciousness begins with Descartes, who back in the 17th century could already see and was helping to forge the scientific world view. Especially he saw that the physical seat of consciousness, the brain, is separated from the world by the very things that connect it to the world. Pursuing the scientific vision into the brain itself, the separation of consciousness from physical activity appears to continue. We are left with the difficult problem, which I call the generation problem, of explaining precisely how the physical workings of the brain generate or underlie conscious experience. Famously, Descartes ‘solved’ the problem by announcing the absolute separation of consciousness from the brain: mind and brain are utterly different kinds of thing. But this is not what is most important in Descartes’s philosophy of mind. Rather, we should pay attention to Descartes’s suggestive remarks linking consciousness to the notion of representation and his brain-theory of the generation of consciousness. Since Descartes maintains that every state of consciousness involves an idea and ideas are basically representational, Descartes is suggesting that consciousness is in some fundamental way itself representational. Furthermore, Descartes postulated that the brain is teeming with purely physical ‘representations’, and he has surprisingly modern sounding views on the function and creation of these representations. This is the birth of cognitive science. Descartes also had an interesting theory of how consciousness was generated. This theory is a molecular-compositional theory which posits, at the simplest level, a brute causal power of the brain to produce elementary ‘units’ of conscious experience. Thus Descartes sets the themes of this book: the nature of consciousness and its generation, and begins the exploration into them.
