ABSTRACT
Every generation of scholars is prone to believing that it is the first to finally see things clearly. This is true also for the study of consciousness. However, Sigmund Freud and Gottfried Leibniz identified two of the fundamental problems posed by attempts to reduce consciousness to the goings-on inside the cranium, the first a hundred years ago, the second three hundred years ago. Freud states the first problem in his Outline to Psychoanalysis:
We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies in between is unknown to us, and the data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge. If it existed, it would at the most afford an exact localization of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding it.
(Freud 1938: Preface)