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Once the world looks like a big mechanism driven by impersonal physical forces, then subjective experience suddenly becomes far harder to explain. And that only really happened around the 17th century.

That's why thought experiments like Leibniz's Mill came up then, which really stress the mind-body problem. Also why Descartes suggested the pineal gland was where the soul connects to the body, which for him was just a machine, a clockwork, and hence entirely separate from thought.

So while the ancient Greeks may not have needed a word for consciousness, I think we do. We need a way to talk about the thing in Leibniz's Mill that is *not* purely mechanical, that doesn't fit into our modern concept of the world.

a related take