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A. H. Zakai
@kripken.com

The ancient Greeks were geniuses, but I don't think they knew better than us here. It is only around the Enlightenment, long after them, when the question of consciousness really becomes challenging, because of modern science.

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social

my wife notes the ancient Greeks had nothing quite like our concept of consciousness. they were probably right

A. H. Zakai
@kripken.com

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.

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A. H. Zakai
@kripken.com

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.

A. H. Zakai
@kripken.com

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. H. Zakai
@kripken.com

So, I am very (very) far from being an expert on Aristotle, but he was facing very different things in need of explanation. AAUI, he distinguished soul and body, but this didn't pose a problem like it does for us, where we know the laws of physics fully explain the body, mechanically.