The Nature Of Consciousness In Leibniz's Argument

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The one aspect of our mind which is unarguably the most familiar yet the most confusing is the conscious experience of us and the world, and has been puzzling humans since their existence. The solution to this problem of consciousness, and several other related problems arising out of the same probably lies somewhere in the depths of our brains, its structure and function.
There have been multiple views and opinions regarding the nature of consciousness and whether or not any substantial basis exists for consciousness, it is central to the notions of thought and personal identity. Some believe that consciousness could not arise from matter alone, as illustrated by Leibniz’s famous analogy of the mill. To illustrate his opinion, he asked his reader to imagine someone walking through an expanded brain as one would walk through a mill and observing all its mechanical operations, which for Leibniz exhausted its physical nature. Nowhere, he asserts, would such an observer see any conscious thoughts. Others believe that all aspects of consciousness could ultimately be routed to the physical structure of the brain, consciousness can be said to arise out of a combination of related ideas. However, …show more content…

If it is fundamental feature of reality, one needs to explain why reality cannot be the way we experience it, without the notion of consciousness. If consciousness is composed of more fundamental, non-conscious entities, one needs to explain how these entities interact to produce the notion of consciousness as we view it. One may attempt to formulate computational models to explain one aspect of consciousness or attempt to explain some other aspect by explaining the way neural interactions in a conscious creature’s mind together give rise to that aspect. All such attempts generally involve explaining a feature of consciousness in relation to some sort of