2. The Emergence of the Concept of Consciousness

The text argues that the modern concept of consciousness was invented to account for sensory properties—color, sound, smell—that science removed from the physical world. Over three centuries, scientific descriptions stripped objects of their sensory qualities, leaving a colorless, invisible physical reality. To explain the sensory experiences people continue to have in daily life, the concept of consciousness was created as a repository for those properties. The author contends that 'consciousness' is simply a name for the sensory attributes that were eliminated from the physical world by science.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In daily life we treat colour, sound and smell as objective properties of the world. Over the last three hundred years science has developed a series of interpretations of the world that have stripped objects of their sensory properties. Apples used to be red and tasty; now physical apples are colourless collections of jigging atoms, probability distributions of wave-particles. The physical world has become invisible. When science eliminated sensory properties from the physical world it was necessary to find a way of grouping, describing and explaining the colours, sounds and smells that we continued to encounter in daily life. We solved this problem by inventing the modern concept of consciousness. ‘Consciousness’ is a name for the sensory properties that were removed from the physical world by modern science.