Description
The identity of the physical and the mental in Spinoza entails that for every physical object there is corresponding mental content. This means that even rocks and shovels have "minds." For this reason, commentators find it important that Spinoza have a theory of consciousness, more specifically, a theory of selective consciousness or at least degrees of consciousness. But Spinoza does not offer any explicit views on consciousness. Scholars have drawn several interpretations of consciousness in Spinoza from key passages in the Ethics, for example, that conscious thoughts are ideas whose objects are other ideas. Michael LeBuffe contends that conscious ideas are those with the most power. I argue that this interpretation is on the right track, and that consciousness is an idea's relation to the nexus of other ideas in a mind. What does this mean for mind-relativity? Is God conscious?
