The Routledge Handbook of PanpsychismWilliam Seager Panpsychism is the view that consciousness – the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe – is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the world, though in a form very remote from human consciousness. At a very basic level, the world is awake. Panpsychism seems implausible to most, and yet it has experienced a remarkable renaissance of interest over the last quarter century. The reason is the stubbornly intractable problem of consciousness. Despite immense progress in understanding the brain and its relation to states of consciousness, we still really have no idea how consciousness emerges from physical processes which are presumed to be entirely non-conscious. The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism provides a high-level comprehensive examination and assessment of the subject – its history and contemporary development. It offers 28 chapters, appearing in print here for the first time, from the world’s leading researchers on panpsychism. The chapters are divided into four sections that integrate panpsychism’s relevance with important issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and even ethics:
The volume will be useful to students and scholars as both an introduction and as cutting-edge philosophical engagement with the subject. For anyone interested in a philosophical approach to panpsychism, the Handbook will supply fascinating and enlightening reading. The topics covered are highly diverse, representing a spectrum of views on the nature of mind and world from various standpoints which take panpsychism seriously. |
From inside the book
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... complex forms of consciousness. Some things, like us or our brains, have the right chemistry. Rocks do not. One of the major philosophical problems facing panpsychism – the so-called 'combination problem' – is to understand how mental ...
... complex subjects, whether quantum mechanics can help fund a panpsychic outlook, whether causation itself can underpin some form of panpsychism and the core question of the real nature of the infamous combination problem. The handbook ...
... complex forms of consciousness. So in bare outline panpsychism presents a familiar picture of fundamental features interacting in ways to generate more complex forms, it's just that the catalog of the fundamental includes consciousness ...
... complex (for example, many kinds of charge beyond that of electric are now recognized) but all new hypotheses link to the relations between observable quantities, albeit sometimes indirectly. It is unsurprising that nowhere in this ...
... entirely different order and seems to call for more than conservative emergence. Ever more complex calculations of the behavior of ever more complicated physical systems will not get us to consciousness, 6 William Seager.
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |