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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... entities) to cosmopsychism (which takes the entire universe to be the fundamental conscious entity). Next, in the third section, panpsychism faces up to a number of critical alternatives which are distinctive for taking panpsychism ...
... entity is conscious will depend upon the arrangement of its fundamental constituents given some presumed laws of 'mental chemistry'1 which govern the emergence of complex forms of consciousness. So in bare outline panpsychism presents a ...
... entities of the world. Maybe the laws are a mere catalog of universal regularities, or meta-regularities across a set of possible worlds (the 'nomologically possible worlds'). Perhaps the laws are an imposition of the conscious mind ...
... entities, a merely abstract specification of structure as, say, sets of ordered n-tuples, is revealed to be already present (sets exist if their members do). Something has to 'select' a certain structure as 'real' or concrete and ...
... entities postulated by physics. But this sort of standard or conservative emergence based upon complexity does not engender an explanatory gap. When vast numbers of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, for example, get together just right (and ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |