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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... experience itself is that of Daniel Dennett which attempts, cleverly but ultimately unsuccessfully, to work around this argument. Dennett proposes that we suffer an illusion that subjective experience exists but that this illusion is a ...
... experience and consciousness of the notional 'researcher' who is performing the heterophenomenological exercise. One way to see this is to take an epistemological route. Following the old path of Descartes, let us each ask ourselves ...
... experience in a selfless, or more precisely for Sautrāntika-Yogācāra in a subjectless world. The Abhidharma analysis of experience reveals that what we experience as a temporally extended, uninterrupted, flow of phenomena is, in fact, a ...
... experience (Ganeri 2012) by an appeal to the notion of Humean supervenience (Lewis 1986: ix). Humean supervenience is the view that everything supervenes on spatio-temporal distribution of intrinsic properties. Weatherson (2015) offers ...
... experience to arise. A cognitive event is initiated by contact, which the Ābhidharmikas describe as a relation ... experience. Representational forms of experience are created by the interplay of these five mental features and ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |