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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... be intrinsically conscious. In fact, though commonplace the former belief is demonstratively mistaken, which leaves open the status of the latter claim. This is not a new thought. In one form or 1 1 Introduction: A Panpsychist Manifesto.
... fact which links properties with the appropriate level of modal force. Perhaps the laws somehow follow from the causal powers of the fundamental entities of the world. Maybe the laws are a mere catalog of universal regularities, or meta ...
... fact about our world that it is structured by a hierarchy of relatively autonomous emergent domains (of course, if it were not, we would not be here). The emergence of subjectivity presents a problem of an entirely different order and ...
... fact, given that all the physical features we know are either fundamental or conservative emergents that arise from assemblages and interactions of, ultimately, the fundamental features of the physical world. Absent emergence, the ...
... fact the only direct revelation of subjectivity is in our own experience and the panpsychist interprets this as evidence, that 'consciousness ... provides a kind of “window” on to our brains' thereby revealing'some at least of the ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |