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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... given some presumed laws of 'mental chemistry'1 which govern the emergence of complex forms of consciousness. So in bare outline panpsychism presents a familiar picture of fundamental features interacting in ways to generate more ...
... given that the number of possible initial conditions (the degrees of freedom of the big bang) is finite (which seems to be implied by current theory, e.g. the holographic principle and possible theories of quantum gravity). So the LEGO ...
... given the structuralist constraints of physical science. But, roughly speaking, something beyond structure is needed to make reality concrete. This point was perhaps made most precisely and forcefully by Max Newman (1928) in his ...
... 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 second ...
... given way to liberal naturalism (Strawson 1985). Liberal naturalists in philosophy of mind seek to explain consciousness without the metaphysical constraints of physicalism and of any ontological limitations on sorts of things that ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |