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
Results 1-5 of 77
... 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.
... intrinsically chaotic universe (we find laws of nature because we could not exist in those regions of possibility that were 'too' chaotic; a kind of anthropic Kantianism). In any case, this conception of matter excluded consciousness as ...
... intrinsic subjectivity. So the great revolution in physics occasioned by the discovery of quantum mechanics has not by itself closed the explanatory gap and solved the hard problem of consciousness. In fact, as noted, some aspects of ...
... intrinsic property of subjectivity. We are thus left with a radical emergence in which subjectivity simply appears at some, seemingly arbitrary, point in the physical development of the universe rather like Locke's fantasy of God ...
... intrinsic qualities of the states and processes which go to make up the material world' (Lockwood 1989: 159). The fact that very simple physical systems do not exhibit complex behavior should not be surprising but it's hardly clear that ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |