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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... kind of mentality is the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe: consciousness. The fundamental form of consciousness posited by panpsychism is presumably very remote from that of human consciousness and possessed ...
... kind of minimal consciousness in question is not 'self-consciousness' or 'transcendental subjectivity', or awareness of the self as a subject, or awareness of one's own mental states, or the ability to conceptualize one's own mental ...
... kind of stuff, all of whose parts are exactly alike except for differences of position and motion; (b) a single fundamental kind of change, viz, change of position . . . (c) a single elementary causal law, according to which particles ...
... kind of anthropic Kantianism). In any case, this conception of matter excluded consciousness as one of its properties (except perhaps if God directly and miraculously 'superadded' it to a material system6) and, in any case, there was no ...
... kind of interacting 'elementary systems' is in sharp contradiction [with] quantum mechanics (1998: 88). • Basil Hiley: quantum phenomena require us to think in a radical new way, a way in which we will have to ultimately give up both ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |