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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... least – to my mind – in tracking down the beautiful Emily Carr painting which graces the handbook's cover. 1 INTRODUCTION WILLIAM SEAGERINTRODUCTION A Panpsychist Manifesto William Seager The xii Preface to the Handbook.
... least to 19th-century writers such as Ernst Mach and William James, and in the early 20th century to Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington. The basic idea that the nature of matter is not obvious just from our daily interactions with ...
... least simulate anything which can be computed (ignoring speculative hyper-computational devices), including quantum mechanics. Such a simulation might be very slow but one should not confuse the simulation runtime with the time internal ...
... least one dialogue, the Gorgias (508a). We will also see that to speak of the supreme soul (i.e., the World Soul) as persuading other souls is to presuppose that each lesser soul has the power to be moved. Plato hints at the panpsychist ...
... least compatible with the view that necessary, although not sufficient, causal conditions are inherited from the past. Soul does not merely transmit tendencies from the past, nor just receive them, as in bodies. 4. The World Soul Second ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |