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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... notion of consciousness, plucked merely for illustrative purposes from Aaronson (2016): 'displaying intelligent behavior (by passing the Turing Test or some other means) might be thought a necessary condition for consciousness'. On the ...
... notion of particles and fields (1999: 116). • David Bohm: the entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivis- ible unit in which separate parts appear as idealizations permissible only on a classical ...
... notion is simply that of a system having properties which are not possessed by its parts. Familiar and uncontroversial examples abound: the liquidity of water, the vortex structure of a tornado or hurricane. Commonplace but more exotic ...
... notion of phenomenal bonding and some develop the idea that primitive experiential aspects 'fuse' into new forms, superceding the originals. It is also possible to re-orient the problem by adopting a radical holism, in which the single ...
... notion of Humean supervenience (Lewis 1986: ix). Humean supervenience is the view that everything supervenes on spatio-temporal distribution of intrinsic properties. Weatherson (2015) offers a useful picture to understand this thesis ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |