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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... principle here. Why is that? As hinted previously, the core of the problem is the apparent mismatch between the nature of the physical world as we understand our fundamental theories to have revealed and the subjective, 'what it is like ...
... principles. (1714/1989: 215, my emphasis) Note that Leibniz makes the anti-structuralist point that the causal organization of the mill, or the brain, cannot provide an explanation of ... principle of composition, according to 3 Introduction.
... principle and possible theories of quantum gravity). So the LEGO world conception is in fact a spectacularly powerful one and it is based upon an intuitively attractive conception of the nature of matter. One reason panpsychism seems ...
... Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt and Co. (Reprinted in 1950, New York: Dover, ed.X. (Page references to the Dover edition.)). Joos, Erich, Dieter Zeh, H. et al. (2003). Decoherence and the Appearance of a Classical ...
... principle, on the one hand, and animal soul (including human soul), on the other. It is the lack of self-motion in everyday inanimate things that has caused materialists or dualists to suppose that the microscopic parts of these things ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |