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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... require that ability to pass the Turing test. Feeling pain (or any other sensation) alone is sufficient for consciousness; consciousness implies only sentience. It's worth noting this because there is a somewhat pernicious ambiguity ...
... requiring/expecting a physical-science revolution before consciousness can be understood as a natural phenomenon (see 2000: ch. 4). The staunch anti-panpsychist John Searle sometimes also suggests the need for a revolution in science in ...
... require us to think in a radical new way, a way in which we will have to ultimately give up both the notion of particles and fields (1999: 116). • David Bohm: the entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single ...
... requires some explication of a purely cognitive, non-experiential theory of thought content which Dennett has attempted to supply with his theory of intentional stances. A particularly sophisticated deployment of this account leads to ...
... requires the intervention of a conscious observer appears in somewhat veiled ways in Bohr and von Neumann. It is explicitly advanced in London and Bauer (1939/1983) and Wigner (1962). A modern proponent is Henry Stapp (e.g. 1993). 9 ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |