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
... quantum mechanics can help fund a panpsychic outlook, whether causation itself can underpin some form of panpsychism and the core question of the real nature of the infamous combination problem. The handbook also contains two 'keynote ...
... quantum mechanics. Such a simulation might be very slow but one should not confuse the simulation runtime with the time internal to the simulation. Perhaps, so to speak, it might take seconds of simulation time to compute one ...
... 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 the notion of particles and fields (1999: 116). • David Bohm: the entire ...
... Quantum Physics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. James, William (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York ... Mechanics'. In J. Wheeler and W. Zurek (eds.), Quantum Theory and Measurement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp ...
... Theory Explain Consciousness'. New York Review of Books, January 10: 54–58. Stapp, Henry (1993). 'A Quantum Theory of the Mind-Brain Interface'. In Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics. Berlin: Springer, pp. 145–72. Strawson, Galen (2003) ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |