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	Panpsychism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind.
		Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are either many separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything that is. The concept of the unconscious, made popular by the psychoanalysts, made possible a variant of panpsychism that denies consciousness from some entities while still asserting the ubiquity of mind.
		Panpsychism, as a view that the universe has "universal consciousness", is shared by some forms of religious thought: theosophy, pantheism, panentheism, and cosmotheism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Panpsychism (876 words)

	CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Panpsychism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Panpsychism is a philosophical theory which holds that everything in the universe, the inorganic world as well as the organic, has some degree of consciousness.
		Between panpsychism and hylozoism there is no sharp distinction, because the ancient hylozoists not only regarded the spirits of the material universe and plant world as alive, but also as more or less conscious.
		Of a similar type is the panpsychism of Paulsen, and not far removed are the speculations of Häckel on the pleasures and pains of the elements.
	www.newadvent.org /cathen/11446a.htm (1009 words)

	Panpsychism.
		Panpsychism is still often regarded as absurd - so much at odds with common sense that it discredits any theory with which it is associated.
		New reasons for looking at panpsychism again have emerged; if consciousness arises naturally out of information, and everything is covered in information, then it seem logical to expect at least the beginings of consciousness everywhere.
		First, he does not consider the empirical unprovability of panpsychism is necessarily a problem; lots of things appear to be unprovable, and a panpsychist's knowledge of consciousness is not based on material evidence, anyway, but on subjective experience.
	www.consciousentities.com /panpsychism.htm (1012 words)

	Panpsychism
		Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe.
		Since panpsychism is, by definition, the doctrine that mind, in some sense of the term, is everywhere, in some sense of that term, it is worth mentioning a complication which is a possible source of confusion at the outset.
		Panpsychism enjoys a metaphysical advantage in that it avoids the difficulties of emergentism, which are greater than is generally thought.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/panpsychism (11244 words)

	Panpsychism
		Panpsychism adds further to the mind population of the universe, for in addition to the persons and selves recognized by pluralistic personalists, the panpsychists find an elementary monad or self or mind cell for every minute constituent of nature.
		In its more significant form, panpsychism is rather the view that all things, in all their aspects, consist exclusively of "souls," that is, of various kinds of subjects, or units of experiencing, with their qualifications, relations, and groupings or communities.
		Panpsychism, in contrast, is able to admit all the variety of levels of individuality, including the ultramicroscopic, which are suggested by the discoveries of science.
	websyte.com /alan/panpsych.htm (790 words)

	Panpsychism
		Panpsychism's assertion that mind suffuses the universe presents a fundamental and sharp contrast with its basic rival, emergentism, which asserts that mind appears only at certain times, in certain places under certain -- probably very special and very rare -- conditions.
		It is this that explains the lack of interest in panpsychism, emergentism etc. that sets in after the Presocratics and lasts until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century with its renewed interest in comprehensive naturalistic accounts of the world.
		Panpsychism is an abstract metaphysical doctrine which as such has no direct bearing on any scientific work; there is no empirical test that could decisively confirm or refute panpsychism.
	www.science.uva.nl /~seop/archives/win2002/entries/panpsychism (10894 words)

	Notes to Panpsychism
		This mystic Roman Catholic polymath endorsed a kind of world-soul (thus embracing what Hartshorne called a synechological form of panpsychism) which he called the "noosphere" and urged that the old conception of matter and mind be replaced with a new notion of “matter-spirit”.
		Panpsychism appears to avoid both epiphenomenalism and reductionism, though at the cost of rejecting traditional forms of physicalism.
		As McGinn says: “the weak version [of panpsychism] says that matter has some properties or other, to be labeled ‘proto-mental’, that account for the emergence of consciousness from brains.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/panpsychism/notes.html (741 words)

	panpsychism
		Panpsychism resolves at a fundamental level, the enormous ambiguity underlying the basic processes of the earth.
		An honest panpsychism cannot avoid the conclusion that perhaps mammals are generative automata spawned by an overripe AI render.
		If mechanism is not incompatible with panpsychism, neither is behaviorism: believing in the probability of behavior resonating through structures to create reward-punishment learning cycles does not negate the possibility that consciousness permeates all layers of that mechanistic-behavioral wave.
	www.year01.com /jhave/SIAT_blog/panpsychism (3376 words)

	Panpsychism: What is it? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Panpsychism is perhaps the most fascinating of all the metaphysical belief systems that attempt to explain the ultimate reality.
		Panpsychism, variously called panexperientalism or radical materialism, proposes that matter (or physical energy) itself is intrinsically sentient or experiental, all the way down." (When de Quincey says, Òall the way down,Ó he means from the entire universe down through the sub atomic particles or waves.)
		Panpsychism doesn't have this problem because it is an ontology where matter and mind are not separate substances.
	www.panpsychism.net /html/what_is_it.html (1067 words)

	Meditation on Panpsychism part 1 - Philosophy
		Panpsychism is the philosophical school of thought proposing that consciousness pervades all of material existence.
		Panpsychism, on the other hand gives all matter a mind, its ideological roots growing out of the animism that was the spiritual dogma of our ancestors.
		Panpsychism is rescued from the cold, reductionist clutches of classical science by quantum mechanics.
	www.bellaonline.com /articles/art39843.asp (561 words)

	PANPSYCHISM (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The other ground on which panpsychism is argued for is that ordinary knowledge of the physical world is only of its structure and sensory effects on us, and that the most likely inner content which fills out this structure and produces these experiences is a system of patterns of sentient experience of a low level.
		Panpsychism is expressed somewhat variously in virtue of differing usages of such words as consciousness’;, sentience, ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’.
		Panpsychism is also sometimes associated with some form of absolute idealism according to which all things are included in one all-embracing consciousness in a manner which displays itself as their containment in a single spatiotemporal system.
	members.aol.com /NeoNoetics/PANPSYCHISM.html (1742 words)

	David Skrbina - Panpsychism in the West - Reviewed by David Cunning, University of Iowa - Philosophical Reviews - ...
		Skrbina is arguing that panpsychism has been a pervasive view in the history of human thought, but he is also (at the end of the book) attempting to defend the view itself, and his reconstruction of the many arguments that have been offered in its favor contribute to both ends.
		In defending the view that Plato is a panpsychist, for example, Skrbina points to a passage from the Timaeus in which Plato argues that the existence of a human soul attached to its body is entailed by the body's composition of the four elements.
		In addition, the thesis that panpsychism is bolstered by its predominance in the history of human thought is the view that the panpsychist perspective on reality has been taken by many distinguished philosophers and scientists and that we should consider taking it as well.
	ndpr.nd.edu /review.cfm?id=4681 (1732 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Whitehead is in fact undoubtedly the foremost exponent of panpsychism in the twentieth century.
		Nonetheless, and despite accepting panpsychism as a genuine option, Strawson also expresses the usual reluctance to endorse it, preferring to maintain that his view is suggestive of and compatible with panpsychism but not equivalent to it (see 1994, pp.
		David Chalmers is largely responsible for the most recent rekindling of interest in the search for a scientific account of consciousness and is well known for coining the catch phrase ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ to refer to the specific problem we have been discussing.
	www.scar.utoronto.ca /~seager/whitehead.htm (4112 words)

	Panpsychism and Parsimony
		Moreover outside a Whiteheadian context panpsychism is not infrequently defined in "double aspect" terms, that is to say, it is defined as the doctrine that entities or individuals possess mental properties as well as physical properties.
		The former alternative is the non-Whiteheadian double aspect panpsychism; yet the latter and sole other alternative is non-Whiteheadian also, for the Whiteheadian view is that the properties which science abstracts from occasions and embodies in its theories are genuine as far as they go -- though they do not go far enough.
		-- panpsychism replies that so far as all matters of detail are concerned this is correct, since philosophy has no jurisdiction over questions of detail, which belong entirely to the special sciences, but that there are some questions of principle which in the present state of the special sciences are likely to be forgotten.
	www.religion-online.org /showarticle.asp?title=2363 (2905 words)

	SUNY Press :: Panpsychism
		Panpsychism is the view that mentality extends from humans to animals, insects, plant cells, and other natural bodies exhibiting persisting unity of organization.
		This comprehensive anthology, which includes selections spanning two millennia, chronicles the history of panpsychism, beginning with the early cosmologists of Greek philosophy and continuing into the present.
		The major philosophers responsible for developing and defending modern panpsychism are represented, including Leibniz, Fechner, Clifford, and Whitehead; detractors such as Edwards and Popper are also featured.
	www.sunypress.edu /details.asp?id=60960 (235 words)

	CONSCIOUSNESS, INFORMATION AND PANPSYCHISM (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		But panpsychism was always at the fringe of scientific/philosophical respectability and tended to lose whatever respectability it possessed as the scientific understanding of the world expanded.
		Panpsychism will have no advantage over physicalism if essentially the same problem lurks at its heart, and of course, it faces the intrinsic implausibility of asserting that atoms are conscious (in whatever degree you like — it remains undeniably implausible).
		An alternative to panpsychism is, then, the view that while there is no explanatory relation between matter and consciousness —; no solution to the generation problem that is consciousness is, at the bottom of its being so to speak, a physical phenomenon.
	members.aol.com /NeoNoetics/CONSC_INFO_PANPSY.html (9014 words)

	Metapsychology Online Reviews - Panpsychism in the West
		For Skrbina, a philosophy professor, panpsychism is, roughly, the position that "all things have mind or a mind-like quality....mind would exist, in some form, in all things...." (p.
		Panpsychism, then, has to do with the "enigma of mind"--a subject that these days is out of favor in most professional fields.
		The chapters cover: ancient origins; developments in the renaissance; continental panpsychism of the eighteenth century; panpsychism, mechanism and science in nineteenth-century Germany; the Anglo-American perspective; panpsychism, 1900-1950; scientific perspectives in the early and middle twentieth century; and, panpsychism from 1950 to the present.
	mentalhelp.net /books/books.php?type=de&id=2887 (2055 words)

	Magical Mind-Dust: (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Panpsychism is increasingly being regarded as a respectable position by researchers in various disciplines concerned with solving the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness.
		For example, it is generally assumed that a commitment to (some version of) panpsychism entails a commitment to the possibility of artificial (in the sense of artifactual and not as-if or ersatz) consciousness.
		On what is perhaps the most thoroughly worked out version of panpsychism — Whiteheadian-Hartshornian panexperientialism (or ‘psychicalism’) - a distinction must be made between (1) ‘actual occasions’ (or dipolar physical-mental events) and ‘compound individuals’ (or structured complexes of occasions) that are experiential, and (2) mere ‘aggregates’ of occasions which are not.
	mcs.open.ac.uk /sma78/Tucson_2002.htm (414 words)

	The Dimensions of Experience, essay by Andrew Smith
		To most of us who live in modern, scientifically-based societies, panpsychism is likely to appear quaint, the kind of anthropomorphic fantasy that young children engage in, but hardly a view to be taken seriously by a rational adult.
		But panpsychism does insist that consciousness was a property of the universe from its very beginning, billions of years ago.
		That is, if, as panpsychism holds, awareness is an inherent property of matter that has evolved along with matter, one might argue that dimensions have no reality apart from lifeforms that are capable of experiencing them.
	www.integralworld.net /smith16.html (13358 words)

	Weak Panpsychism and Environmental Ethics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Weak panpsychism, the view that mindlike qualities are widespread in nature, has recently been argued for by the prominent ecofeminist Val Plumwood and has been used by her to ground an ethic of respect for nature.
		I argue that weak panpsychism cannot, convincingly, justify the rejection of moral hierarchy, as it is compatible with it.
		I cast doubt on the claims that (i) intentionality is a necessary condition for moral status and that (ii) it is sufficient for the ascription of agency.
	www.erica.demon.co.uk /EV/EV720.html (197 words)

	Panpsychism in the West - The MIT Press (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		In Panpsychism in the West, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism--the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things--in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind.
		In addition, panpsychism is one of the most ancient and enduring concepts of philosophy, beginning with its pre-historical forms, animism and polytheism.
		Skrbina argues that panpsychism is long overdue for detailed treatment, and with this book he proposes to add impetus to the discussion of panpsychism in serious philosophical inquiries.
	mitpress.mit.edu /catalog/item?sid=41D98BB6-0F6C-4067-BC0F-F1C0DEBC57D6&ttype=2&tid=10531 (568 words)

	Rudy's Blog at rudyrucker.com
		Panpsychism is the idea that every object has a mind of some sort.
		Panpsychism isn’t so much about saying that a piece of matter can precisely emulate the human mind, as it is about saying that a piece of matter has that some numinous internal glow that a person does.
		Could be the toons from Frek and the Elixir, the orphidnet AIs from “Postsingular,” aliens in the form of cosmic rays as in Freeware, “angels” from the Mirrorworld, or elves from the subdimensions.
	www.rudyrucker.com /blog/index.php?m=12&y=05&d=17 (2396 words)

	JCS Journal of Consciousness Studies 10,3
		Contrary to the common view that panpsychism is a fringe or ‘absurd’ theory of mind, it in fact has a long and noble tradition within western philosophy.
		In the forms of animism and polytheism, panpsychism was the dominant view for most if not all of the pre-historical era.
		With the advent of logical positivism and linguistic/analytic philosophy, panpsychism was once again driven down (along with most all metaphysical theories) to a relatively low status.
	www.imprint.co.uk /jcs_10_3.html (700 words)

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