Relation to the world· Mind and consciousness
Panpsychism
Axis: The enigma of consciousness — Can a science of the brain fully explain lived experience?
Experience did not arise by miracle in a dead universe: a form of inwardness is a fundamental property of matter, present everywhere in varying degrees, of which our consciousness would be the most elaborate form.
Philosophers 2
Show inferred positions (2)
Spinozainferable
Thought and extension are two attributes of one substance: the mind is the idea of the body, neither reducible to it nor separable from it. "All individuals are animate in varying degrees": a position close to dual-aspect monism and panpsychism.
Ethics, II, props. 7 and 13 (scholium)
Schopenhauerinferable
A double thesis: the intellect is a function of the brain, a secondary, late, and fatigable phenomenon, which has materialist overtones; but the ground of all things, from the mineral to man, is will. Less a panpsychism in the strict sense than a doctrine of the universal objectification of the Will: it is not mind that is everywhere, but blind willing.
On the Will in Nature