The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism

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