engleski

Clear awareness and panpsychism

The question of the intrinsic nature of concrete reality is one of the most intriguing in all of metaphysics. At its heart lies what has become known as the mind-body problem, a recurrent issue in our attempts to reconcile the notions of mind and body and their characteristics within a single ontology. In recent years, discussions of the mind-body problem have predominantly dealt with qualia and intentionality, the qualitative and representational aspects of mind, respectively. This dissertation, however, shows that a third option is available as well. Named clear awareness, this third aspect of mind is here identified as a central and necessary condition for mentality and, thus, as a novel, relevant player in the ongoing debate. The main thesis defended in this dissertation is that clear awareness is non-reducible and fundamental in a way that supports a version of panpsychism. Non-reductionism is the view that at least certain mental phenomena are not metaphysically reducible to anything else. The latter, panpsychism, is much stronger, claiming that mind is both fundamental and ubiquitous, that is, present “inside” everything. To argument for these points, a broad discussion is given. I advance an argument for the fundamentality of clear awareness, which in turn becomes an argument for a clear-awareness- based version of panpsychism. The argument, however, is aimed at supporting only the fundamentality of mind so that the ubiquitousness criterion of panpsychism remains, due to the shortness of this dissertation, only an assumption. The resulting thesis is that of CA-Panpsychism – the view that the clear awareness aspect of consciousness is a metaphysically fundamental and ubiquitous character of concrete reality. This thesis offers an account of the world as a mental realm within which all of our other ideas about nature and its workings are kept safely intact.

mind-body problem; consciousness; clear awareness; non-reductionism; panpsychism

nije evidentirano