Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

‘panpsychism’. There’s a ‘weaker’ form of this, known as ‘hylozoism’, that says that all matter is alive, but not necessarily conscious.)

The first view — consciousness does not really exist — has the problem of explaining both the correspondence of thoughts with actual events and the problem of thoughts which do not seem to be stimulated by external sources, such as memories and dreams. There is also the problem of free will. If consciousness doesn’t really exist then it seems meaningless to ask if there is freedom. All our ‘choices’ are just illusions. The remaining views are all a matter of degree, running from humans as the only known seat of consciousness through to a universe that is completely conscious.

The traditional view (our second option above) is to accept that humans are the only truly conscious beings that are known. The problem here is, where did consciousness come from? Are humans alone conscious because of being made in the image of God? Or are people conscious because of somehow having evolved this way? In the latter case, when did purely instinct-driven creatures make the leap into consciousness? The view that other creatures have a measure of consciousness only spreads the problem over a larger swathe of time. There must still be a point at which consciousness enters into the universe.

The last option — panpsychism — avoids this difficulty, but has the problem of being very hard to substantiate. It is fairly clear from observations that humans and perhaps the higher mammals have something that can be

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