Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

feelings of the individual cells of my body? Or, for that matter, all the feelings of my individual atoms?

Panpsychism may be a fringe belief for the time being, but that might be more of an accident of history than anything else. Or it may be that it is easier to think about objects out there in the material world than it is to think about what’s going on inside our heads.

Panpsychism is really suggesting that the ‘ultimate substrate’ — which we’ve been seeking for several chapters now — is consciousness. So, on this view, there is only one substance — consciousness — and everything else, including matter, is derived from this.

Whilst some scientists try to ‘reduce’ consciousness to physical events in the brain, and therefore to ‘objects’, other scientists can be quoted as seeing things with a sense of wonder and speculating on consciousness as the true source of existence. Max Planck: ’I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness.’ David Bohm: ‘A rudimentary consciousness is present, even at the level of particle physics.’ James Jeans: ‘The universe begins to look like a great thought than a great machine, that exists in the mind of some eternal spirit.’

The persistence of a belief that people are somehow separate from the objective world leads us from consciousness to more extreme notions of soul and spirit. For that ‘something beyond’ the everyday world of sense experience the term transcendence is often used. This has

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