Abstract Panpsychists commonly hang onto the ‘realist’ assumption that our world with its structures has an observer-independent, often spatial element to it, even while they claim that those structures are realized by the experiences of subjects. I argue that this assumption is the ‘worm in the apple’ that lurks behind two of panpsychism’s major problems: the subject (de)combination problem...
Abstract The Perennial Philosophy centres around what is said to be a recurring mystical insight: that our inherent nature is actually pure, unconditioned consciousness, identical to the ground of all being. Perennial Idealism, the name the author gives to a metaphysical system she has been building, extrapolates from the Perennial Philosophy to explain how the world could be configured if it...
Abstract: Panpsychism is viewed by its advocates as resolving the main sticking points for materialism and dualism. While sympathetic to this approach, I locate two prevalent assumptions within modern panpsychism which I think are problematic: first, that fundamental consciousness belongs to a perspectival subject (whether microlevel or cosmic) and second, that the physical world, despite being...
Abstract Buddhists maintain that the enlightened person is freed from the illusion of 'self' with its ideas of 'me' and 'mine'. What notion of self is at stake here? What must be the case, with regard to the self and consciousness, for nirvana to be psychologically possible? Is the picture that emerges a plausible one in the philosophy of mind? Part One outlines the notion of self under...