Panpsychism

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In philosophy, panpsychism () is the view that mind or conscious experience, of some type or other, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, including all physical matter. It is one of the oldest theories in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, possibly overlapping in some interpretations with the animism of many indigenous societies, which is traditionally characterized as a more spiritual or religious worldview. Panpsychism has been attributed to certain ancient Indian philosophies, such as Jainism and Advaita Vedanta, as well as to Western philosophers including Spinoza, Margaret Cavendish, Leibniz, William James, and, more controversially, to Thales, Plato, Schopenhauer, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell. Views described as panpsychism were advocated by prominent 19th-century philosophers such as Schopenhauer and James, but saw a decline in the mid-20th century associated with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness...

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