Kongress: The Mental as Fundamental (2010)

Description

Workshop "The Mental as Fundamental - Panpsychism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness" In recent years there has been increased interest in the doctrine of panpsychism as a perspective worth advocating in the context of the mind-body problem. The heart of the mind-body problem is the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” – the problem related to the question: how does the subjective fit into our material world? Whereas it is not principally impossible that we will at one point have the ability to describe all of our conscious behavior and the related functional features of the mind via physical concepts, we currently have no idea how an objective description of the subjective dimension of the mind should be possible. Panpsychism is offered as a candidate to deal with this problem taking into account certain basic concepts of physical science as well as the subjective dimension of consciousness. In the ongoing discussion on panpsychism some of the scholars have defended it as the