The General Idea Sample Clauses

The General Idea. The main motivation for postulating basic or fundamental consciousness is the goal of making it more intelligible how consciousness emerges at higher levels. The combination problem for panpsychism16 is the question of how these experiences, subjects or “feelings” at the lowest level of reality come together to form more complex higher-level experiences, subjects or “feelings”. Most famously, it was formulated by Xxxxxxx Xxxxx in The Principles of Psychology (1890). Xxxxx criticised what he called the “mind-dust” theory, according to which mental states are understood as combinations of elemental mental states (Chalmers 2017). It is also important to note that Xxxxx’s broader argument was aimed against the possibility of intrinsically organised wholes of any sort (Shani 2010). In fact, Xxxxx approvingly quoted Xxxxx in the Principles of Psychology: “No summing of parts can make a unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless this unity exists for some other subject, not for the mass itself” (Royce 1881: 375–76). Xxxx Xxxxx (2010: 419) identified three main theses within the broader paragraph quoted by Xxxxx, all of which play an important role in his argument against mental combination: