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Combining Minds Luke Roelofs (Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-University Bochum)

Combining Minds By Luke Roelofs (Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-University Bochum)

Summary

This book explores how groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds. Roelofs argue that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity, and that properly understanding our place in nature requires more willingness to see minds as composite systems, both one and many.

Combining Minds Summary

Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity by Luke Roelofs (Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-University Bochum)

Combining Minds is about the idea of minds built up out of other minds, whether this is possible, and what it would mean if it were. Roelofs surveys many areas of philosophy and psychology, analysing and evaluating denials and affirmations of mental combination that have been made in regard to everything from brain structure, to psychological conflict, to social cooperation. In each case, he carefully distinguishes different senses in which subjectivity might be composite, and different arguments for and against them, concluding that composite subjectivity, in various forms, may be much more common than we think. Combining Minds is also the first book-length defence of constitutive panpsychism against all aspects of the 'combination problem'. Constitutive panpsychism is an increasingly prominent theory, holding that consciousness is naturally inherent in matter, with human consciousness built up out of this basic consciousness the same way human bodies are built up out of physical matter. Such a view requires that many very simple conscious minds can compose a single very complex one, and a major objection made against constitutive panpsychism is that they cannot - that minds simply do not combine. This is the combination problem, which Roelofs scrutinizes, dissects, and refutes. It reflects not only contemporary debates but a long philosophical tradition of contrasting the apparently indivisible unity of the mind with the deep and pervasive divisibility of the material world.Combining Mindsdraws together the threads of this problem and develops a powerful and flexible response to it.

Combining Minds Reviews

The book is a trove of intricate, careful, intellectually honest metaphysics. * Eric Schwitzgebel, University of California, Riverside, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR) *

About Luke Roelofs (Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-University Bochum)

Luke Roelofs is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He works on a range of topics in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and meta-ethics.

Additional information

NPB9780190859053
9780190859053
0190859059
Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity by Luke Roelofs (Postdoctoral Researcher, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-University Bochum)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press Inc
2019-03-21
352
N/A
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