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Publications in Scientific Journals:

G. Franck:
"Presence and Reality: An Option to Specify Panpsychism ?";
Mind and Matter - an international interdisciplinary journal of mind-matter research, 6 (2008), 1; 123 - 140.



English abstract:
Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world, existing throughout the universe. One problem with panpsychism is that it is a purely theoretical concept so far. For progress towards an operationalization of the idea, this paper suggests to make use of an ontological difference involved in the mind-matter distinction. The mode in which mental phenomena exist is called presence. The mode in which matter and radiation exist is called reality. Physical theory disregards presence in both the form of mental presence and the form of the temporal present. In contrast to mental presence, the temporal present is objective in the perspective of the third person. This relative kind of objectivity waits to be utilized for a hypothesis of how the mental and the physical are interrelated. In order to do so, this paper translates the mind-matter distinction into the distinction between mental and physical time and addresses the problem that panpsychism tries to attack head-on in these temporal terms. There are, in particular, two issues thus getting involved: (1) discussions about a time observable and (2) the quantum Zeno effect.

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.