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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 also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature... which exists throughout the universe". It is one of the oldest theories in the philosophy of mind, possibly overlapping in some interpretations with animism, the spiritual or religious worldview of many indigenous societies, though panpsychism is usually regarded as a philosophical (metaphysical) stance.
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 and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century, because it addresses the hard problem directly.
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