Part VI - CONSCIOUSNESS AND WAYS OF KNOWING

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Large questions about ontology and epistemology have already been addressed. Indeed, a significant cause of the renewed interest in animism is its entanglement with knowledge and knowledge-seeking about the world and humanity's place in it. Part VI brings together chapters that expertly address the state of knowledge about consciousness. They range widely (surveying a variety of sciences concerned with matter, Gaia, plants, animals, human bodies, scholarly methods and trance). Cutting-edge research about consciousness promises to enrich debate about animism precisely because both domains of debate entail questions about the relation of matter and consciousness.

Max Velmans opens his chapter by asking, “Are we the only conscious beings?” While he does not mention animism, his expert presentation of current thinking about consciousness is vital to attempts to understand contemporary animism(s). Vast implications arise for the way the world is treated by animists, on the one hand, when they act on the assumption that everything is at least theoretically a living person (in some sense), and when (some) modernists, on the other hand, act on alternative assumptions of matter's inertness. Here, and in Velmans's larger work (e.g. 2009), we are not offered proof that animists are right about anything, but we are invited to consider the likelihood that consciousness is widely distributed and has been present in matter or, perhaps more accurately, as matter, for as long as anything has existed.