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Abstract:
What is the reality*space and time*in which we find ourselves?
Two types of answers to this question have gone back and forth
since ancient Greece. Democritus claimed that empty space was an
absolute void, whereas Aristotle suggested some type of
background pattern or "plenum." In the nineteenth century Maxwell
proposed a "luminiferous ether" to explain the propagation of
electromagnetic waves through a vacuum, however the
Michelson-Morley experiment seemed to disprove such a concept and
the conventional wisdom reverted to an absolute void. Einstein's
special relativity with its nonpreferential frames of reference
upheld the absolute void context, but Einstein's general
relativity with 4-dimensional spacetime curvature swung the
pendulum back toward an underlying "plenum ," or pattern in basic
reality*the spacetime metric. Since then various descriptions of
a fundamental quantum sea, vacuum, foam or spin network have been
used to describe underlying spacetime geometry. Is this relevant
to the understanding of consciousness? Could phenomenological
inner space related to the nature of space everywhere?
Historically, panpsychist, pan-experiential and pan-protopsychist
views suggest that consciousness, or its raw undifferentiated
precursors, are fundamental to the universe (somewhat like mass,
spin or charge) accessed by brain processes. If so, qualia may be
found at basic levels of reality at which quantum theory holds
sway. The chapters in this section address these issues.
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