Cosmopsychism

Cosmopsychism combines two ideas.

1. Consciousness is fundamental. This is the panpsychist premise, motivated by the hard problem of consciousness.
2. The whole is prior to its parts. Jonathan Schaffer has argued for priority monism, on which the universe is the one basic thing and everything else depends on it.^[2]

Put together, the fundamental conscious thing is the universe itself. Itay Shani, Yujin Nagasawa and Khai Wager, and Philip Goff have each developed versions.^[1][3][4]

A related family of views is idealist. Bernardo Kastrup argues that there is only universal consciousness, and that matter is how it appears from outside. Miri Albahari defends a position she connects to Advaita Vedanta.

The gain is that cosmopsychism avoids the combination problem. It does not need to explain how small minds fuse into large ones, because it does not start with small minds.

The cost is the reverse problem. It must explain how one cosmic mind gives rise to many separate minds, each closed to the others. This is the decombination problem, and it is at least as hard.

Although the name is recent, the idea resembles older systems: Spinoza's single substance, the Brahman of Advaita Vedanta, and the absolute idealism of nineteenth-century philosophers such as F. H. Bradley.

Cosmopsychism is the closest academic relative of Universal Panpsychism. Both begin with one universal consciousness and treat individual minds as derived from it. The Source plays the role of the cosmic subject.

The differences are large. Academic cosmopsychism is a thesis about the structure of consciousness. It makes no claims about souls, purpose, reincarnation, or an afterlife, and nothing in the published arguments leads to them. Universal Panpsychism rests those further claims on a different kind of support: testimony. See Convergent testimony as a method.

One recent development narrows the gap slightly. In Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Goff argues that the universe may have a direction or purpose.^[5] He does not connect this to souls or survival of death.

1. Shani, I. (2015). Cosmopsychism: A holistic approach to the metaphysics of experience. Philosophical Papers, 44(3), 389-437.
2. Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: The priority of the whole. Philosophical Review, 119(1), 31-76.
3. Nagasawa, Y., & Wager, K. (2016). Panpsychism and priority cosmopsychism. In G. Brüntrup & L. Jaskolla (Eds.), Panpsychism: Contemporary perspectives (pp. 113-129). Oxford University Press.
4. Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and fundamental reality. Oxford University Press.
5. Goff, P. (2023). Why? The purpose of the universe. Oxford University Press.