Cosmopsychism
Explanation
Cosmopsychism is a recent variant of panpsychism, developed by philosophers such as Itay Shani, Yujin Nagasawa or Philip Goff. Instead of starting from below, positing micro-consciousnesses in particles, cosmopsychism starts from above: what is really conscious would be the whole cosmos, and individual minds would be local manifestations or "dissociations" of that cosmic consciousness.
The strategy responds to the combination problem that burdened constitutive panpsychism. If it is hard to explain how micro-experiences give rise to macro-experiences, perhaps the correct direction is the reverse: cosmic experience is primordial, and the limited experiences we have are fragments that emerge through processes of differentiation or individuation, like waves in an ocean.
Philosophically, cosmopsychism approaches non-Western traditions such as Advaita Vedānta (where the individual Ātman coincides with the cosmic Brahman), Neoplatonism (where the One unfolds into particular minds) or Whitehead's process philosophy. It is, in a sense, a technical reformulation of mystical intuitions in the language of contemporary analytic philosophy.
Bernardo Kastrup has popularized a similar version under the name of analytic idealism: there is a single universal consciousness, and human and animal minds are dissociated "alters" of it, analogous to multiple personalities in dissociative identity disorder. The dissociation metaphor explains why individual minds appear separate and why they do not have direct access to the cosmic totality.
Technical objections are numerous. What does it exactly mean for the cosmos to have a unified consciousness? How is it empirically justified? Is it not a kind of pantheism rebranded? Moreover, how does cosmopsychism fit with the apparent multiplicity of subjects with divergent perspectives, and with the fact that our minds seem to depend causally on concrete biological brains?
Despite these difficulties, cosmopsychism has gained philosophical traction as a serious alternative to reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism. Its fertility lies in reconfiguring the fundamental question: instead of "how does matter generate mind?" it asks "how does total consciousness fragment into local perspectives?". It is a figure-ground inversion of the mind-body problem.
Strengths
- Solves the combination problem by inverting its direction.
- Coherent with holistic theories in physics (quantum non-locality).
- Natural dialogue with perennial traditions (Vedanta, Plotinus).
- Unitary framework for the diversity of finite experiences.
Main critiques
- Decombination problem: how does the cosmic subject 'break' into finite subjects?
- Hardly empirically verifiable.
- Accusation of disguised theology.
- The ontological status of the cosmos as a subject is undetermined.