In Defence of Cosmopsychism

Is the cosmos itself conscious, and could our minds be aspects of its vast, overarching consciousness?

In this ambitious and original study, Khai Wager defends cosmopsychism, the view that the universe as a whole is conscious and that individual minds like ours derive from this cosmic consciousness. Wager situates cosmopsychism within what he calls the landscape of fundamental consciousness, bringing it into productive dialogue with closely related views such as panpsychism, panqualityism, and perennialism. The result is a fresh perspective on one of philosophy’s deepest puzzles: the nature and origin of consciousness.

The problem of phenomenal consciousness asks how subjective experience can emerge from non-conscious matter. Fundamental approaches reject the idea that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter, instead proposing that it is present at the most basic level of reality. Panpsychism—the most prominent such view—holds that all fundamental microphysical entities are conscious. This, however, leads to the combination problem: how do billions of micro-level minds combine to form distinct macro-level minds like ours? Cosmopsychism offers a radical alternative: rather than being formed from a combination of micro-level instances of consciousness, individual minds are partial aspects of a larger, cosmic-level consciousness. As a result, cosmopsychism sidesteps the combination problem entirely. Yet this gives rise to a new and equally pressing challenge—the derivation problem: how are individual minds derived from the cosmic consciousness?

Through rigorous and insightful analysis, Wager argues that cosmopsychism can navigate these problems and offers a compelling alternative to both physicalism and panpsychism. As such, this first book-length treatment of cosmopsychism makes an illuminating contribution to debates about the deep structure of reality and our place within it.