Cosmopsychism

Cosmopsychism reverses the standard explanatory ontology that facts about big things are grounded in facts about small things. It posits that facts about little things are grounded in facts about big things. In other words, all things ultimately exist and are the way they are because of certain facts about the universe as a whole. Following the argument to its logical conclusion, there would be one and only one fundamental thing: the universe (Goff et al., 2022).

The minimal commitment of cosmopsychism is that the universe is in some sense “conscious.” But just as micropsychism can have quantum particles with experience but no thought, so cosmopsychism can have the universe with some kind of experience but without thought or agency.

Philosophical and Religious Perspectives

Philip Goff makes a grander case. He develops a form of cosmopsychism, according to which the universe is a value-responding agent, an ultimate explanation motivated to account for the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and for the emergence of life and mind. He states that assuming fine-tuning needs explanation (it is not “an implausible fluke”), then there are three prime categories to evaluate: theism, multiverse, and “agent cosmopsychism.” He argues that “agentive cosmopsychism is more theoretically virtuous than theism” because “God” would require “a commitment to both physical and non-physical kinds, and to both necessary and contingent kinds.”

Similarly, on the multiverse, he argues that “its structural complexity is realized by an astronomical number of distinct individuals” that “we cannot directly observe,” whereas on agentive cosmopsychism, “the structural complexity is realized by the properties of a single individual,” so there is no need to “postulate a single new individual.” Goff reasons that agentive cosmopsychism is more parsimonious in that it requires “only one causal capacity rather than multiple” (Goff, 2019a, Goff, 2019b). In his book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Goff calls this third way “teleological cosmopsychism”—some kind of conscious cosmos with some kind of goal-directed intent (Goff, 2023).

Thus, Goff rejects both theism and multiverse as explanations of fine-tuning, claiming that each has prediction errors and insurmountable problems. He focuses on the one universe that we have and know to be real, “merely” adding some new properties. “The universe is a conscious mind,” he concludes, “with purposes of its own” that are “still unfolding” (Goff, 2023).

Yujin Nagasawa makes a novel case for cosmopsychism by drawing parallels between the relationship between mind and body in philosophy of mind and the relationship between God and cosmos in philosophy of religion. In analyzing articulations between panpsychism and cosmopsychism in philosophy of mind and between polytheism and pantheism in philosophy of religion, he argues that by replacing divinity with phenomenality in pantheism, we can derive cosmopsychism and that doing so undercuts the combination problem (panpsychism's greatest challenge).

He claims that using a top-down approach (with which he derives polytheism from pantheism) in conjunction with endorsing cosmopsychism, “the consciousness of the cosmos is ontologically prior to the consciousnesses of individuals like us.” This, he says, avoids the combination problem (Nagasawa, 2019).

Sophisticated arguments for cosmopsychism come from Indian philosophy. Swami Vivekananda, the 19th-century Indian monk who introduced Hinduism and Vedānta to the West, champions (with his followers) a distinctive form of cosmopsychism, a panentheistic cosmopsychism, according to which the sole reality is Divine Consciousness, which manifests as everything and everyone in the universe (Medhananda, 2022).