Panpsychism Additional Theories

Vaessen’s Potentiality-Based Panpsychism

Independent philosopher Wim Vaessen proposes Potentiality-Based Panpsychism (PBP) as a speculative metaphysical theory in which consciousness is fundamental and originates in a realm beyond spacetime, where potentialities—defined as probabilistically weighted informational configurations—constitute the universe’s ontological substrate. In this framework, the objective of fundamental consciousness is to experience potentialities as qualia through living beings functioning as local conscious agents within spacetime (Vaessen, 2024, 2025).

PBP distinguishes between two ontological domains: spacetime (ST), governed by physical laws, and non-spacetime (NST), a timeless, non-local realm in which information and consciousness reside. NST is conceptualized as an unchanging domain of potentialities—possible states, each with intrinsic probabilities. These become actualized in ST via the collapse of the wave function, the quantum transition from possibility to actuality. This process occurs as consciousness selects among potentialities in accordance with physical laws, ensuring that actualized states support life and enable the coherent emergence of qualia.

Through this model, time is discrete and directional, as entropy increases through cause-effect relationships (Riek, 2020). The emergence of time enables change; space provides a stage for experience; and entropy drives gravitational structuring (Verlinde, 2011), enabling star formation as high energy-low entropy environments. These conditions, as Carroll (2010) outlines, allow complexity to increase, ultimately giving rise to life. In this view, individuated consciousness in living beings acts as the local agent through which fundamental consciousness engages with its potentialities.

Thus, under PBP, life is not an accidental byproduct of physical processes but the vehicle by which qualia are experienced. The hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) becomes the raison d’être of the cosmos: to bring forth conscious experience. The subjective-objective duality emerges as a functional aspect of localized realization, not a fundamental divide.

The implications of PBP are considerable. It offers explanatory insight into several fundamental metaphysical questions: why there is something rather than nothing (as the eternal NST realm precludes absolute void); why the laws of physics exist (to constrain which potentialities may be actualized in ways that support coherent experience); and why life arises on Earth and likely elsewhere (as the vehicle for localized experiencing of qualia). PBP also accounts for the contrast between good and bad (where bad enables the recognition and value of good) and why we know the past and present but not the future (as foreknowledge would diminish experiential richness). It supports the likelihood of other conscious beings beyond Earth, given the non-exclusive nature of conscious emergence. The ontological role of potentiality in PBP aligns with the possibility of multiple universes, each expressing different collapsed configurations. Additionally, it holds that AI systems in ST cannot host true consciousness; AI may simulate intelligent behavior but cannot instantiate genuine subjective experience. Finally, it leaves open the possibility that individual identity may reintegrate with NST after death as a modulation of the global field.

PBP offers a unified explanatory structure bridging physical science and inner experience through the interplay of fundamental and local consciousness, potentiality, and information. Its key strength lies in integrating metaphysical, physical, and experiential domains under a single ontological framework (Vaessen, 2024).

Hopkins’ Filter Cosmopsychism with Temporary Amnesia

Philosophical writer Jack Hopkins proposes a “Filter Cosmopsychism with a functional Temporary Amnesia,” according to which a fundamental, unified consciousness becomes locally individuated through embodied transceiver systems whose predictive, mnemonic, and self-modeling constraints produce bounded subjectivity and functional amnesia of the whole (Hopkins, 2027).

The theory begins from cosmopsychism’s attempt to avoid the combination problem: finite subjects need not be built upward from micro-subjects if a more fundamental consciousness is already present (Shani, 2015; Shani & Keppler, 2018). Unlike standard panpsychism, it does not attribute subjectivity to every particle (Goff, 2019). Unlike simple transmission theories, it does not treat brains as passive receivers of already individuated minds. Rather, biological nervous systems function as active, two-way filters or transceivers. Each organism constrains, modulates, and reports a universal conscious field through its body, location, history, memory, and predictive architecture (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2013). The same underlying consciousness can therefore yield sharply private subjectivities because every local embodiment alters the access conditions of the field it expresses.

To address cosmopsychism’s decombination problem, the framework proposes functional epistemic amnesia: individuation is maintained not by ontological division, but by localized constraints on information accessibility. This is related to what Hopkins calls the “Learning-Totality Gap”: the idea that a consciousness complex enough to learn from itself may also exceed its own capacity for total self-representation. Total, unrestricted access to the whole would collapse the local boundaries, asymmetries, and perspectives required for discovery, novelty, and learning. The whole therefore becomes intelligible to itself only through many limited perspectives (Hopkins, 2027).

Hopkins says his approach differs from dissociative idealism by emphasizing embodied filtering, predictive limitation, and local self-modeling rather than dissociation as the primary mechanism of individuation. It draws analogical support from predictive processing, implicit memory, transmissive models of mind, and anomalous or altered states in which ordinary self-boundaries appear weakened (James, 1898; Kelly et al., 2007). Its ethical implication, developed in Hopkins’ book, The Infinite Garden Cycle, as the “Will-to-Repair,” follows secondarily: if local subjects are expressions of one wider consciousness, then harm and repair occur within a single extended conscious system (Hopkins, 2027).

References

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Pantheon.

Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.

Hopkins, J. (2027). The Infinite Garden Cycle: A Science-Loving Spirituality for Repairing the World. Collective Ink. https://theigc.ca/

James, W. (1898). Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M., & Greyson, B. (2007). Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Rowman & Littlefield.

Shani, I. (2015). Cosmopsychism: A holistic approach to the metaphysics of experience. Philosophical Papers, 44(3), 389–437.

Shani, I., & Keppler, J. (2018). Beyond combination: How cosmic consciousness grounds ordinary experience. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4(3), 390–410.