Consciousness
What is conscious experience, and how might brains generate or enable it?
Individual experience, report, and the hard problem live in Consciousness.
CosmicConsciousness
What would it mean for consciousness to be cosmic?
Three inquiries
Collective Consciousness
How do minds participate in shared symbols, beliefs, institutions, cultures, and group cognition?
Shared meaning is not a synonym for a conscious cosmos. That inquiry is Collective Consciousness.
Cosmic Consciousness
Could consciousness belong to reality more deeply than the individual mind, and what do extraordinary experiences of unity with the Cosmos actually tell us?
What would make consciousness feel larger than the self?
“To make the matter clear it must be understood that there are three forms or grades of consciousness.”
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.”
Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, First Words, 1901.
Note on Bucke
Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1901. The title link opens a scan of a later Innes printing at the Internet Archive, identifier cosmicconsciousn01buck. Page numbers are not claimed. The three grades below are his model, not a present consensus.
- Simple consciousness
- Self consciousness
- Cosmic consciousness
The widening is his ranking, not a measurement. He treated the third grade as a faculty humanity was coming into. That certainty belongs to late nineteenth-century evolutionary culture. It is not a finding to carry forward.
The experience can be real.
The interpretation can still be open.
“Non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.”
“The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”
“Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures XVI and XVII. Ineffability, then the noetic mark. The sentence opposite is from the close of those lectures.
Note on James
Project Gutenberg ebook 621. In Lecture XVI he says the first two marks, ineffability and noetic quality, entitle a state to be called mystical. Transiency and passivity are the two he calls less sharply marked, and usually found. They are not quoted here. The sentence on non-mystics is from the close of Lectures XVI and XVII. Joseph Chisholm’s recording, below, begins at James’s later conclusions. It is a reading, not the 1902 witness.
What was felt, and what was added?
Nothing here depends on the recording above.
I lost the boundary between myself and the universe. Everything was alive. I knew that all things were one.
Mark what was felt, and what was added. Written for this page. Not a reported experience, and not a quotation.
The boundary between myself and the world was gone.
Everything felt alive.
I knew it with certainty.
The universe is one mind.
All things share one mind.
A feeling of unity and a claim that the cosmos is conscious can share one report. They are not the same claim. You can refuse both.
Neither theory emerged intact.
“These results align with some predictions of IIT and GNWT, while substantially challenging key tenets of both theories.”
Cogitate Consortium et al., Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness, Nature 642 (2025).
The paper tests predictions of two theories of individual consciousness. It does not test whether the universe is conscious.
If there is still no agreed account of how an individual consciousness works, a cosmic claim has to move more slowly, not more loudly. The theories themselves are followed in Consciousness.
Note on the paper
doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1. Pages 133–142. The sentence above is the paper’s result statement. In 2025 a preregistered adversarial collaboration tested predictions of integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory. Lucia Melloni’s keynote is from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping in 2024, before those journal pages. It is her account of the collaboration, not a substitute for the paper.
Which direction does explanation run?
Many toward one
“Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”
How do many become one?
That is the combination problem. Tiny experiential units, if they exist, do not obviously compose a single human subject.
One toward many
“The minimal commitment of cosmopsychism is that the universe is conscious.” Goff keeps that apart from pantheism, and from giving the universe human thought or agency.
How does one become many?
That is the decombination problem. A conscious cosmos does not, by itself, explain why your experience is not mine.
“still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), as quoted by Philip Goff, section 4.2.
Philip Goff, “Panpsychism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 13 May 2022.
Note on Goff
The panpsychism sentence is the entry’s opening definition. The cosmopsychism sentence is from section 2.4, where he also separates the view from pantheism and from attributing thought or agency to the universe. In section 4.2 he says the name “combination problem” comes from William Seager (1995), and that the problem itself is generally traced to James’s 1890 argument against feelings combining. The sentence on this page is the one Goff quotes from James [1890] 1981, page 160. Combination and decombination are pressures. They are not experimental results.
Matter, then a report
- Hydrogen
- Stars
- Carbon
- Chemistry
- Cells
- Nervous systems
- Brains
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.”
At what point did the universe begin to feel like something from the inside?
The list names structures. It does not say why any of them is experienced.
Or did a local form of experience differentiate from something already there?
David J. Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995).
When, if ever, experience enters this list is not settled by the list.
Note on Chalmers
Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200–219, 1995. The linked page is his posting of that article. In the same passage he cites Nagel (1974) for the phrase that there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This page does not quote Nagel’s article. Chalmers did not write the list.
Where does the trouble sit?
These are not six answers. They are six places the trouble can sit.
- PhysicalismExperience depends closely on the brain. Does dependence establish identity?
- DualismMind and matter as different in kind. Then how do they act on each other?
- PanpsychismMentality fundamental, and widespread. Then how do many become one?
- CosmopsychismThe universe itself conscious, at least minimally. Then how does one become many?
- Russellian monismPhysics gives structure and relation. What, if anything, is intrinsic in what bears them?
- IdealismReality fundamentally mental. Then what secures a shared, stable public world?
Still asking
You are conscious.
The Cosmos exists.
What is the relationship between those two facts?
Philosophical possibilityIs consciousness something that happened inside the Cosmos, or something through which the Cosmos becomes present to itself?
Many toward one is the claim that mentality is everywhere. What an individual experience is lives in Consciousness.
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