A novel variant of cosmopsychism is proposed, the view that ordinary conscious experiences are ultimately grounded in an all-pervading cosmic consciousness. The approach uses stochastic electrodynamics (SED) as its physical foundation, supplemented by insights from eastern philosophy and wisdom traditions. Cosmic consciousness is identified with the vacuum state of quantum field theory, from which ordinary consciousness dynamically emerges. The authors argue that this framework is well suited to address problems of phenomenal constitution, particularly concerning the qualities and structure of experience and the generation of subjects.
In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, a nationalist existentialist project examined how cultural conditions shape human agency. This article revisits the concept of accidentality—an underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. Accidentality illuminates forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.
Attention is pervasively biased by embodied affects, and people are normatively assessable in light of this bias. Buddhist philosophy, particularly the work of Buddhaghosa (5th–6th century CE), offers a rich tradition of normative theorizing about attention. Through an analysis of how wholesome empathy can go wrong, the article argues that Buddhaghosa posits an existential norm of attention: it commands not only proper attention to oneself and the world but also a gradual transformation of one's cognitive-emotional constitution, leading to liberation from suffering.
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining why there is subjective experience at all—may be unsolvable due to inherent limitations in our conceptual tools. This essay argues that the central difficulties arise from two pervasive conceptual categories: compositional concepts (part/whole, constituents/constitution) and instantiational concepts (properties/objects, universals/particulars). Examining their use across four contexts—multiple realizability, zombies, mental causation, and panpsychism—reveals that both categories encounter the same kinds of obstacles in each case. This suggests these conceptual frameworks may be key to the cognitive limitations that prevent resolution of the hard problem.
A philosophical argument shows that a specific form of panpsychism—idealist panpsychism, which holds that fundamental reality is purely experiential and that consciousness grounds physics and human consciousness—cannot account for the structure of spacetime. If idealist panpsychism were true, human consciousness and fundamental consciousness would share the same metrical structure. But human consciousness does not have the same metrical structure as spacetime, creating an explanatory gap that idealist panpsychism cannot close. Therefore, idealist panpsychism is false.