Emergent Cosmopsychism and the Direction of Combination

Abstract

Contemporary cosmopsychism—including priority cosmopsychism (Shani; Nagasawa and Wager) and Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism—treats the cosmic subject as prior and actual, and so inherits the decombination problem: How does one complete cosmic consciousness divide into many private subjects? This essay argues that the difficulty stems from a tacit temporal assumption—that the One precedes the many—and that reversing it yields a coherent, underexplored alternative: emergent (or eschatological) cosmopsychism. Here the unified consciousness is not the ground but the limit, that toward which a real plurality of fragments converges. The view dissolves the decombination problem (plural subjects are basic) at the cost of re-inheriting the combination problem—but as a diachronic, limit-directed convergence that blunts the subject-summing objection fatal to constitutive panpsychism. It is distinguished sharply from Kastrup's dissociationism, located in a de-theologised process lineage (Whitehead, Schelling, Teilhard), and assessed by a generative rather than falsificationist criterion.