A Reflexive, Psychophysical Universe

Abstract

This paper develops Reflexive Monism (RM), a panentheist, psychophysical, dual-aspect monist form of cosmopsychism, as a framework for understanding how consciousness relates to energy/matter in both the ground of being and the manifest world. I begin by distinguishing “mind,” largely constituted by unconscious information processing in contemporary cognitive science, from “consciousness,” understood as phenomenal experience. This reframing transforms the traditional mind–body problem into a more precise consciousness–energy/matter problem, aligning Western debates with similar distinctions in Indian Sāṃkhya and Vedānta philosophy. To avoid materialism’s “hard problem of consciousness” and pure idealism’s “inverse hard problem of material forms,” RM posits a Psychophysical Cosmic Mind—primordial conscious energy whose complementary aspects of consciousness and energy underlie all manifestation. Consciousness real-ises existence, while evolving energy/matter gives consciousness its varied forms. This panentheist cosmopsychism dissolves micropsychism’s “combination problem” and cosmopsychism’s “decomposition problem” into empirical questions about psychophysical laws. Building on Fechner’s “outer” and “inner” psychophysics, and on modality-specific neural information structures, RM treats experiences as what it is like to be particular configurations of conscious energy/matter. I propose an extended psychophysics—integrating fundamental physics, neuroscience, and disciplined first-person inquiry—as a natural research programme for a reflexive, psychophysical universe.