Khai Wager

Special Issue of AGATHEOS – European Journal for Philosophy of Religion on 'God Concepts and Spiritual Well-being'. Editorial: Philosophers of religion are of course very much used to assessing concepts of God on conceptual and evidential grounds, as when they examine the internal consistency of a God concept, or the extent to which it can withstand one or another formulation of the “problem of evil.” In this collection of papers, the focus of discussion is somewhat different: here, the authors consider how we might evaluate a God concept in the light of its bearing on our understanding of the nature of the well-lived, or “spiritual,” life, or in terms of its capacity to enable, in practical terms, the enactment of a given ideal of the spiritual life. And in general, we might suppose that it is possible to move back and forth between God concepts and accounts of the nature of the well-lived life, until we reach a point at which our God representation and ideal of life are in a state of reflective equilibrium. The papers by Simon Hewitt and Tasia Scrutton begin from a conception of the well-lived life, defined in relational or political terms, and consider what might follow for our conception of God. These papers are nicely complementary, since each examines the bearing of ideals of the spiritual life on the question of whether God is to be conceived as immutable and impassible. The papers of Khai Wager and Mark Wynn also discuss the interplay between God concepts and ideals of the spiritual life, Wager exploring the structure and viability of a conception of the spiritual life that is grounded in a pantheistic conception of the divine, here using the work of Robinson Jeffers to bring out the implications of this view for lived experience, while Wynn considers the relevance of concepts of eternity for an account of the nature of the well-lived life, with reference to the experience of bereavement. Finally, Ryan Byerly’s paper examines how God concepts can provide a focus for spiritual practice, here drawing on empirical sources to support the claim that a God concept, when embedded in the right practice, can be spiritually transformative, even in the absence of any belief that the concept tracks the metaphysical facts.

Is the cosmos itself conscious, and could our minds be aspects of its vast, overarching consciousness? In this ambitious and original study, Khai Wager defends cosmopsychism, the view that the universe as a whole is conscious and that individual minds like ours derive from this cosmic consciousness. Wager situates cosmopsychism within what he calls the landscape of fundamental consciousness, bringing it into productive dialogue with closely related views such as panpsychism, panqualityism, and perennialism. The result is a fresh perspective on one of philosophy's deepest puzzles: the nature and origin of consciousness. The problem of phenomenal consciousness asks how subjective experience can emerge from non-conscious matter. Fundamental approaches reject the idea that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter, instead proposing that it is present at the most basic level of reality. Panpsychism-the most prominent such view-holds that all fundamental microphysical entities are conscious. This, however, leads to the combination problem: how do billions of micro-level minds combine to form distinct macro-level minds like ours? Cosmopsychism offers a radical alternative: rather than being formed from a combination of micro-level instances of consciousness, individual minds derive from a larger, cosmic-level consciousness. As a result, cosmopsychism sidesteps the combination problem entirely. However, a new and equally pressing challenge arises-the derivation problem: how do individual minds derive from the cosmic consciousness? Through rigorous and insightful analysis, Wager argues that cosmopsychism can navigate these problems and offers a compelling alternative to both physicalism and panpsychism. As such, this first book-length treatment of cosmopsychism makes an illuminating contribution to debates about the nature of reality and our place within it.

This paper presents a pantheistic account of spiritual well-being drawn from the life and works of poet Robinson Jeffers. The account is based on a general conceptualisation of the spiritual life according to which it has three components: a conception of ultimate reality, a conception of the human condition (including a view of the actual position human beings find themselves in and a vision of their ideal position congruent with the view of ultimate reality), and a guide to the practical structuring of a human life aimed at its transformation from its actual to its ideal position. Spiritual well-being, then, is conceived as the spiritual life that is going well for a person. A pantheistic account that includes each of the three components of the spiritual life is presented. Therefore, we arrive at a pantheistic account of spiritual well-being, and this undercuts common objections to pantheism.

This collection of papers centres around a novel approach to the problem of phenomenal consciousness called cosmopsychism. A simple version of cosmopsychism says that the cosmos as a whole is conscious. In this collection, I focus on a comparison between arguably the most promising versions of cosmopsychism and panpsychism, called constitutive cosmopsychism and constitutive panpsychism, respectively. The first paper, ‘A Blueprint for Cosmopsychism’ offers a blueprint for a cosmopsychist approach, comparing it to the panpsychist approach. It highlights how following the blueprint allows one to sidestep the most serious of panpsychism’s problems, the combination problem, while also avoiding the problem of infinite decomposition. However, it notes that the approach must address a serious problem of its own in the derivation problem. The second paper, ‘Beyond Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism? Focuses’ on two related views that reject subjects of experience at the fundamental level, thus avoiding the subject aspects of the combination and derivation problems. Albahari’s perennialism is touted as the natural successor to cosmopsychism; avoiding its subject derivation problem while maintaining a cosmic consciousness. Meanwhile, Coleman’s panqualityism is touted as a natural successor to panpsychism; avoiding its combination problem while maintaining that phenomenality is present at the level of microphysical ultimates. However, I show both views seem to face problems equal in measure to those they seek to avoid. The third paper, ‘The Subject Problem for Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism’ targets the hardest problems for constitutive panpsychism and constitutive cosmopsychism; the subject combination problem and the subject derivation problem, respectively. I show that the two problems are almost identical, both hinging on the entailment of what I call synchronous perspectives scenarios. I formulate broad arguments from metaphysical impossibility and epistemic implausibility against both views, based on such scenarios. However, I provide a possible model of how to understand synchronous perspective scenarios unproblematically. I also provide several alternative responses. The fourth, and final, paper in the collection provides an account of, and motivation for, a version of cosmopsychism I call CRP cosmopsychism. This version of cosmopsychism is created on the priority cosmopsychism blueprint and has three further key commitments: simple panpsychism, priority monism and Russellian monism. The paper motivates each of these commitments both in isolation and in partnership, before responding to each of the derivation problems; the subject derivation problem, the quality derivation problem and the structure derivation problem. Furthermore, I argue that cosmopsychism should be preferred over panpsychism owing to considerations concerning internal relations.

A contemporary form of panpsychism says that phenomenality is prevalent because all physical ultimates instantiate phenomenal or protophenomenal properties. According to priority cosmopsychism, an alternative to panpsychism that we propose in this chapter, phenomenality is prevalent because the whole cosmos instantiates phenomenal or protophenomenal properties. It says, moreover, that the consciousness of the cosmos is ontologically prior to the consciousness of ordinary individuals like us. Since priority cosmopsychism is a highly speculative view our aim in this chapter remains modest and limited. Instead of providing a full defense of priority cosmopsychism, we try to show only the theoretical advantage of the view over panpsychism. Tis, however, by no means entails that we develop the view in logical space merely for its own sake. We offer instead a blueprint for a new alternative to panpsychism and explain how such a view avoids some of the most persistent problems for panpsychism while maintaining several of its strengths.