Goff (2017, 2019) and Shani (2015) develop cosmopsychism as the inverse of constitutive panpsychism (the view that consciousness is fundamental at the micro-level and macroconsciousness arises by combination of microconscious parts): the cosmos is fundamentally a single conscious subject, and finite minds are derivative parts or aspects of that cosmic consciousness. The view sits closer to Spinoza and to Advaita Vedānta (the Indian non-dualist tradition holding that ultimate reality is one undifferentiated consciousness) than to standard Western theism, but it shares the central commitment that a single fundamental subject grounds the structural roles (T, S, and Φ, the three structural Conditions the book's argument derives, borne by Time, Space, and Substance). Goff's "priority cosmopsychism" attaches the view to Schaffer's (2010) priority monism: the cosmos is the one fundamental concrete object, and finite things (including finite minds) are derivative.

The position is formulated to escape the combination problem that troubles constitutive panpsychism. Where constitutive panpsychism builds macroconsciousness from microconscious parts and has to explain how subject-summing works, cosmopsychism starts with the unified cosmic subject and faces the inverse task (*decombination*) of explaining how finite minds derive from a cosmic mind. Chalmers (2016) and Miller (2017) have pressed the decombination problem as no easier than its mirror: a unified subject does not obviously yield discrete subjects with their own perspectival closures. Goff's reply invokes "subsumption": finite subjects are aspects of the cosmic subject in the way a region of a visual field is an aspect of the field. The proposal is genuinely under development, and its prospects are open.

The challenge to the present argument has two layers. The first is the priority claim: cosmopsychism asserts that the cosmic subject is metaphysically prior to T, S, and Φ, that the structural conditions are features of the subject's mode of existence rather than independent. The second is the unity claim: that consciousness, properly understood, is fundamentally one and that the appearance of structural plurality is derivative.

The reply addresses both layers.

On the priority claim: a cosmic subject capable of grounding finite minds must stand in a determinate relation to them. That relation requires difference, directed dependence, and real bearing at role-resolution. Cosmopsychists need not grant that decomposition literally runs over time; upgrading the directed grounding relation to temporal articulation requires the separate role-to-type argument. Even granted in full, the unified phenomenal field reading (Shani's cosmopsychism, perennialist non-dual consciousness, Advaita's *cit* as undifferentiated awareness), the priority reversal goes through not at the *mode* of cosmic cognition (which may indeed be a non-discursive unified field, engaged as a configuration at [§2.6.8](<2.6.8 Ontological Identity.md>) and as a subject-type at [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)) but at the *relation* the cosmic subject must stand in to what it grounds. If the cosmic subject lacked T, the cosmic-to-finite decomposition could not be temporally articulated; if it lacked S, the finite minds grounded would not be differentiated; if it lacked Φ, no grounding relation could persist long enough to ground anything. The structural conditions are not features of the cosmic subject's mode of existence; they are conditions on there being a cosmic subject of the kind cosmopsychism requires. The priority is the wrong way around.

A prior challenge the reply can afford to leave open is whether a composite 'cosmic subject' exists to bear the priority at all. Mereological nihilism denies that any such composite is there to be fundamental (the pressure [§4.3.11](<4.3.11 Mereological Nihilism.md>) takes up directly), and the structural reply is consistent with either verdict, since the structural conditions are prior to the cosmic subject whether or not the composition obtains.

On the unity claim: the structural argument does not deny that there is a single fundamental ground. It denies that the ground is a subject. A subject (whether finite or cosmic) is a configuration of self-modeling under structural constraints ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) and Chapter 8). The structural conditions are what such a configuration requires. They are not what such a configuration is. Cosmopsychism's unity is preserved at the level of structure; what the argument removes is the further claim that the structure is itself a subject.

The decombination problem, on the present account, is no longer a problem the cosmopsychist must solve in its original form. Decombination is the question how one consciousness gives rise to many. If consciousness is not the fundamental ground, the question takes a different shape: the structural conditions support multiple configurations of self-modeling, and finite subjects are among them. Cosmic-subjecthood is one such configuration the structure can support, not the source of the others.

This also answers the parsimony argument Goff presses in the cosmopsychist's favor. Cosmopsychism advertises itself as simpler than its rivals: leaner than dualism, since it posits no second fundamental kind, and more honest than functionalism, since it incurs no strong-emergence debt for the experiential. Granted on both counts; but the advantage is won against dualism and brute physicalism, and it does not transfer here. The structural account posits a single fundamental category and no strong emergence (experience is the inside-aspect of structure, §[§4.3.1](<4.3.1 The Hard Problem of Consciousness.md>)–4.3.3, not a second kind bridged to the first nor a product conjured from a non-experiential base) so it matches cosmopsychism's parsimony scorecard line for line. Where the two part, the structural account posits *less* at the ground: cosmopsychism must seat a subject there, and a subject is, by the account of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) and Chapter 8, an articulated configuration of self-modeling under structural constraints, the more demanding posit, not the simpler one. The priority reversal is therefore also the parsimony verdict: grounding in the structural conditions, from which subjecthood is derived, is leaner than grounding in a cosmic subject that already presupposes them.

*What converges.* The convergence with the structural account remains significant. Cosmopsychism and the present account agree that there is a single fundamental ground and that finite minds are configurations within it. The disagreement concerns whether the ground is a subject or a structure. The argument of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) and Chapter 8 establishes that subjects, as configurations of self-modeling under structural constraints, presuppose the structural conditions; the structural conditions do not presuppose subjects. Cosmopsychism's cosmic subject is then a particular configuration the structure can support rather than the structure's ground.


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← [4.3.3 Russellian Monism](<4.3.3 Russellian Monism.md>) | [4.3.5 Idealism](<4.3.5 Idealism.md>) →
