The decombination problem

Ordinary panpsychism starts with many tiny minds and has to explain how they combine into one. That is the combination problem. Cosmopsychism starts with one great mind and avoids it. In exchange it inherits the mirror image.^[1]

The difficulty has two parts.

1. Subjects do not seem to divide. A subject of experience is a single point of view. It is unclear what it would mean for one point of view to contain others, or to split into them.
2. Privacy. My experiences are closed to you and yours to me. If we are both aspects of one mind, something must explain why that mind's contents are walled off into compartments, and why no compartment has access to the whole.

A third worry follows. The cosmic mind would presumably experience everything at once. Human experience is narrow, partial, and often mistaken. It is hard to see how limited experiences could be parts of an unlimited one.

• Dissociation. Bernardo Kastrup compares individual minds to the separate identities in dissociative identity disorder, where one mind presents as several that are closed to one another.^[2] Critics reply that this names the phenomenon without explaining it, and that the clinical condition is itself poorly understood.
• Grounding by subsumption. Philip Goff suggests that individual minds are aspects of the cosmic mind in the way that a hue is an aspect of a color experience.^[3]
• Perspectives. Itay Shani proposes that the cosmic consciousness has an intrinsic tendency to form localized perspectives.^[1]
• Appearance only. In the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, the separation is not ultimately real. Miri Albahari develops this line.^[4] It removes the problem at the cost of denying that individual subjects exist in the way they seem to.

None of these is widely accepted.

The Bridge describes fragmentation as an intended act of the Source and illustrates it with a prism and a shattered mirror. It explains the privacy of individual minds by the veil of forgetting, which hides a soul's origin from it during a life. See Experiential learning.

These supply a reason for the division and an account of why it is not noticed. They do not supply a mechanism. The veil explains why I do not remember being the Source. It does not explain how the Source's one field of experience became my separate field in the first place.

This is the most serious open philosophical question for the framework. It is shared with every view of its kind, including those defended in academic philosophy.

1. Shani, I. (2015). Cosmopsychism: A holistic approach to the metaphysics of experience. Philosophical Papers, 44(3), 389-437.
2. Kastrup, B. (2018). The universe in consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(5-6), 125-155.
3. Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and fundamental reality. Oxford University Press.
4. Albahari, M. (2019). Perennial idealism: A mystical solution to the mind-body problem. Philosophers' Imprint, 19(44), 1-37.