Living systems, panpsychism, ecological ethics

Reads Val Plumwood, David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, Kat Anderson's Tending the Wild, permaculture as design discipline. His own thinking has taken a panpsychist, living-systems turn: problems are not solved by mechanistic solutions; the success condition is flourishing living systems. Now stated in full in the departure-in-place network (2026-10-26): dual-aspect monism (one kind of stuff, an outward functional and an inward felt aspect, inwardness graded across matter); closure; graded-ethics; beauty-as-perception; animism-as-perception. His worked-out architecture as first recorded: a relational panpsychism in which relata are constituted by relations, subjects arise through closure (self-maintaining loops), moral standing grades continuously, and beauty is a system perceiving the conditions of its own flourishing (his wording; "veridical" in the seed notes was LLM phrasing, dropped 2026-10-26).

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The fuller statement (July 2026)

From "A somewhat ambitious metaphysical exploration" (https://exitmusic.world/a-somewhat-ambitious-metaphysical-exploration), his current metaphysics, epistemology, ontology and ethics:

• All is alive; consciousness is the interior mentality of all stuff. "Thingness" is an illusion: things are bundles of relationship "cohering conditionally for the time being", and selfhood is the consciousness aspect of those coherences.
• Nested orders. Consciousness can be shaped like a human, a fox, a mycelial network, a town, a culture, a bioregion or a planet. Nested consciousnesses are of different orders and don't seem aware of their continuity with what they contain or what contains them (the gut-biome example: what does that imply about the culture or bioregion that contains us?). Selfhood is "non-exclusive, overlapping, entangled, multi-scale and multi-order". See closure.
• Frame as epistemic choice. Treating the world as mechanistic and mostly unconscious is a choice, as is treating it as alive. Modern colonial societies have repeatedly assumed the unaliveness or inferiority of other beings and been wrong, so acting on the assumption of aliveness is the more prudent choice; the moral question is which choices we would make differently if we knew the whole world was alive.
• Life as counter-entropic complexification, which the universe manifestly does too.
• His label: "panexperiential dual-aspect monism, with a helping of nestedness and a heaping of complexity/emergence". He hadn't seen it put together this way and had not read Whitehead.
• Ethics follows: graded-ethics, regenerative-violence.

Source: James's notes at exitmusic.world (read 2026-10-26); his own position, disposition stated.

Provenance: James, in conversation with Claude, Aug–Oct 2026 (unverified). Disposition: stable.

Related: intellectual-formation, departure-in-place

Part of thread: thread-mind-and-machine