Monistic idealism
In the words of physicist Amit Goswami, who wrote a book The Self-Aware Universe (1993) on this concept:
The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles
of matter, the basic constituents — building blocks — of matter. And
cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or
elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make
molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way,
the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary
particles. This is the belief — all cause moves from the elementary
particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view,
what human beings — you and I think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon
or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And
any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an
illusion. This is the current paradigm.
Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness.
That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view,
consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free
will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal
power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency — it
does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles
upward, so there is upward causation — but in addition it insists that
there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and
acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions
we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.
