Is the Universe Developing Consciousness?

You think that this is a process that is leading towards what? Do you extrapolate? Do you really think that, like, do you wonder, like, what humans are actually doing, what consciousness is actually doing, why the universe has this as a tendency or as a law? Yeah, no. It's, I think it's the most mysterious question there is. So is there an ultimate goal? So what I do think is that this increase in complexity is inevitable, but like I said, it's not this straight march of progress. There's like constantly these challenges. There's massive existential challenges, and that is the only thing that pushes us to create solutions. So there's this principle in the book that I call Popper's Principle, named after a philosopher of science, Karl Popper. And the idea is that, yes, so that our challenges are what force us to find solutions. So if progress is going to always continue, that means the challenges won't stop. So even if we do attain some like globally unified state, I would like to see like some sort of agreement among nations that says, okay, we're all going to demilitarize and we're going to put this money into like medicine or technology, whatever else, you know, all the other things that, you know, we could be funding that could help, you know, human society. And you know, we could have something like that, but there could still be like pandemics, there could still be someone crazy that takes over and starts to, you know, try to reverse that. So the point is, you can never reach a utopia. And even if we did, it wouldn't be a utopia for a long time, because the world is always changing. It's this, you know, reality is this noisy, thermally fluctuating thing. And there is chaos, chaos is needed for complexity too. Actually, when a system transitions to a state of higher order, you need some chaos in the system. So that's because like if a system is too rigid, and too, so you could think of like, things seemed we had democratic presidents, like you could think about just like how things were under Obama for a while, you know, we didn't, there wasn't the craziness that we're seeing today. So you might think like, oh, well, whatever that system was, it was a good thing, or it was better than what we have now. But no system, no model, no way of doing things will work forever, because the external world is always changing. So we're always going to be going through these cycles and phases where we have temporary stability, but then the system needs to change. And I think right now, when we're seeing all this chaos, it is indicative of what complexity scientists call a phase transition. And so basically, the chaos is basically the system screaming for change. So you see all of this chaos and that provides, it creates flexibility within a rigid system that allows the system to transition into something new and higher. So you think that this is a function of the universe, that the universe has a tendency towards complexity, and that we are one of the driving forces of this. So we're a biological driving force of a greater law of the universe. But what do you think the universe wants? What's the ultimate goal out of this? So when you talk about what the universe wants, we're already getting into a little language trap because are we saying that the universe is conscious, that it has a conscious intent? I don't think so. Well, let me ask it in a different way. Where do you think this is going? Well, no. So it's good to break that down and be like, does the universe have a conscious intent? So I don't think it does, but I think it has a sort of design. And when I say design, it's something that's not mystical. I'm saying that the laws of physics are such that complexity increases and the universe does have something like a goal. So it may not have a conscious intent, but life emerges inevitably and that the laws of physics play something analogous to DNA in an organism. So the laws and constants of physics are sort of cosmic DNA that ensures that this evolutionary program plays out. So maybe the universe is moving towards something like a cosmic attractor. And an attractor is a term that physicists use to describe a state of order. So for example, when you take the stopper out of your bathtub, you will get the formation of a whirlpool so you get this spontaneous order. Gravity is attracting the water down the pipe. Yeah. So you have these attractors, which are basically kind of this goal state of a system. In living systems, attractors are basically states of stability that the living system is trying to maintain against this second law of thermodynamics. And so it seems like cosmic evolution is a process of generating increasingly complex attractors. So when I say that, there are these evolutionary transitions, which are versions of phase transitions that I just explained. So if you look at the story of the universe, it's a story of nature's simplest parts coming together to form larger functional holes. So atoms come together to make molecules, which come together to make cells, which come together to make multicellular organisms, which come together to form societies. And now we have something like the emergence of a global brain, which is the network of humans connected by the internet, as well as AIs. And so when humans leave the planet, like people out there like Elon Musk with SpaceX are trying to get humans off the planet, I'm saying that that's part of this natural evolutionary process. It wasn't just like a decision someone made or something that we decided to do because we're clever or something. It's actually baked into this process. And that's because if life is going to continue to persist, it has to get off the planet before its star dies. So it creates like a game clock that forces life to spread. What is the end state? Maybe something like this cosmic attractor where some very legitimate scientists have speculated people like Paul Davies, Ray Kurzweil, you know, as a technology guy, may seem, you know, futurist may seem a little bit more out there. But there's this idea that, you know, the universe is evolving and waking up and that there could be this integrated state where something like a cosmic mind emerges from this process. Is it an egocentric way of looking at consciousness to think that the universe is waking up? I mean, we are this tiny speck that's riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe. For us to say, oh, one day the universe will catch up with us and be conscious like us. Isn't that kind of goofy? But isn't it like if you think about it, isn't it kind of an egocentric biological function? The idea that consciousness, the way we term it, thinking about all our problems and the way we fit in with the universe and coming up with solutions for unique situations that we have to deal with. We think that's so amazing. The universe is literally they have stellar nurseries out there. They're creating stars. We have hypernovas. Stars are exploding. They create carbon, which is literally the building blocks for all carbon-based life. All that stuff is happening. We're like, yeah, one day they're going to catch up. It's going to be conscious. Why is consciousness even important? Well, first of all, you need stars and planets to have consciousness. That's part of the process too. The first ordered structures that were created by this cosmic evolutionary process, which includes life, are those ordered structures. One point you made was that we're on this small planet. What the book argues and what a lot of origin of life researchers are arguing is that life isn't improbable. It's probably not only here that where you have the right conditions, life emerges inevitably. If you have the right ingredients, it'll cook something up and that will be life. There are estimated to be something like billions to maybe trillions of Earth-like planets out there that life may have emerged on and maybe intelligent life. To assume that we are the only intelligence out there is to say that what happened on this planet is extremely, almost infinitely improbable. I don't think that's the case. People like Richard Dawkins have argued that life emerging on other planets will evolve according to Darwinian mechanisms and these new processes of self-organization that we're describing. If the universe is waking up through life, and so when I say that, I want to be very clear that I'm not talking about panpsychism. When I'm saying the universe is awake, I'm talking about just conscious agents like us are awake and the universe used to be all inanimate matter prior to life, so in a very literal sense, the matter in the universe is waking up. If there is this process and we find ourselves on this planet at this point, it's of course going to look like there's not much other life out there and that consciousness doesn't have this cosmic significance, but that's just how it looks right now at this stage. We're already starting to see how technology can bring life off the planet. A couple hundred years ago, people thought it was impossible to fly. Actually I learned this from a friend. There was a New York Times article that came out something like 10 months before the Wright brothers created the plane that said it would take like 10 million years, some ridiculously long amount of time for humans to invent like aircraft. You can already see that this process basically has no limits. The other thing you said was that is it kind of anthropocentric to people think we're projecting human qualities on the universe when you say maybe the universe is waking up, but I think that's a mistake to talk about humans as if we're not part of the universe. We're part of that physical system, so I don't think it's right to be like, oh, consciousness is something that only applies to humans and it's this like quirky thing. We are part of the cosmos and you can't strip away consciousness from the description of the universe without taking away one of its most interesting aspects.