The Universe as an Intergalactic Brain: Philosophical Problems and Prospects for Neural-Network Cosmology

A recent in article in BigThink summarizes an increasingly popular theory in contemporary cosmology: “The big idea is that the Universe is not just an arbitrary physical system, but something more like an evolving computational or biological system — with properties strikingly similar to a complex adaptive system, like an organism or a brain.” This idea, it claims further, may be “the most profound paradigm shift in the history of science and philosophy. If true, it raises new existential questions that will force us to completely rethink the nature of reality and ideas about whether the Universe has a function or “purpose.” The article goes on to describe several interesting new ideas and data-points being advanced about the micro and macro structure of the physical universe that have inspired this view. The philosophical basis of this idea is that:

“The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher(s) proposed that an intelligent cosmic force, or “Nous,” guides the development of the Universe toward a more organized and purposeful state of existence. Today we might describe Nous as the principle of self-organization…. the Universe is not just a computational or information-processing system, but a self-organizing system that evolves and learns in ways that are strikingly similar to biological systems.”

Several significant empirical findings are pointing toward this kind of view in contemporary physics and cosmology. Most compelling perhaps are the observed (by cosmologists like Sabine Hossenfelder) similarities between the “connectomes” uniting the galaxies of our universe, and neural clusters in the brain, in addition to “galactic filaments” that seem to perform functions much like the brain’s neural pathways. Cooperative Studies by astrophysicists, physicists and neurologists also suggest that there are consistent correlations between cosmic events occurring in entities black holes and quasars located in vastly different parts of the universe, indicating that these entities may be somehow “non-locally” communicating with one another in the same way that various regions of the brain interact with one another. The article adds that “Where Hossenfelder described the structural organization of the Universe to be brain-like,” another physicist Vitaly Vanchurin “argues that the world is literally a neural network, with an interconnected network of “nodes” existing at the microscopic scale that is equivalent to the network of neurons inside our skulls” Vanchurin believes that this holistic self-organizing-type system could account for, and reconcile, many of the mysteries and dilemmas that our contemporary physical worldview has both raised and made seemingly intractable:  such as the nature of universal laws, the emergence of consciousness, and the reconciliation of Newtonian space and time with Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum physics.

This idea of an intelligent, purposeful, teleologically evolving universe is indeed a revolutionary one, considering the scientific legacy of the past 400 years which, culminating in the Mechanistic, purposeless, mindlessly material, Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, has configured the parameters of modern cosmology up to now. Post-Newtonian science has pretty much viewed the physical universe as a huge expanse (perhaps infinitesimally so) of matter-particles and energy within a container of space and time (or “spacetime”, after Einstein), blindly and mechanically driven by physical laws. Then, emerging, existing, and eventually —via entropy (the 2nd law of thermodynamics)— burning out in “heat death” for the rest of eternity. Speaking from this vantage-point in the early 20^th century, preeminent philosopher Bertrand Russell lamented:

 “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…. buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” 

And contemporary scientist Richard Dawkins, also a proponent of Newtonian mechanism and no more sanguine about this situation, concludes: 

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication…you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design , no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

However, the new ‘universe-as-a-neural-network’ theory , among related others recently emerging in the literature, poses a starkly different paradigm. As the article observes:

“The idea that the Universe is a brain, a neural network, or a self-organizing complex adaptive system analogous to an organism invites us to reexamine our understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it. If the Universe truly is a living, evolving entity, then the emergence of life and consciousness on Earth would not be an “accidental” phenomenon, but instead the natural and expected manifestation of a cosmic evolutionary process that continually generates higher levels of organization, knowledge, and awareness. As conscious beings capable of shaping our environment, we are not mere passive observers, but active participants in the Universe’s ongoing development toward a more interconnected and complex cosmos.”

This kind of universe is also depicted in cosmological schemas like John Wheeler’s famous “participatory universe” (made famous by the diagram of a u-shaped eye at one end looking at the other end: representing the self-aware contemporary universe —evolved from mindless matter— looking at the past-state of the universe and, in this way, bringing its own self-awareness into being), derived from his interpretation of observer-caused subatomic ‘state-vector collapse’ resulting in the material world that we experience in daily life. This idea also inspired Wheeler’s conception of the universe and all the matter within it as constructed out of “quantum information” (instead of mindless Newtonian matter itself) which directs the evolution of the universe in an intelligent way. Wheeler’s self-directed universe inspired physicist Heinrich Pas’ recent “quantum monism”, which posits another substrate (as yet undiscovered) underlying and unifying both matter and information in a way that reconciles them with the emergence of mind and teleological (purposeful) development in the universe’s evolution. Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s argument (in his landmark Mind and Cosmos) that the very existence of human consciousness, rationality and free will (which, he demonstrates, must indeed exist in the universe), leads inescapably to the conclusion that the material universe must involve teleological, intelligent, self-direction.

Thus, these recent theories address and (to a large extent, perhaps) resolve, many of the fundamental mysteries and dilemmas facing physics and philosophy. For example, the age-old “teleological argument” in philosophy raises the question of how, given the apparent complexity, structure and apparent ‘design’ ‘that seems ‘built into’ the nature and dynamics of the universe, the universe could nonetheless be as randomly created and purposeless as Newtonian cosmology has heretofore claimed. Recent speculation in cosmology about ‘cosmic fine-tuning’ reiterates the teleological argument by asking how , given the universe’s initial conditions, the extremely precise physical forces needed to generate its development, keep it viable and expanding, and allow life/consciousness to emerge, could exist without some intelligent purpose configuring it in an intentional way. Such intelligence and purpose would almost have to be responsible for such fine-tuning.

In addition, the related ‘cosmological argument’ asks how, if ours is a mindlessly and mechanistically causal material Newtonian universe, it can even arise or begin to exist at all. Given Newtonian cosmology, in which every physical event must be the result of an external mechanistic cause, the cause of the universe itself would apparently have to come from outside the universe. How the universe’s initial conditions themselves can possibly emerge ‘from nothing’ however, provoked Steven Hawking famous query:

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach in science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

The neural network theory goes a long way toward answering this question—along with those raised by the teleological argument, cosmic fine-tuning, and philosophers like Nagel—by suggesting that the universe did arise, and continues to evolve, with a purpose or teleology: it’s development governed by a natural impulse, arising with its own origins (or perhaps even intrinsic to an eternal, self-perpetuating universe that had no ‘creation event at all’) toward maximum complexity and sustainability in a way that is self-organizing and perpetually adapting to the conditions brought about by its own evolution. This process would account for its apparent design, the reconciliation of pre- and post- quantum physics, and the emergence of conscious life from a formerly non-living, non-conscious universe; All of this generated and sustained ‘naturally’, from within the physical universe itself, rather than from a trans-cosmic or supernatural creation event.

Nonetheless, despite its impressive explanatory scope, neural network theory (and related ideas mentioned above) still has significant difficulties in accounting for the phenomenon it attempts to address. For instance, despite its progress in addressing the issue of apparent design in nature, it doesn’t quite resolve the teleological argument dilemma. While it succeeds in locating design in the self-directed evolution of the universe, it remains unable to trace the source of this design to the universe in-itself, since according to neural network theory, the universe’s capacity to think and strive toward increasing complexity must involve a design that the universe began, or is just endowed, with—meaning that this original ‘programming’ must have a source outside even the self-directed universe itself. 

Its inability to fully address the teleological argument points to related problems it has with the cosmological argument: if all the connections in the universe are restricted to a causal chain of evolution within the universe itself, then the initial cause of (or if it is somehow eternal, the explanation for) the universe must still come from outside the universe’s own self-directed causal chain. “What breaths fire into” Hawking’s initial equations and makes “the universe bother to exist” must be an impetus or intelligence beyond the universe itself. In his fascinating recent book, Steven Meyers argues for both the necessity of a cosmological beginning of the physical universe, and necessity of some cosmic intelligence as its cause, given the spacetime geometry and history of the universe: tracing cosmic history back through the 2nd law of thermodynamics to the initial Penrose-Hawking singularity (or BigBang), then forward via the ‘Hubble expansion’ (which, the Borda-Guth-Vilenkin Proof demonstrates, must have a beginning), even through its very quantum-scale origins via the Wheeler-Dewitt equation. This extra-natural beginning, combined with the apparent cosmic design built into nature, has clear implications: the intelligence in our thinking universe, he argues, must derive from an intelligence beyond the evolving causal chain of the universe itself, and this applies even to inflationary or cyclical ‘multiverse cosmologies’ proposed to circumvent the need for any transcendent cosmic beginning.

Finally, while neural network theory (and its relations) claim to account for the emergence of consciousness in the physical universe by way of evolving ‘complexity’, upon further scrutiny this falls short of a truly adequate explanation. Again, there have been any number of emergence-based theories along these lines that subscribe to the neural network worldview. Biochemist and popular public intellectual Stuart Kauffman claims that via “integrated complexity”, “The evolution of the universe biosphere, human culture, and human action is profoundly creative….life, agency, meaning, value, and even consciousness, and morality almost certainly arose naturally…”. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi concurs and has proposed “integrated information theory” to explain the emergence of consciousness from expanding complexity in formerly mindless physical structures that incorporate increasingly complex quantum information. Most of these theories even claim to be empirically verifiable.

However, even beyond the lack of any actual substantial empirical evidence to support these neural network and emergence-based theories, their impressive intricacy and technical sophistication still fail to demonstrate logically how—even in principle—a self-aware, subjective, volitional, and rational consciousness could somehow simply ‘emerge’ from mindless matter and/or physical forces. A long history of philosophical criticism directed at this problem has yielded many arguments and thought experiments demonstrating the obvious implausibility and/or incoherence of the idea that consciousness could somehow arise from a non-conscious material world. While too numerous to mention here, they illustrate how such emergence is both empirically lacking and makes no sense. No scientific experiments have succeeded in demonstrating that consciousness is somehow physical, no rational argument has shown that consciousness is a physical substance, and no empirical or logical reasoning has explained how a non-physical consciousness could possibly emerge from any physical substance. Indeed, it is for this very reason that many consciousness-based interpretations of quantum physics (which insist that the ‘observer’ necessary to ‘collapse’ the Schrödinger wave state-vector for the actualization of any physical state, must be a conscious observer) claim that conscious observation is key to the emergence of the material world, rather than the opposite. 

Still, the move that ‘naturalistic’ theories like the neural network perspective make from the old, reductive, mindlessly mechanistic, crudely materialistic Newtonian-Cartesian worldview to a more creative, dynamic, evolving intelligent and self-directed paradigm, is a laudable one. It is a fresh and welcome paradigm that tries to provide a space (and, indeed, a physical mechanism) for creative intelligence in the evolution of the physical universe and a resolution of some seemingly intractable centuries-old dilemmas in physics, consciousness, free will, morality and meaning—all of which were excluded by fiat in the Newtonian-Cartesian schema. In fact, neural network-type theories have a quasi-panpsychic element to them, that seems to allow for a renewed sense of the sacred in nature, as Kauffman’s popular book contends. 

However, where the neural network and similar theories fail is in their stubborn adherence to a paradigm that attempts to overcome the old Newtonian materialism while continuing to cling to materialism in a new form. While less rigid than the old Newtonian-Cartesian materialism, this new neural network materialism is still nonetheless….materialistic. It therefore cannot, despite an innovative and valiant effort, overcome some of the major metaphysical problems it attempts to resolve. Other theories like cosmopsychism, and idealism in various forms—both philosophical and spiritual–that consider consciousness to be primary and essential to the evolution of the physical universe, rather than a secondary emergent by-product of physical evolution (as neural network theory contends), are arguably much better equipped to resolve perennial problems like the teleological and cosmological arguments, consciousness, freedom, and meaning in a living universe. 

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