I’ve been thinking about this idea that’s kind of been messing with my head. We know the universe is heading toward some kind of end — maybe heat death, where everything’s so spread out and cold that nothing can happen anymore. Total stillness.
But what if consciousness — life, intelligence — is the universe’s way of preventing that?
Like, what if the reason conscious beings exist is so that, once they get advanced enough, they can understand the universe deeply enough to actually do something about it? Maybe in the distant future, some intelligent species (maybe even us, if we last long enough) figures out how to manipulate matter and energy at a huge scale — enough to delay or reverse entropy, or even trigger a new Big Bang.
And maybe this has happened before. Maybe every time a universe reaches its death phase, intelligent life emerges just in time to restart it. Maybe that’s the cycle. Maybe we’re not the first.
It just makes me wonder — is consciousness not a side effect of the universe, but actually its built-in tool to keep going? Is the universe trying to save itself… through us?
Curious what others think.
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Yeah, maybe.
But also, maybe, just maybe, conciousness is just a mechanism in our monkey brains that enables us to form complex thought, make up infinite scenarios and possibilities to move forward, and also infinite ways in which all of this makes sense to do, including assigning us a bigger role in the grand scheme of things that we actually have, because otherwise, there is a huge heap of very… counterproductive ideas to be had.
Maybe, just maybe, we ARE just monkeys trying to have a good time. Maybe all this “everything is connected and one big cycle” is just another entry in the big list of books, philosophies and other ways of living to make us enjoy this weird gift that we have been given, make us an active part within in, make us collaborate to “find the true meaning” – whatever that means – and is all just a neat little evolutionary trick our DNA kindly provided us to maintain the infinite complexity in our skulls including a failsafe to not go crazy while doing so (best case scenario).
Maybe we can just appreciate the insane detail nature has put into us, make the best out of it, do our best to maintain it so more cool lifeforms can appreciate this gift too going forward.
And if what it takes is believing in a big connected cycle of everything, so be it.
As someone who finds himself on a bit of a spectrum that has huge issues with questions and having no answers to them, I personally find a lot of solace in the fact that I don’t need to answer all the questions in the universe and especially the biggest of them all might forever be one big awesome puzzle for us to figure out. (or expand upon! The path is the goal something something)
even after you burn all the chairs in existence, the idea of a chair lives on. i’m sure we exist in the dream world between matter and energy somehow, even after the curtains fall
This is the plot to a book called “Blasphemy”
Some scientists turn on a super collider and God speaks out of it and tells them the purpose of life is to develop technology to slow the heat death of the universe to Give God enough time to finish building a perfect universe for the life to exist forever, essential Heaven.
Why would it care? Can it care?
Can things not just happen as a result of everything before it?
I don’t buy into the universe having this idea, it’s such a vague statement that you couldn’t make sense of it. Define “universe”, because we have different definitions clearly.
We evolve for selfish reasons, to keep on going as a species. We cause more damage than good. I really do not think this idea is anything more than good sci-fi material.
If it is merely a built-in mechanism, then by whom was it built and why didn’t the builder simply reverse (or disallow) entropy rather than create the middleman of consciousness to possibly figure things out? We can’t have intelligent design without an intelligent entity behind it, and if they are intelligent enough to program a universe and not want it to end, why not just make it so? If they are intelligent but bound by physical law, then they would know they cannot circumvent the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Many problems with this. Firstly, consciousness is not strictly necessary for intelligence. You idea hinges on them being the same. In fact, based on what we know about the brain, it seems that consciousness is just an emergent property, and it’s possible that you could have intelligent but unconscious beings that fulfil your entropy-reducing goal.
Secondly, you’re implying that the universe specifically chose to, or is geared towards producing conscious entities. There’s no evidence to support the idea that the universe chose to make us at all. Once you have replicating DNA, it’s quite likely you’ll evolve intelligent creatures, and maybe they are conscious, but does that mean that the universe somehow made that happen? Even if the universe ‘wanted’ to do it, by what mechanism would it have intervened? Such a mechanism would have to be part of the physical laws. If not, well you’re supposing that the universe is a god with the power to circumvent physical laws and leave no traces of it, for no particular reason except that the god thought it’s better to use this complicated method rather than to just make the second law of thermodynamics not exist at all.
Personally, I think you’re anthropomorphising the universe to an unrealistic degree. It’s okay to do this for fun, but the evidence isn’t in support of such theory, unfortunately. It’s not a bad idea for a sci-fi plot though! I’d watch a Doctor Who episode on it
Nah what we know is the universe is pretty random and chaotic. Consciousness is a crap shoot. That happened purely by chance. It was a survival mechanism some biological ancestor developed that increased the likely hood of surviving. The fact we exist is PURE random chance. It was random space debris colliding causing particles to mix which eventually led to a series of chemical reactions that led to microorganisms that eventually evolved into another creature and through slight mutations that eventually became us. Existence is the biggest lottery you ever played and you won.
The universe isn’t sentient It doesn’t give a damn if it exists or not if we weren’t alive we couldn’t even observe it for you to formulate the question. Which begs the philosophical question “would the universe exist if humanity wasn’t here to see it?”
I’ve had a hard time leaving the idea that we as a species just got very “lucky”.
I don’t think intelligent aliens exist or ever existed. I could be convinced that very low level organisms live in space, but nothing even remotely close to humans. We somehow evolved and at some point gained the level of consciousness that we have now- and just by happenstance.
Probably a pessimistic take but I don’t think negatively about it.
A good kickoff point for further mulling is Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story “The Last Question”:
http://www.thelastquestion.net/
If so it’s gonna die a painful slow death. As far as we know, consciousness only exists on earth, and consciousness is actively destroying it. Good luck universe.
Jokes aside. What you’re suggesting is circular. If the universe is conscious a priori , it doesn’t need us to manifest itself, it would be just conscious and save itself (or not). If it’s trying to save itself through us as tools, than why keep it just to one tiny earth? If we were the manifestation of a conscious universe, universe would be flourishing with it.
If universe is unconscious and we popped up as conscious beings, doesn’t mean the entirety of cosmos became conscious too. If consciousness vanishes without means to come back an evolve, that’s it.
Maybe what you’re arguing that consciousness is a primordial and block-building part of our universe, as some panpsychism philosophers suggest. In that workframe we can’t assume any motivation for its existence, because we would need to do the same with the other forces.
I get people sometimes need narratives to face the nihilism of the heat death of the universe and our role in it. A sort of spirituality without being spiritual. This is akin to the simulation hypothesis, very little evidence. Maybe it makes sense in some larger devine/spiritual sense we don’t have access yet and in purely phicicalist sense it does hold some allure – atoms studying atoms – but that’s the conundrum we can’t extrapolate much meaning from without some larger narrative.
Then you should smoke more DMT – if you enhance your consciousness enough that you have multiple consciousnesses then that is a net win over not doing that and the universe dying.
To summarize – even if the universe probably isn’t dying you are so the least you can do is to roll the dice on your life if case all things everywhere are at risk.
It makes perfect sense that you’re less important than everything everywhere, and that you might be able to do something about that. Do it already.
Its not as silly as it sounds.
If we go by our current understanding aka materialism then everything is physical and governed by the laws of physics.
If thats true,we aren’t beings living in the universe but we are integral parts of it.
In that case,us experiencing ourselves can be thought as the universe experiencing itself.
Since any or most living beings primal instinct is to stay alive as long as possible then we can interpret that as the universe trying to defy its own demise. Maybe.
Wouldn’t the universe need to have some form of consciousness already in order to predict an upcoming end, have a desire to avoid that end, and come up with a plan to achieve that desire? Wouldn’t some form of self-awareness/consciousness/whatever be a prerequisite for any kind of intentional action?
It is an interesting thing to think about. Kind of an animist belief system that anything that can be conceived of can have a will of its own.
What makes you think the universe is coming to an end? Scientists know that the universe should be ever expanding outward, but there’s some force holding it together. Plus, energy can’t be destroyed. It can only be changed to another type of energy.
That said, the universe would have to have thought in order to try and save itself. The universe and nature are chaotic and eventually find a middle ground on which to settle. The universe will be here far longer after the earth dies. If you look at the earth and compare the earth’s life to a year-long calendar, humans have been around since midday, December 31st. That’s 364.5 days with no humans.
So no, the universe isn’t trying to save itself from dying because of Scientists have observed and learned a lot and have passed along their knowledge.
Philipp Mainländer was a German philosopher who believed that the universe exists because God killed Himself. In his view, God once existed as a single, perfect being—but He didn’t want to live. Instead, God longed for non-existence. So, in an act of cosmic suicide, God destroyed Himself, and the result of that destruction is everything: the universe, matter, life.
For Mainländer, life isn’t a gift or a blessing—it’s the slow, painful aftermath of this divine death. Every part of existence, including humans, carries a deep, unconscious desire to return to nothingness. He believed the purpose of life isn’t to thrive or to be happy, but to eventually reach peaceful non-existence. In other words, death is the true goal, and the only real redemption is release from life. ❤️💝💖🌟
Science has literally shown that life increases the rate of entropy increase. Which means life increases the dissipation of energy accelerating the heat death.
I smoked a doobie yesterday and figured out that following the information that exists will most likely give us the answers we are searching for.
We just need to figure out how information can be synthesized into whole (new?) universes after entering a blackhole.
What if Consciousness is the universe, period? What if there is only Consciousness, singular? You are Consciousness being you, I am Consciousness being me, that table is Consciousness being a table, every molecule in that table is Consciousness being that molecule, and so on.
What if Life and Death are just illusions, marking divisions between roles?
I thought about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and how only now, in all of earth’s history, do we have a real chance at redirecting one. That’s like 30 years out of 4 billion.
Maybe somewhere deep in our genes, there is some memory of it, and somehow, the earth, through natural selection, did create a creature powerful enough to defend itself from space rocks.
Cosmopsychism the idea that the universe is sentient.
It does make sense that the universe may have some motivation for enabling life and this or human levels of consciousness for some reason if it is itself sentient and aware of its own lifespan which it ought to be if it is literally everything.
A recent paper has touched on the idea that the concentration of information seems to be the opposing reaction to entropy. It’s possible with this train of thought to come to the conclusion that life and consciousness is not a tool to defeat entropy but rather it is the result of defeating entropy. Or perhaps it is in fact our purpose to prevent heat death in some way.
This is at the moment almost entirely in the realm of metaphysics. However there is a mechanism by which the universe might guide the creation of life. The collapse of the wave function.