Questions
Big questions short answers, then the evidence.
Is the universe a neural network? What explains galaxy rotation curves? Where does consciousness come from? Each page opens with a direct answer and then shows the data, the open problems and what would prove it wrong.
01Is the universe a neural network?Nobody has shown that it is. Two lines of work make the idea serious: Vitaly Vanchurin's 2020 model, in which the learning dynamics of a network reproduce equations resembling quantum mechanics and gravity, and the 2020 Vazza–Feletti measurement showing that the brain's neuronal network and the cosmic web share statistical structure across 27 orders of magnitude. Both are hypotheses under test.02Can galaxy rotation curves be explained without dark matter?Partly. MOND fits many individual rotation curves with a single acceleration scale, and emergent-gravity models reproduce the radial acceleration relation, but neither explains galaxy clusters and the cosmic microwave background as well as dark matter does.03What did Michael Levin discover about bioelectricity?Michael Levin's lab at Tufts showed that patterns of voltage across cell membranes carry instructions for body shape. Changing those patterns made flatworms grow two heads, and the two-headed form persisted through later regeneration with unchanged DNA. Frog embryos grew eyes on their tails. Part of anatomical memory is stored in bioelectric networks, outside the genome.04What is the hard problem of consciousness, and which theories try to solve it?The hard problem, named by David Chalmers in 1995, asks why physical processes in the brain are accompanied by subjective experience at all. The leading theories (global workspace, integrated information, higher-order and predictive processing) mostly explain which processes are conscious. None explains why they feel like anything. The useful test is what each theory predicts that the others do not.05What is panpsychism, and is the universe conscious?Panpsychism is the view that experience is a fundamental feature of matter, present in a tiny form in basic physical entities, with brains combining it into rich minds. Philosophers such as Chalmers, Goff and Strawson take it seriously because it sidesteps the hard problem. Its main difficulties are the combination problem and the lack of testable predictions. No evidence shows that the universe as a whole is conscious.06Are we living in a simulation?There is no evidence that we are. Nick Bostrom's 2003 argument shows only that one of three possibilities must hold, and most versions of the simulation hypothesis make no testable predictions. A more productive idea is that the universe computes without an outside programmer: physical law behaves like information processing. That version can be tested against data.07What is Landauer's principle?Landauer's principle, stated by Rolf Landauer in 1961, says that erasing one bit of information must release at least kT ln 2 of heat, about 2.9 × 10⁻²¹ joules at room temperature. It was measured directly in 2012. It connects information to thermodynamics and is the strongest argument that information is a physical quantity.08What is the cosmic web?The cosmic web is the large-scale structure of the universe: galaxies and dark matter arranged in long filaments and flat walls that meet at dense clusters, surrounding enormous, nearly empty voids. It grew from tiny density ripples in the early universe under gravity. Most galaxies sit in filaments and walls, while voids fill most of the volume.09Is consciousness quantum?There is no accepted evidence that it is. The Penrose–Hameroff Orch-OR theory proposes that consciousness arises from quantum processes in neuronal microtubules, but Max Tegmark's 2000 estimate suggests such states would decohere far too fast to matter. Recent anaesthesia and microtubule experiments keep the question open without settling it.10What is integrated information theory?Integrated information theory (IIT), proposed by Giulio Tononi in 2004, says that consciousness is integrated information: how much a system as a whole constrains its own past and future beyond what its parts do, measured by a quantity called Φ. It predicts that consciousness depends on the causal structure of the posterior cortex. It is influential, hard to compute and heavily debated.