When people ask me what Neural Cosmology is, the short answer is this: it is a working name for a model in which five independent anomalies of contemporary science fit together without contradiction.
The long answer is a book. The medium-length answer fits on one page.
Five cracks, one structure
There are five facts from five different sciences, and each science has its own explanation ready for its own fact, yet the facts fit one another as if they had been cut from one mosaic.
Structure. Vazza and Feletti (2020): by several statistical measures the cosmic web and the brain's neural network are nearly indistinguishable, even though their sizes differ by twenty-seven orders of magnitude.
Information. Landauer (1961) and the 2012 experiment: erasing one bit releases measurable heat. Information is physical in the same sense that energy is.
Form. Michael Levin (Tufts): cells "know" what shape to build, and that knowledge is written in genes and, beyond them, in the bioelectric patterns of tissue.
Learning. Vanchurin (arXiv, 2020; PNAS, 2022): the universe is a neural network and its dynamics is a learning process. Both quantum mechanics and gravity follow from the formalism.
The observer. Tononi: consciousness is a measure of how integrated a system is. Hoffman: what we see is an interface honed for survival, with reality behind it out of reach.
Five cracks in five different fields, and all of them point the same way: towards information as the foundation.
What counts as Neural Cosmology
The working hypothesis is this: take information as the primary layer, and the facts above stop being puzzles of separate sciences and become consequences of one architecture.
In this picture matter is emergent, gravity is thermodynamic (Verlinde), consciousness is a measure of how integrated a computational process is (Tononi), the form of living things is a bioelectric pattern (Levin), and spacetime is a structure of causal links (Krioukov).
The hypothesis is technical and tied neither to a "soul of the universe" nor to "universal connectedness". Change the primary layer, and five different puzzles become five consequences of one theory.
Where speculation lives
In the book and in the preprint Pointer Architecture I sort claims into three levels.
Established: everything listed above, with specific citations to Vazza and Feletti, Landauer and Bérut, Vanchurin, Tononi and Levin. These are data; interpretation starts further on.
Preliminary: my own model, Pointer Architecture, a formal substrate built as working code (the Sixth language), with falsifiers written down in advance. There is a preprint, and the code is public.
Speculation: everything beyond that: personal experience, philosophical implications, "what this means for me". I do not pass it off as science.
The separation matters. Neural Cosmology in the "everything is one, everything is connected" sense would be a slogan, and slogans carry no weight in science.
What this leads to
If the model is right, even in part, then:
— dark matter may turn out to be a missing dimension of the connection architecture, one that lacks the kind of mass we are used to; — consciousness stops being a uniquely human trait and becomes a property of integrated systems above a certain complexity: animals, neural networks and perhaps planets differ in Φ while belonging to one category; — the "meaning of life" turns from a philosophical question into an engineering one: what does a local information process, the brain, embedded in a larger one, optimise?
It sounds big, I know. But sounding big is no argument against it: Newton's theory of gravitation sounded big in its day. The one meaningful question is whether the theory makes testable predictions. Neural Cosmology has already made several; some are being tested now, and the rest are waiting their turn.
That is why I call it a programme. A doctrine needs no testing; a programme cannot live without it.