Ask A Genius 1290: Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? Exploring Physics, Quantum Events

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/02

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hey, Rick. What about when theologians say the universe is fine-tuned for life?

Most sufficiently large universes, with many planets orbiting most stars, likely have conditions that support life. I would assume that it’s difficult to create a universe without at least some habitable regions.

Certainly, planets can be negentropic—they receive energy from an external source (like a star) and then radiate it away. Since they are open systems, they are capable of increasing in order.

Most large universes have physics that, in some places under the right conditions, allows life to originate. The size and scale of the universe might determine some of its fundamental constants.

Specific universe sizes or combinations of fundamental constants may not be conducive to negentropic environments.

Rick Rosner: Water is key. A planet with liquid water on its surface, at a distance from its star, where water can exist in all three phases—vapour, liquid, and ice—has a considerable advantage when it comes to the emergence of life.

Maybe some possible universes exist without water. But I’d guess that those universes are vastly outnumbered by ones where substances conducive to complex chemistry—and eventually biology via evolution—are present.

That would be a version of the weak anthropic principle—the idea that there are many universes where life can arise and that we naturally observe one of them.

What was the original question?

Jacobsen: Why does the universe seem built for life?

Rosner: Because it’s hard to prohibit life.

It’s hard to pick a combination of fundamental constants that completely preclude life across all possible universes. As long as some universes allow for life, we—observers—exist in one that does.

That’s a selection bias. Of course, we find ourselves in a universe that can support life—otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.

There may be countless universes that don’t support life—certainly, very tiny, early universes wouldn’t. A universe with only a hundred particles wouldn’t have enough complexity to sustain chemistry or biology. There’s just not enough stuff for those processes to happen.

There may be entire classes of massive universes that don’t easily support life, but some do.

Jacobsen: We have black holes. We have theoretical white holes. What about gray holes? What the fuck would that even be? Isn’t the rest of the universe technically the white hole? Black holes are dense, dark, and highly concentrated. Meanwhile, the rest of the universe is diffuse and bright—or at least bright-ish.

Rosner: I would guess that every universe is born from a black hole. When a black hole forms, it compresses most information from the matter it consumes. But that highly compressed, degenerate matter inside that hole wants to rebuild complexity.

In some cases, it may not. But in many circumstances, it will—it will transition from a low-information state to an information-rich state by forming its own universe. So yes, you could argue that the Big Bang is essentially a white hole expanding.

But what the fuck would a gray hole be?

We should call it a night.

Jacobsen: Thank you. It’s pretty rainy, and I’ve got to check on those dogs.

Rosner: Enjoy those dogs you took time to enjoy.

Jacobsen: They don’t enjoy themselves. They don’t do much. They don’t doanything. 

I was washing the blanket today, and the dogs got uncomfortable. They started barking nonstop. I realized it was because they didn’t have a blanket on their mat—the one they sit on for fifteen hours a day.

They weren’t just barking. They were protesting. So I was in our yard, and this motherfucker was looking at me through the door, barking at me in my backyard. I walked around, did five different trips trying to figure out what the fuck was going on because they never do this. They may be jazzed up because they got out.

I shut the blinds—still barking.

I put the food box in front of the door—still barking.

I gave them extra treats, but they were still barking.

I took them on an extra-long walk around the block—still barking.

And I’m thinking, “Oh my god, what is it?”

Then I realized—I washed their blanket. These dogs are trained. They’ve been conditioned to understand that when their blanket disappears, it will return if they complain loud enough. I was catering to them.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: But obviously, they’ve seen their blanket taken away enough times that they know they’ll eventually get it back if they bark about it. So, I gave them a temporary blanket. They sat on it awkwardly. Then, I put their sweaters on either side of the blanket so they’d know where to sit.

Then I left. And they stopped barking. Later, when the original blanket was dry, I swapped it back, folded it nicely, and then they were fine.

But the wind was so bad. This time? They didn’t bark. Anyway, I have one more question if you want to answer it. 

Rosner: What was it?

Jacobsen: Good, gray holes—We haven’t discussed those. 

Rosner: You want to talk about things that don’t quite collapse into a black hole? You mean physics? A brown dwarf is a star that doesn’t have enough mass to go black.

Jacobsen: Look, man. We live in an diverse society. We have room for everyone. But this is why we talk about information. We talk about a non–Big Bang universe. It is not entirely a Big Bang universe, but a universe in which Big Bang mechanics are part of the system—but not the entire cosmology. Things expand as information is generated. What about when you have a sink with a plug-in, and there’s soap on the surface—then you blast water onto the soap? It bubbles. Is that what you’re getting at visually?

Rosner: No. No.

It looks like the Big Bang, but imagine you have a mass of degenerate matter—degenerate because it’s under intense gravitational force. When you enter a black hole, that matter can reorganize itself.

That matter can become undegenerate.

It can transition from a general, high-entropy state to a lower-entropy state, generating order by rearranging itself into something less general.

A completely degenerate state is useless—it’s just a uniform mass where everything is the same. There’s no time. There’s no space.

But as it transitions, yes, it could resemble how a jet of water hitting soap generates a cluster of bubbles. But more than that—it generates space. It generates clumps of matter.

Jacobsen: Do you think, in a way, that this non-uniformity—what appears to be t = 0 from our perspective—is evidence of a kind of microcausal disconnect between different points in the universe?

It’s still a unified system, but if it’s bubbly, then it’s not just that things are functioning relativistically—instead, the laws of nature themselves might have microfractures in how the universe implements them.

Rosner: No, I don’t think so. Aside from the fact that anything can happen at Planck scales—where space itself isn’t well-defined—there are no meaningful discontinuities at larger scales.

Yes, at distances of 10⁻³⁴ cm, space and time become ambiguous. But in terms of real-world effects? No, there aren’t significant discontinuities. We perceive reality as a sequence of moments—one after the next. That’s the structure given to us by the information in our awareness.

At the same time, the universe provides a framework of possible next and possible previous moments. And yet, we always find ourselves in the presentmoment. We experience the world by moving from one present moment to the next. Each successive moment is selected from a set of likely next moments.

Jacobsen: So it’s all a string of moments.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Now, let’s talk about what happens within those moments.

Rosner: A gazillion processes are happening in our brains from moment to moment—generating our consciousness, which I’m using interchangeably with awareness. You can nitpick the distinction, but functionally, they overlap.

Somehow, what we experience from moment to moment is a consequence of neurons firing—dendrites forming connections, strengthening some, weakening others, disconnecting where necessary.

This happens in response to signals in much the same way circuits work in feedback systems and AI.

I should know more about how that works at the micro level, but at the dendrite level, it’s all feedback—the dendrite adjusts the strength of connections as it learns.

Jacobsen: In a way, we are subject to the most common analogies of our time. And right now, the most common analogy is computers. Brains are everywhere.

Rosner: Let me draw the analogy—

We have these intricate mechanics of brain function, but somehow, thatproduces consciousness.

And you’ve got the physics—many quantum events happening throughout the universe, continuously generating and shaping it. Exactly how the analogies work, I’m not sure, but there are analogies. Just as we are not consciously aware of the individual neural events that generate our awareness, we can assume that if the universe has some level of understanding—or even if it doesn’t—its macro-reality is not directly aware of every individual quantum event within it. For the sake of this argument, let’s assume the universe possesses some form of awareness or consciousness. If that were the case, that consciousness would not be aware of discrete quantum events occurring within it, just as we are unaware of the microscopic neural firings that form the basis of our perception.

One of the key questions I’m interested in is: How do quantum events, in aggregate, generate the information processing that occurs in the universe—the same way our awareness and consciousness arise as forms of information processing? Maybe the universe does not process information as we do, but it is undoubtedly engaged in some form of information processing. It most likely operates on a macro level, where what we perceive as the universe’s large-scale structure is an emergent property of countless micro-events—much like how we experience a macro picture of reality while unaware of the micro-scale neurological events occurring in our brains. Similarly, we could assume that the universe presents a macro-scale picture of something—whatever that may be—while remaining unaware of the micro-events that produce it.

So how the fuck does all that work?

Because I’ve said it many times, we know that inside stars, many quantum events occur that leave no record. Trillions of these quantum events unfold every second, but most do not persist meaningfully. However, a subset of these events doleave a record. A sequence of quantum interactions might eventually result in a small amount of fusion occurring or a photon escaping from the sun’s surface—perhaps later being absorbed on Earth. These are quantum events with at least some potential to leave a trace.

But that doesn’t mean the macro picture—the grand reality the universe presents to itself—is necessarily affected by any individual quantum event. However, in the aggregate, these micro-events must contribute to the more extensive system. The real question is: How do these micro-events—including many that leave no trace—give rise to macro-level structures, both in our own awareness and in some broader information-processing function of the universe, which, for the sake of argument, we could call awareness? Comments?

Jacobsen: Are you asking if the universe is just one big computer?

Rosner: No. Because a computer doesn’t have awareness.

The universe is different. I would say it is likely unitary, but not necessarily so. 

We think of our own consciousness as unitary—we feel like one person, experiencing a continuous stream of thoughts that we “own.” However, you could argue that even our consciousness is not truly unitary—it’s fragmented, composed of multiple subsystems interacting with each other.

But it’s still devoted to one thing—our individual experience. You can make similar arguments and counterarguments about what’s happening in the universe. But it’s not a computer because computers—as we think of them today—don’t generate awareness. Computers follow instructions. Yes, they’re getting closer to something resembling awareness, but arguing that the universe is just a giant computer is a viewpoint rooted in the 1960s.

I’d argue that the universe is more like a giant brain or a giant AI—but not the shitty AI we have now. Something far more advanced. Does that sound reasonable? 

Jacobsen” It’s still unclear whether we can make a necessary argument for this idea, but we can make a sufficient argument: we can characterize the universe in terms of data. And we’ve been doing it, in a hand-wavy way, for a long time.

The fact that a form of data can characterize the universe doesn’t necessarily mean that all of its properties are currently expressible in our frameworks. In other words, extending our current understanding of physics to account for where new information might emerge is a separate question. But even beyond representation in a theoretical framework, the real question—which you’re directly alluding to—is: Does the ability to characterize or represent the universe in terms of data, mathematics, or physical law imply that the universe itself has inherent computational or cognitive properties?

That has always been the most significant divide between you and me. You take it as part of the argument—a natural extension of the premises. I don’t necessarily take it as a given. To me, it remains an open question. But I’ll admit, it does make the discussion easier.

It’s like assuming a variable in an equation—assume gravity exists in the formula. Does the formula work? “Yes. That makes a lot of sense.” You’re approaching it more from a philosophy of physics perspective than from challenging mathematics, but that’s fine.

Rosner: Consciousness is so efficient at modelling the world that it seems unavoidable in large, self-consistent information-processing systems. The only reason that sounds suspect is that all sorts of loose, new-age, hand-wavy philosophical nonsense have contaminated our understanding of consciousness. But even if you strip away all the metaphysical fluff, consciousness still exists. And once you look at it in a complex, empirical light, you end up with something that makes sense for an information-processing system to have. That’s my argument.

I have to wrap this up in a second.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: So that was the question. But it doesn’t do the same shit we do. We do the same shit.

Jacobsen: Not as much as AI does. That’s their only modality. Our generativityincorporates all these other systems to reach that generation level. When we read books or consume information in a purely passive way, that is our sole input. I will see you tomorrow.

Thank you.

Rosner: You’re welcome.

Jacobsen: Bye.

Last updated May  3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices.  In Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.