The Universe Is Intelligent—And Your Brain Is Tapping Into It to Form Your Consc

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Published: Apr 18, 2025

The Universe Is Intelligent—And Your Brain Is Tapping Into It to Form Your Consciousness, Scientist Says

Chipper says "Your Consciousness is derived from your cells and the function each one provides"

That could mean intelligence is a fundamental property that structures like the brain interact with.

The universe has no brain. It has no gray matter, no nervous system, no neurons firing electrical impulses—and yet, that physical structure may not be where intelligence and consciousness actually come from. Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.

This is the latest hypothesis from biophysicist and mathematician Douglas Youvan, Ph.D. who spent decades working at the intersection of physics, biology and information theory. He merged research involving enzyme engineering and machine vision with his decades of knowledge in genetics, leading him to realize something remarkable.

"I began to see that life and intelligence weren’t just reactive—they were predictive, efficient, and often mathematically elegant,” Youvan says. “Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI model, can tap into.”

His more recent work with AI only matured this hypothesis. With AI technologies advancing at what seems like light speed, Youvan felt that the many insights gained came so fast that “they felt more discovered than invented.” It was almost as if some outside force was generating them, and human researchers were pulling them out of the ether where they appeared, he thought. This experience fleshed out a controversial idea that suggests intelligence is a force of the universe that exists separately from living organisms.

"I suspect intelligence originates from what might be called an informational substrate of the universe—a pre-physical foundation where structure, logic, and potentiality exist prior to space and time,” he says.

Youvan’s concept of intelligence was partly inspired by quantum theory, whose outcomes are probabilistic until actually observed, such as Schrodinger’s cat paradox. In this case, the hypothetical cat, which is in a box with poison, can be both alive and dead until the box is opened. In other words, it exists in two states at the same time until it is measured. Likewise, our networks of neurons do not themselves create intelligence, but are instead made to connect with something that is much larger and outside of them. Youvan thinks this is how we give ourselves access to intelligence.

Whatever this process is, it is also evolving on its own in a recursive way, much like the fractal structures visible in structures ranging from crystals to entire galaxies: copy-pasting themselves and occurring at smaller and smaller scales. Our neurons are supposedly made to interface with this outside intelligence because of their own fractal structure, Youvan says.

Keith Frankish, Ph.D., is a philosopher whose idea of consciousness and intelligence is on the other end of the spectrum from Youvan’s autonomously intelligent universe. Youvan sees intelligence existing without consciousness “as an elegant algorithm or a perfectly adapted organism.” While Frankish agrees that consciousness and intelligence are intertwined, his view posits that consciousness is not necessarily an illusion. At the same time, it may not be what we think it is, he says.

“We learn about the world around us through perceptual systems that evolved to supply us with information useful for survival,” Frankish said. “Similarly, we learn about our own minds through evolved self-monitoring systems designed to give us useful information. But in both cases the systems are selective and distorting. They give us the information we need to survive and flourish, not a complete and wholly accurate picture. This often misleads us.”

For example, when you look at your feet at the bottom of a pool, they are somewhat distorted. That doesn’t mean that submerging our feet in water has actually started to distort them. What we see is not a reflection of reality. Frankish often uses the illusion of objects under water to explain his idea of consciousness.

It does not always give us an accuratescientific picture of our surroundings. Perception and introspection can selectively distort things.

So far, there has been no way to quantify or scientifically define consciousness—or intelligence—which is why we are prone to using illusions in an attempt to explain them. In Frankish’s opinion, we can take something we like and organize our entire belief system around it. For instance, just because the expanse of land in front of us looks flat all the way to the horizon does not mean the entire planet is flat. Likewise, the universe being made of self-replicating fractals does not mean it is intelligent on its own. However, if there is one thing Frankish could possibly agree with Youvan on, it is the elegance in everything. He just sees it in a more physical sense.

“We are products of the most amazing design process—not of intelligent design but of billions of years of natural selection," he said. "Evolution cannot see ahead, but it has equipped us beautifully for the niches we inhabit."

Frankish is open to accepting the idea of a universe that is conscious and intelligent if this can somehow be observed. Though Youvan does believe that science could someday model aspects of consciousness, such as attention, awareness and the process of making decisions, consciousness cannot be reduced to its components.

“Science excels at describing behavior and structure, but consciousness may ultimately be more like a point of view—a subjective presence—that resists objective reduction,” he says. “If anything, I think a unified theory of consciousness will come from a fusion of physics, computation, and metaphysics.”


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