Four Places to Look for a Calling Card of the Transcendent

The cosmology PhD Zeeya Merali authored a recent book entitled A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes. When I look up this book on www.amazon.com, I see the following claim in the text promoting the book: “As startling as it sounds, modern physics suggests that within the next two decades, scientists may be able to perform this seemingly divine feat – to concoct an entirely new baby universe, complete with its own physical laws, star systems, galaxies, and even intelligent life.” The claim is complete nonsense, and there is nothing at all in the book that justifies such a laughable claim. What the book actually discusses rather briefly are a few cases where a theorist has speculated that if his theory is true, then you might be able to create some fleeting microscopic irregularity; and the theorist calls such irregularities “universes.” The theories in question are just speculative schemes which are completely unproven.

Merali's book is fairly interesting and has some interviews with prominent cosmologists. Having lots of material for a good book, we can only wonder why she chose a book title hyping this “manufacturing of baby universes” nonsense. Maybe, it was kind of a “that will attract attention” type of thing. As the Big Bang involves an entire universe, the very phrase “a Big Bang in a little room” makes no more sense than a “big galaxy in a little soda bottle.”

One of the interviews in the book is with a cosmologist named Anthony Zee who suggested an interesting idea: that a Creator of the universe might cause a message to exist in the cosmic background radiation. The cosmic background radiation pervades all of space, and is believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang in which the universe began. In a scientific paper entitled “Message in the Sky,” Zee and co-author S. Hsu speculate that if a Creator of the universe wanted to provide a message, the cosmic background radiation would provide a “stupendous opportunity,” since the same message could be observed all over the visible universe. It is believed that the cosmic background radiation looks the same to observers all over the universe. 

 

Zee and Hsu do not provide any evidence that the cosmic background radiation actually has such a message. They merely speculate about low-level details of how such a message could be implanted in the cosmic background radiation, suggesting that such a message could be found “hidden in very small temperature fluctuations in the CMB (of order 10⁻⁵) ,presumably resulting from primordial density perturbations.”

Another interesting idea is that a Creator of the universe might put a message or signal in pi, the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. Some scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled “Pi in the Sky” which addressed this possibility. The paper begins by suggesting that there is statistical nonrandomness in both pi and the cosmic background radiation. We hear a discussion of various such abnormalities, and it sounds fascinating.

But then the paper tells us that if we convert the digits of pi into letters, we get a message. There's a visual suggesting that when the first digits of pi are converted into letters, we read the full name of Stephen Hawking: Stephen William Hawking. At this point the paper gives away that it's a fake. The paper has a date of April 1, 2016. I think poorly of people who put up fake material on the Internet, and I do not excuse them for using April Fool's Day as an excuse.

The idea that a divine creator might use pi as a kind of divine calling card was once suggested by an unlikely source: the late astronomer Carl Sagan. In his nonfiction writings Sagan had always sounded completely irreligious. So it must have come as a surprise to readers of Sagan's novel Contact when they read the book's end. In the novel's end, scientists discovered that there was a gigantic circle pattern embedded in the digits of pi, something that the novel said was proof that the universe had been designed. This highly original ending was removed from the movie version of Contact starring Jodie Foster, which left in an unoriginal “meet an extraterrestrial looking just like a human” element that reminded people of previous scenes in The Twilight Zone and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Sagan's idea of a message embedded in the digits of pi raises the interesting philosophy of mathematics question as to whether such a thing could conceivably be done by an omnipotent agent. Are the digits of pi some transcendental thing that must be the same in every possible universe? Or could an omnipotent agent create a universe that had pi digits with some desired sequence?

Another idea along these lines is the possibility that some transcendent force might leave a calling card in the genetic code, the system of symbolic representations used by all earthly life. Something along these lines has been suggested in the scientific paper “The 'Wow! Signal' of the Terrestrial Genetic Code” by two scientists. The scientists claim to have found “readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality” in the genetic code, and claim that this may indicate that earthly life was brought here by extraterrestrials.

I can think of one other possibility along these lines, a scenario that we might call “a calling card left in the subatomic particles.” Imagine you are creating a universe. You could create the universe so that all matter was built from two or three stable subatomic particles, including a positively charged particle and a negatively charged particle. Each of the positively charged particles might be hundreds or thousands of times more massive than each of the negatively charged particles. But when you set up this universe you could make it so that the charge of each of the negatively charged particles was the exact opposite of the charge on each of the positively charged particles. Across the universe you had created, scientists would be able to discover this coincidence. After the scientists across your universe had measured that the charge on the negatively charged particle was the exact opposite of the charge on the positively charged particle, with the match extending to twenty decimal places, would they then not conclude that this was some “signal in the particles” that indicated you had set things up very precisely?

No, they would do no such thing; the scientists would simply ignore the exact match. We know this from the example of our universe. For there exists exactly such a match in our universe, in which each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron, but in which the charge of the electron is the exact opposite of the charge of the proton, with the match being to twenty decimal places. Our sharp-eyed scientists have paid no attention to this exact match.

The Quixotic Quest of the Multiverse Hunters

There is a certain type of sensationalist that I might call an inkblot sensationalist. I derive the term from the psychological testing technique of giving someone an inkblot, and asking him to tell what the ink blot represents. The technique was pioneered by Rorschach, who found that people would give all kinds of imaginative interpretations when presented with ordinary ink smudges. An inkblot sensationalist is someone who takes some murky blob of pixels, and interprets it in some sensational way, as a sign of some thing of enormous significance.

A recent example of inkblot sensationalism was the television program Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed. The program consisted mainly of sensational interpretations of magnified lunar photographs, suggesting that some of the blurry pixel blobs were signs of alien bases and alien mining activity. But it may be that if you look through thousands of photos of purely natural landscapes, and magnify them sufficiently, with sufficient imagination you can find something that looks to you like artificial activity, even when nothing is there.

Below is the latest lunar example of inkblot sensationalism. Someone has found what looks like a man and his shadow on the moon. That seems pretty exciting, until you realize that it really looks more like a shadow and its shadow, not a man and his shadow. 

Image Credit: Google Earth/Youtube.com

Another example of inkblot sensationalism is when a paranormal investigator posts a photo with a little white smudge or white blur, implying that is possible evidence of a ghost. Having just read the sensational story of the ghosts of flight 401, I would not at all exclude the possibility that a ghost might be photographed. But if you are going to claim to have evidence of a ghost, it had better be something more than just a blurry white smudge on your photo, as such smudges can be produced by fingerprints on a lens, insects flying near a lens, or a speck of dust floating in the air.

Another example of an inkblot sensationalist may be a scientist who scans the cosmic background radiation, claiming to find little parts of it that are evidence of some other universe beyond our own. We saw an example of this in the article Beyond the Horizon of the Universe by physicst

Laura Mersini-Houghton. Studying the cosmic background radiation (believed to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang), Mersini-Houghton claimed to find 9 possible signs of evidence for another universe. At least one of these claimed “signs” was ridiculous: the non-observation of supersymmetry (as if a non-detection of anything could be evidence for another universe). Other items on Mersini-Houghton's list seemed to be just flimsy cases of looking for some unexplained anomaly, and claiming that as evidence for another universe. But some of the things mentioned by Mersini-Houghton were anomalies that had been named or suggested by other cosmologists: a large-scale “Dark Flow,” a “cold dark spot” in the cosmic background radiation, and a claimed linear feature of the cosmic background radiation called “the Axis of Evil.”

The idea of trying to find evidence for other universes by looking at features of the cosmic background radiation in our universe seems like a quixotic quest (I will avoid the less polite term “fool's errand.”) Even if we were to find a particularly striking feature in that radiation, it would merely tell us something about our universe or its history, rather than being an indication of some other universe. It should also be noted that the cosmic background radiation is essentially featureless, because it is uniform to 1 part in 100,000. The visual below illustrates the point.

Recent findings have not been kind to Mersini-Houghton's thesis. Using the latest and greatest observations from the Planck satellite, no less than 175 scientists co-wrote a paper last year concluding that there is no evidence for Dark Flow. They said flatly, “There is no detection of bulk flow.” You can read here a New Scientist story reporting on this paper. The story says, “The sharpest map yet made of light from the infant universe shows no evidence of 'dark flow.'"

Now there is a new scientific paper that casts doubt on other items on Mersini-Houghton's list. The paper is entitled “Planck CMB anomalies: astrophysical and cosmological secondary effects and the curse of masking.” The paper refers to a process called masking, whereby scientists subtract foreground signals to try to get at an underlying background signal. Imagine if you have planted a tape recorder in the home of a mobster who is unaware of eavesdropping devices in his house. Perhaps the mobster always turned on the radio while he was talking, so that no one could detect his words. You might then create some technique for subtracting the sound of the radio, to get at the background signals of the mobster's voice. That would be an example of masking. Scientists use similar techniques to “mask out” foreground signals to get at background signals such as the primordial cosmic background radiation, believed to come from the very early universe.

The authors of the new paper (discussed in this phys.org article) point out that this masking process seems to exaggerate certain parts of the cosmic background radiation. The authors argue that the so-called “Axis of Evil” is not a significant feature of the cosmic background radiation, nor is the “cold dark spot.” The authors suggest that these are merely spurious artifacts of this masking process. This finding (along with the earlier Planck team's finding of no “dark flow”) pretty much means that the main parts of Mersini-Houghton's “evidence for another universe” have dissolved like the morning mist on San Francisco Bay.

Early Universe Had “Enormous Amount of Fine-Tuning,” Says New Scientific Paper

Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll just released a scientific paper entitled In What Sense Is the Early Universe Fine-Tuned? Since Carroll has taken on a part-time role as a worldview warrior, trying to throw cold water on anyone suspecting that the universe is not the result of pure blind chance, I suspect that some with similar views must have started to read the paper hopefully, thinking to themselves: now finally here is someone who will debunk all that talk about the early universe being extremely fine-tuned.

Fine-tuning basically means “fitness for an end,” and the term is used by both scientists and philosophers nowadays in a religiously neutral sense. Using the term fine-tuning does not semantically imply belief in a fine-tuner (although if one is discussing a sufficiently improbable case of fine-tuning that might, arguably, bring to mind the notion that such a fine-tuner once existed). When people talk about fine-tuning of the early universe, they mean the idea that the early universe had some arrangement of matter and energy (or evolutionary trajectory) that was highly improbable, something that was conducive to the eventual appearance of creatures such as us. Discussions of the fine-tuning of the early universe are discussions of the way the universe was about 13 billion years ago, around the time of the Big Bang, when the universe was very, very hot and dense. Cosmic fine-tuning is also discussed in a different context, the observation that the universe's fundamental constants and laws are improbably suitable for the existence of intelligent life. That's a fascinating topic discussed here, but in this post I will discuss only the first type of fine-tuning.

Rather than thinking of fine-tuning in the early universe in terms of a horizon problem or a flatness problem, Carroll suggests that it should be considered in terms of smoothness and trajectories. We know that the early universe was incredibly smooth. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was uniform to 1 part in 100,000. We know that from the cosmic background radiation, which has no lumps greater than 1 part in 100,000. You may get the wrong idea by looking at one of those maps of the cosmic background radiation that show different colors. Those maps are amplifying differences of only 1 part in 100,000. A map of the cosmic background radiation that does not use such an amplification would consist of a single color (see the visual below).

But such almost perfect smoothness, Carroll points out, would not occur in more than the tiniest fraction of the trajectories that the universe might have had after an event such as the Big Bang. How small is that fraction? On page 21 of the paper Carroll estimates that “the total fraction of the trajectories that are smooth at early times” is very roughly 1 in 10 to the 66 millionth power. That's a fraction equal to 1 in x, where x is 10 followed by 66 million zeroes.

How low is this probability of 1 in 10 to the 66 millionth power? It's a probability much less than the probability of you filling up a huge dump truck with many thousands of dice, having the truck dump the dice gradually along a road, and then finding that each and every one of the dice landed on the road coming up showing the number 6 (with no 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, or 5's showing anywhere on the road). It's also a probability much less than the probability of you guessing the birth date (month, day, and year) of every person you ever met, and you guessing the correct birth date each and every time throughout your life.

Carroll says of his estimate, “This represents a very conservative estimate for the amount of fine-tuning involved in the standard cosmological model.”

Does the theory of cosmic inflation eliminate this fine-tuning? Carroll says:

Inflation, therefore, cannot solve this problem all by itself. Indeed, the measure reinforces the argument made by Penrose, that the initial conditions necessary for getting inflation to start are extremely fine-tuned, more so than those of the conventional Big Bang model it was meant to help fix.

Carroll refers to the famous cosmologist Sir Roger Penrose, who made an argument (based on entropy) that the early universe required fine-tuning even more improbable than the microscopic probability listed by Carroll.

Carroll also concludes (page 21):

We can therefore conclude that the smoothness of the early universe does indeed represent an enormous amount of fine-tuning... The real sense in which the early universe was fine-tuned is extremely simple: the overwhelming majority of cosmological trajectories, as quantified by the canonical measure, are highly nonuniform at early times, and we don’t think the real universe was like that. Clearly, the specific numerical value we obtain is not of central importance; what is certain is that the history of our actual universe does not look anything like it was chosen randomly.

I can give a very crude analogy of how mind-boggling this is, one involving a trajectory and smoothness. Imagine you are walking along carrying a white poster board. You walk by a big muddy hole in the street. A big truck speeds by, driving over the muddy hole. Splat! A big blob of mud hits your poster board. Later you analyze the mud splat, and find that the distribution of mud is uniform to one part in 100,000. It's as if someone very carefully sprayed on the mud with a spray can, but even more orderly. How the hell could that have happened?

The fact that this result (1 chance in 10 to the 66 millionth power) has been advanced by Sean Carroll may make it all the more compelling, as Sean Carroll (a champion of naturalism) is the type of thinker one might expect to be hostile towards any conclusion of cosmic fine-tuning. Professor Carroll's naturalism forbids him from philosophically connecting the dots in regard to this and other cases of cosmic fine-tuning, but it is not obvious that others should conform to such a prohibition.

Hypothetical Configurations of a Programmed Cosmos

In some previous posts (here, here,  and here) I have advanced the theory that the universe has a cosmic computation layer: a kind of primordial programming that has existed since the known beginning of the universe (the Big Bang). I argued that we need to assume such a layer to account for how the universe manages to fulfill so ably all of its near-infinite computation needs. I also argued that we need to postulate such a computation layer to help explain the astonishing evolution of the universe, the appearance of galaxies, life, and eventually Mind from a universe that began in a superdense state. The theory I have suggested is that our universe is quite real (not a simulation), but that it has been somehow programmed for success from the beginning. To anyone reading my previous post on 18 anthropic requirements that must be met for civilizations such as ours to exist (some of which are most unlikely to occur by chance), such a theory of cosmic programming may seem like a good idea.

Upon hearing such a theory of a cosmic computation layer, some readers no doubt must have objected: we can't believe such a thing, because we can't imagine how such a thing might work; we can form no idea of what type of configuration such a computation layer might have.

My purpose in this post is to rebut such an objection. I will argue that there are hypothetical configurations we can imagine that might allow such a computation layer to exist. My aim is not to show that any one of these configurations is likely, but merely to show that we can imagine various hypothetical configurations for a cosmic computation layer, none of which violates any known findings. I will ask the reader to allow me to engage in some speculation, which may at times get rather exotic. Before dismissing such speculation, please remember a quote from the famous physicist Niels Bohr: “Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true” (a reminder that nature often ends up favoring some pretty mind-bending exotic realities).

First, let me comment on the use of the term “layer.” By speaking of a computation layer, I am not speaking of anything very similar to the layer of a cake. I use the term layer in the same way that software architects use the term, to mean a certain type of functionality that exists in a system, regardless of its physical location (in the same way that such architects speak of an abstraction layer). Computer people might talk of a hardware layer, a driver layer, and a software layer, but they don't actually mean things that are lying on top of each other horizontally like the layers of a cake. The term layer is simply used to mean some particular aspect of the overall functionality, regardless of where it is located. Do a Google image search for “software layer” and you will see many examples.

When I depicted a diagram (in this post) showing a computation layer underneath a mass-energy layer, I stated that the two layers are intermingled or intertwined (and certainly did not mean that one layer was vertically floating over the other).

So what type of arrangement or configuration might allow for such a computation layer to exist? At this stage of our ignorance, we can only speculate. But it is possible to imagine some reasonable configurations that would allow for such a thing.

The Possibility of Invisible Computation Particles

One possibility we can imagine is that the universe may have two types of particles: primary particles such as protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons, and also what we may call computation particles. The purpose of the computation particles might be to facilitate computation related to the primary particles, and to make sure that the universe's programming is followed. There could be at least one computation particle for every primary particle, and there might be many computation particles for each primary particle. The computation particles might somehow shadow or surround the primary particles. Each computation particle might be able to store many bits of information.

The immediate objection one could make is: such particles couldn't possibly exist, because we would have already detected them. But this objection isn't valid in light of current theories about dark matter. Currently physicists say that we are all surrounded by invisible dark matter. They say that we can't see dark matter because it does not interact with electromagnetism (and thus far there have been no unambiguous detections of dark matter). If such a thing is possible, it is possible that there are other types of invisible particles that do not interact with any of the four fundamental forces of our universe, and that are completely undetectable to us through direct observation.

We are not 100% sure that dark matter really exists, but we are absolutely sure that a particle called the neutrino exists. The neutrino has been called the ghost particle. A neutrino has either no mass or very little mass. Neutrinos are emitted by the sun. Scientists say that every second countless neutrinos are passing through your body. Given the reality of such particles, there is nothing implausible about the idea that our bodies and other objects might be intermingled with countless trillions of computation particles we can't see or detect.

We know of one other thing that pervades all of space: the cosmic background radiation, believed to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. All of outdoor space is bathed in this faint radiation, which was only detected around 1965. Stand outside and you will be surrounded by the tiny particles of the cosmic background radiation. Then there is also dark energy, which scientists say now makes up about 68% of the universe's mass-energy. It seems that as time passes, scientists are finding more and more cases of where we can say, “We are surrounded by a type of invisible matter or energy we were not aware of previously.” So there is nothing implausible about the idea that we might also be surrounded by (and intermingled with) computation particles we can't see.

The computation particles I am postulating could either be some type of invisible particle different from dark matter or dark energy, or the computation particles might actually be dark matter or dark energy (or part of either of them). Since we know nothing about how massive or complex dark matter particles might be, we can't rule out that they may be computation particles (or that they may partially be computation particles). We can say the same thing about the dark energy particles postulated by scientists – some of those particles may be computation particles. 

 
The Possibility of Emergence Clouds

The term emergence has been used for the tendency of nature to create units that are more than the sum of their parts. One example of emergence is the appearance of life. First you have mere chemicals, and then later there develops a microscopic living thing that is much more than just a combination of chemicals. Another example of emergence is the appearance of conscious Mind. First you have a collection of cells, and then you have a self-aware consciousness that is much more than just a collection of cells.

If we imagine some type of computation particles as previously imagined, we can imagine some of them grouping together in clusters, related to the emergence of some particular thing that is more than just the sum of its parts. Every atom might be associated with an emergence cloud that handles computation related to that particular atom. Every molecule might be associated with its own emergence cloud. There might also be emergence clouds associated with the origin of life, the origin of Mind, and the origin of galaxies.

Your mind might itself be an emergence cloud, a cluster of computation particles that stays together in order for your consciousness to exist. Such an emergence cloud may or may not dissipate when you die.

In this hypothetical configuration, small emergence clouds can exist within larger emergence clouds. The smallest emergence clouds might be the size of atoms or molecules, and the largest emergence clouds might be the size of galaxies or clusters of galaxies.

The Possibility of Hyperluminal Computational Communication

Physicists say that known physical particles such as protons exchange photons as part of the electromagnetic force, with one particle having an influence on another particle. Thinking in a similar vein, we can imagine that computation particles might be able to somehow communicate with other computation particles.

Would such communication be limited by the speed of light? Not necessarily. The speed of light is the speed of all electromagnetic radiation. But the communication between computation particles might use some different type of radiation or energy that is not limited by the speed of light.

Physicists say that known physical particles such as protons both send and receive virtual particles that act as agents of force exchange. So it is therefore not implausible to imagine that if computation particles exist, they might be both senders and receivers of computation-related messages. Under such a scenario, we can imagine each such particle as being rather like a radio receiver and a radio transmitter.

Given a sufficient number of such computation particles scattered around space, communicating with each other at a speed that is perhaps greater than the speed of light, and perhaps instantaneous, you have all the requirements for a computing system of basically unlimited power.

Would There Be Room for Such Particles?

Let's consider: are there any spatial reasons why it would be implausible to assume that there might be one or many computation particles for each material particle? Could it be that things would be too crowded if such particles existed? Certainly not. Scientists tell us that solid matter is almost entirely empty space. You often see schematic diagrams showing electrons as being a substantial fraction of the size of an atom, but such schematic diagrams are very misleading in their spatial depictions. In reality, according to this site the ratio of the radius of an atom to the radius of a proton, neutron, or electron is between 10,000 and 100,000. An atom is almost entirely empty space. So there is a huge amount of empty space within atoms in which computation particles might exist. There might be 1000 computation particles for every proton in an atom, and there still would be enough space within an atom.

The Possibility of a Computation Field

Another possibility is the possibility of a kind of universal computation field, something perhaps rather comparable to the Higgs field. Scientists say the Higgs field is a field that pervades all of space. So we can imagine a computation field that might pervade all of space, helping the universe to satisfy its computation needs. Such a field might act somewhat like a wi-fi network, but might extend to every bit of space.

Just as some physicists depict the creation of a particle as being a kind of disturbance or flicker in a field such as the Higgs field, we might imagine that each computation event in the universe's computation might be a kind of disturbance, flicker or blip in a universe-wide computation field, with the field having innumerable such blips, like a bubbling, boiling ocean.

In the visual below we can imagine the purple grid as being this computation field, with the green grid below it being space that is warped by the presence of matter. However, if such a computation field existed it might better be depicted as pervading all of space.

Computation Threads in the Fabric of Space?

Still another possibility is the possibility that computation functionality is somehow embedded in the fabric of space. Think of space as being a kind of fabric (a way it is often described). Imagine that this fabric is built from tiny units we may call threads. It could be that every nth thread (every hundredth, every thousandth, every millionth, or some other fraction) is what we might call a computation thread – a unit that helps the universe perform its computation activities. Each such thread might be of a vast length, perhaps stretching for trillions of miles.

Would we be able to detect such a thread as we passed through space? Probably not, largely because ordinary solid matter is something like 99.999% empty space. Astronomers say that stars as big as the sun are sometime crunched into the densest possible state (short of a black hole), and that when the star reaches such a state (called a neutron star), every teaspoon of matter weighs 100 million tons. This shows how empty ordinary matter is. So ordinary matter could pass through space that partially consisted of computation threads. The chance of a collision between such a thread and a material particle would be very low, and a collision might only produce a tiny deflection which would be very hard to detect. Or perhaps a particle of solid matter might be able to pass through such a computation thread without any deflection at all, like a person moving through air.

Where Might the Universe's Software be Stored?

So we have imagined how a computation layer could exist, either (a) in the form of computation particles which might cluster into emergence clouds, and which might communicate between each other, perhaps at speeds greater than the speed of light, or (b) a computation field that pervades all of space, or (c) embedded as threads within the fabric of spacetime. But what about the software that would be a vital element of any cosmic computation layer—where might that be located?

I can imagine several possibilities. One is the possibility that such software might somehow be stored as information content within a universal computation field, something similar to the Higgs field. The second possibilitiy is that the software might somehow be lurking within the cosmic background radiation that pervades all of the universe, or within some similar all-pervading radiation that dates from the time of the Big Bang. The photons that we can detect from the Big Bang are microwave photons. But space might also be pervaded by equally ancient particles of some other type, which somehow store the universe's software or some important part of it. If such particles can travel through any solid matter in the same way that neutrinos can, then any particle could “query” the universe's software just by taking a read of this background radiation (in rather the same way that your GPS device gets your current position partially by taking a read from a GPS satellite).

Another possibility is that the software might somehow be stored within the previously imagined computation threads embedded in the fabric of space.

One other mind-bending possibility is suggested by DNA biology. When a human is conceived, an organism does not get the blueprint for a human being from some non-human external source. Instead it reads the blueprint of a human being stored in every tiny little DNA molecule. Every drop of your blood or saliva is teeming with such molecules. In your cells are trillions of copies of the blueprint for how to make a human. This suggests the following possibility: perhaps the software of the universe (or some vital kernal or core of it) is stored in every computation particle (or perhaps every known subatomic particle). In such a case a proton (or a computation particle) might have no need to query any external source for a guideline on how to behave in accordance with the universe's programming. It might merely retrieve the information from itself.

Just as every cell in your body contains DNA that stores the plan and blueprint of a human being, your body might have within it countless trillions of computation particles that each is storing the plan and blueprint of the universe--and perhaps programming that will assure the glorious future pinnacles of cosmic destiny.

Conclusion

It is far too soon to draw any exact conclusions about the details of a cosmic computation layer. In this regard we have a situation similar to the situation biology was in during the middle of the 19^th century. At that time someone might have reasoned that there must be some information system that allows the blueprint of a human to be passed on during conception. But at that time it would have been impossible to have figured out the details of how such a system worked. We only learned the details with the discovery of DNA in the twentieth century. Similarly we can make compelling arguments that we need to assume that some cosmic computation layer exists, but we cannot say at this time what the exact configuration of a cosmic computation layer might be. We can merely speculate.

But I think the type of speculations made here show that we can easily imagine ways in which a cosmic computation layer might plausibly exist. So the idea that the universe has a computation layer is quite possible, and cannot be excluded because of any “we can't think of any way that could work” type of reasoning. We can indeed think of quite a few ways in which it might work, and I have described some of those possible configurations, as rough as those ideas may be.

Of course, a mere possibility does not show a likelihood. But I think the likelihood of the universe having a computation layer can be shown based on the need to satisfy the enormous computation demands of the universe (as I have argued here), and on the need to postulate a teleological principle to explain the universe's remarkable evolution from infinite density to galaxies to life and finally to Mind (as I argued here). Many a modern physicist recognizes that the universe seems to have a high degree of fine-tuning, for reasons discussed here and here. Some of these physicists have tried to explain fine-tuning by imagining a multiverse (a collection of a vast number of universes). But we can explain the fine-tuning much more simply and economically with the hypothesis that our material universe has been programmed for success from the beginning.