Consciousness as an Interface Between the Material World and Beyond
A speculation on how things might work
Dark Matter, Complexity, and the 95% We Don’t Know
My usual area of interest, as far as Substack goes, is in the ethical implications on content production using AI. However, I just wanted to write about some recent thoughts I have had on the role of complexity in our Universe.
According to the Big Bang Theory the dissipation of matter and heat across the universe seems to be leading us, through the process of entropy, to an inevitable heat death. A vast expanse where everything eventually becomes uniform and disordered.
But when we look at life and its growing complexity over time, it feels like a contradiction. While life can be described from this model as a decrease in entropy, a kind of fight back against inevitable decay, it will as a phenomenon, eventually suffer the same fate as all material in the universe - it doesn’t explain why this complexity should exist at all in the first place.
We know that visible matter—everything we can see, touch, or measure—makes up just 5% of the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy, and we can only detect them through their effects on the space around them.
In a purely mechanical universe, one would think things would just opt for the simplest, easiest path. Why make things more complicated? Why expend energy on building systems that don’t seem necessary? The creation of life doesn’t seem to match any of the other processes in the universe. It is very singular and highly localised. We haven’t detected the complex systems that could lead to life anywhere else - so far.
It may exist in other places but they haven’t been detected yet, so we have a responsibility to the entire Universe to act as proper caretakers, and nurture this opportunity that allows living processes to exist as best as possible. Not killing each other, and taking care of our planet would be a good start.
The usual explanation is that energy from the Sun allows local decreases in entropy (as Schrödinger put it in What is Life?), which creates the possibility for complexity to exist. But that is perilously close to the Fine-Tuning Argument, which says that the universe, its galaxies, planets, and eco-systems are uniquely geared for us to be here. But since there is no way of knowing how life would exist under other conditions, even slightly different, it really isn’t very helpful.
Anyway, what if complexity, especially consciousness, plays a role as an interface between the 5% of the universe we can see and the 95% we can’t? Maybe consciousness isn’t just an accident—it might be necessary for connecting these two realms. This idea could explain a lot: why consciousness seems to have properties beyond material explanations, why complex systems form, and why evolution keeps pushing toward complexity despite the high energy cost.
Life forms reproduce and create more complex systems in a virtuous circle. If life reduces entropy locally, maybe it’s not just fighting against entropy—maybe it’s doing something else, serving some other purpose. Maybe it is bridging the gap between what we can see and what we can’t.
The universe, with its vast and largely invisible dark matter and energy, seems to operate on a deeper, unseen level. If we consider the universe as an immense information-processing system, much like how our brains process data, complexity and consciousness could be key components in understanding how the visible universe relates to the 95% of reality we can’t directly observe.
Life, in its complexity, might not just be an anomaly, but an essential part of how the universe organizes itself, perhaps serving as a bridge to the unseen realms of dark matter and energy.
Perhaps complex systems are something that is required for understanding how things actually work, or even creating new forms of order. We see the results of conscious abstraction and the ideas it can produce in the technological world all around that has served us so well. But could it all be a first step to a greater awareness of the things unseen which we absolutely know are there?
Dark Energy and Dark Matter may not follow the laws of physics as we know them, but nor does our ability to imagine other possibilities follow any given law that we have created. The creative imagination is the most powerful tool that we know of in the Universe. How we act, and everything we have created emanates from that source. It completely defies entropy.
That should tell us something important about consciousness.
Without any kind of material genesis that we know of it just exists. It is something that allows for imagination and abstraction to exist so we can better order the material world to survive and thrive.
Our consciousness and imagination could be a pre-existing phenomenon to which our material selves have evolved to access over the millennia. It was waiting there all the time waiting for us to have developed enough to have access to its universe spanning possibilities. There is some scientific thinking that points in this direction.
This idea also touches on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. (Photons can be particles or waves depending on whether they are observed or not.) Consciousness, as Roger Penrose suggests in Shadows of the Mind, might not just collapse wave functions—it might be part of a deeper connection between the visible world and the hidden world of dark matter and energy. This is highly speculative but it does offer a potential method for this process to take place. Essentially, he posits that there may exist quantum microtubules in the brain that could be affected by the activity of quantum gravity or possibly vice versa, though this remains a hypothesis that is yet to be experimentally validated.
What if these ideas might be testable? If complex systems really are bridges, maybe we can find small differences in how they interact with gravity compared to simpler systems. Maybe areas of high biological or neural activity will show effects in dark matter distribution. Maybe complex systems affect space-time in ways we don’t yet fully understand. I will have to defer to the quantum physicists and biologists on that as I have no formal training in that sphere. (That doesn’t mean I cannot read a paper and have my own ideas.)
But at the end of the day, this theory doesn’t just make sense of complexity—it suggests that complexity is part of the structure of the universe, not a side effect of evolution. It’s a function we don’t yet fully grasp, but that might help us understand the 95% of the universe we’ve never seen.
Maybe complexity isn’t some oddity—it’s a key piece of the puzzle. Consciousness might be a necessary bridge between what we can see and what we still don’t understand.