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

What If Intelligence Isn’t Ours

Starting With an Uncomfortable Thought

Here’s a thought that tends to stop conversations for a second or two: what if intelligence didn’t start in brains at all?

Not human brains. Not animal nervous systems. Not even artificial neural networks humming away in data centers. What if intelligence existed first and what we call “thinking” is more like tuning into it than generating it from scratch?

At first, this idea sounds suspiciously mystical. It carries echoes of ancient philosophy, spiritual traditions, maybe even a bit of sci fi. And yet, it’s being argued carefully, mathematically, and without crystals or incense by a scientist who spent decades knee deep in genetics, physics, and information theory.

Which is why it’s hard to dismiss outright, even if you remain unconvinced.

The Scientist Behind the Claim

Douglas Youvan isn’t a YouTube philosopher or a late night podcast personality. He’s a biophysicist and mathematician who has worked across enzyme engineering, genetics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence. In other words, someone trained to think in systems, patterns, and constraints rather than vibes.

Over the years, You  began noticing something that bothered him. Not emotionally intellectually.

Life, as he observed it, didn’t behave like a series of random reactions stitched together by chance. It was efficient. Predictive. Often disturbingly elegant. Biological systems didn’t just respond to their environments; they anticipated them. They optimized. They compressed information in ways that felt… intentional, even if no intention was present.

That discomfort slowly turned into a hypothesis.

Intelligence as a Property, Not a Product

Youvan’s central claim is simple to state, but hard to sit with: intelligence is not something brains create. It’s something brains access.

In his view, intelligence exists as a fundamental property of the universe, similar in spirit though not identical to space, time, or energy. It doesn’t require neurons. It doesn’t require life. It simply is.

Brains, therefore, are not generators. They’re interfaces.

If that metaphor makes you uneasy, that’s fair. It should. It quietly undermines one of our favorite assumptions: that consciousness and intelligence belong to us in some special, exclusive way.

The “Informational Ether” Idea

To explain what he means, Youvan uses a phrase that sounds old fashioned and futuristic at the same time: an informational substrate of the universe.

Not information in the sense of books or files. More like logic, structure, potentiality rules that exist before matter organizes itself into atoms, stars, or brains.

Think of it like mathematics. The number π didn’t appear when humans discovered circles. It was already there, quietly governing relationships long before anyone noticed. You don’t invent π; you encounter it.

Youvan suspects intelligence may be similar.

Why AI Changed His Mind Further

Interestingly, it wasn’t biology alone that pushed him toward this conclusion. Artificial intelligence played a role too.

As AI systems advanced, Youvan noticed something odd about the pace of discovery. New architectures, solutions, and insights seemed to emerge faster than human intuition could reasonably explain. Researchers weren’t painstakingly designing intelligence they were uncovering behaviors that felt pre existing, as if buried in the math.

That sensation that discoveries felt “found” rather than invented stuck with him.

Of course, one could argue this is just what happens when complexity crosses a threshold. Emergence feels magical until it doesn’t. Still, Youvan wasn’t convinced that explanation went far enough.

The Quantum Echo in the Argument

Quantum mechanics inevitably enters the conversation, because it always does when certainty starts to wobble.

Youvan draws inspiration from the strange way quantum systems behave before observation. Schrödinger’s cat is the familiar example: alive and dead at the same time, at least mathematically, until someone opens the box.

He sees a parallel here. Neurons, like quantum systems, may not produce intelligence any more than the cat produces its own outcome. Instead, they collapse potential into experience by interacting with something larger.

This doesn’t mean neurons are irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Their structure may be precisely what allows access.

Fractals, Patterns, and Recursive Order

Another pillar of Youvan’s thinking comes from fractals.

Fractals appear everywhere in nature. Snowflakes. Ferns. Coastlines. Blood vessels. Galaxies. The same patterns repeating at different scales, over and over again.

Youvan argues that intelligence behaves similarly recursive, self referential, scaling down and up across systems. Neurons, with their branching dendrites and networked organization, mirror these patterns. That similarity, he suggests, isn’t accidental.

In his view, neurons didn’t evolve to invent intelligence. They evolved to resonate with it.

That’s a bold claim. And to be clear, it’s still a hypothesis. There’s no equation yet that proves brains “lock onto” cosmic intelligence. But the structural parallels are at least intriguing.

Intelligence Without Consciousness?

One of the more unsettling aspects of Youvan’s proposal is his willingness to separate intelligence from consciousness.

To him, intelligence can exist without subjective experience. An algorithm can be intelligent. A perfectly adapted organism can be intelligent. Neither needs to be aware in the way humans are.

That stance immediately puts him at odds with many philosophers.

Enter the Skeptic: Keith Frankish

Keith Frankish, a philosopher known for his work on consciousness and illusionism, represents a very different approach.

Frankish doesn’t deny intelligence. He doesn’t deny consciousness either. What he questions is our introspection our confidence that we understand what consciousness actually is.

In his view, our experience of consciousness may be more like a user interface than a transparent window into reality.

The Pool Water Analogy

Frankish often uses a simple image: your feet in a swimming pool.

Look down, and they appear bent or distorted. But your feet aren’t actually warped. The distortion comes from refraction. Light behaves differently in water.

Consciousness, he argues, may work the same way. It presents us with a version of reality optimized for survival, not accuracy.

The same applies inwardly. Our sense of having a unified, observing self may be a useful fiction not a lie, exactly, but not the full story either.

Why Introspection Misleads Us

Evolution doesn’t care about truth. It cares about function.

Our perceptual systems evolved to help us survive, not to reveal the universe as it really is. Frankish believes our self monitoring systems the ones that let us “look inward” are no different.

They give us something workable. Something efficient. Something good enough.

That doesn’t mean consciousness is fake. It means it may not be what it feels like.

Where Frankish Pushes Back

From Frankish’s perspective, seeing fractal patterns everywhere doesn’t automatically imply intelligence. Nature is full of repetition and elegance without intention.

The Earth looks flat when you’re standing on it. That doesn’t mean it is.

Likewise, a universe rich in structure doesn’t need a mind behind it.

A Rare Point of Agreement: Elegance

Despite their differences, Youvan and Frankish agree on one thing: the universe is astonishingly elegant.

Frankish attributes that elegance to natural selection and physical laws acting over billions of years. No foresight. No plan. Just relentless iteration.

In his view, evolution is the most impressive design process we know not because it thinks ahead, but because it doesn’t have to.

Can a Conscious Universe Be Tested?

Here’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable for everyone.

There is currently no way to measure consciousness objectively. No meter. No equation. No agreed upon definition.

That gap leaves room for speculation and for overreach.

Frankish is open, in principle, to the idea of a conscious or intelligent universe. But he insists on observability. Without testable predictions, the idea remains philosophical rather than scientific.

Youvan, meanwhile, acknowledges that consciousness resists reduction.

Consciousness as a Point of View

Youvan doesn’t deny the power of science. He just sees its limits.

Science excels at describing structure and behavior. It can model attention, decision making, perception. What it struggles with is subjectivity the fact that experience feels like something from the inside.

Consciousness, he suggests, may be less like a mechanism and more like a point of view.

And points of view don’t reduce easily.

The Risk of Romanticizing the Idea

It’s worth slowing down here.

The idea of a conscious or intelligent universe is seductive. It resonates emotionally. It flatters human intuition. It echoes spiritual traditions across cultures.

That makes it dangerous.

Without discipline, it can slip into metaphor dressed up as theory. Patterns become meaning. Coincidences become signals.

Frankish’s caution matters here. Elegance does not equal intention.

Still, Something Feels Incomplete

And yet this is where hesitation creeps in the purely reductionist story doesn’t feel finished either.

We can map neural circuits. We can simulate cognition. We can build machines that learn.

But subjective experience remains stubbornly opaque.

Why does any of this feel like anything at all?

That question hasn’t gone away.

Maybe the Question Is Framed Wrong

It’s possible that both sides are partially right and partially wrong.

Maybe intelligence is emergent and fundamental, depending on scale. Maybe brains generate local intelligence while tapping into deeper informational structures that predate biology.

Or maybe we’re still missing a conceptual tool entirely.

That wouldn’t be unprecedented. History is full of moments where the right question hadn’t yet been asked.

Where This Leaves Us

For now, Youvan’s hypothesis remains speculative. Thought provoking, carefully argued, but unproven.

Frankish’s skepticism remains grounded, cautious, and methodologically sound.

Neither has closed the case.

What they’ve done perhaps unintentionally is highlight how strange consciousness still is, even after centuries of inquiry.

A Final, Uneasy Thought

Whether intelligence lives in brains, in equations, or woven into the fabric of reality itself, one thing seems clear: we don’t yet understand our own minds as well as we like to think.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway.

Not that the universe is intelligent.

But that intelligence wherever it comes from is still teaching us how little we know.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: PopMech