Everywhere we turn, physics seems to be dominated by what are clearly psychological phenomena. Does it even make any sense to talk about a physical reality where there are no observers, and therefore no observable phenomena? The entire foundation of physics is based on the concept of an observation, a measurement.
Everything else is just speculation. Or as Feynmann would dimiss it, as just “filazawfigal”.

This all suggests to me that the universe is somehow intimately tied up with the idea of consciousness. I don’t mean that the universe was created by a conscious being, or even that the universe itself is conscious. But we are conscious, we already know the universe can evolve consciousness. That is simply astonishing. It can even be argued that the simplest physical systems respond to stimuli–you heat a gas and it expands, right? Heat transfer in a fluid can switch from conduction to radiation to convection simply because of the temperature gradient. How does it KNOW to do that?

As Sagan pointed out, perhaps the universe HAD to create conscious beings in order to contemplate itself. Perhaps without an object or event being perceived, or at the very least perceivable in principle, it cannot exist.

I really do think consciousness does play some kind of vital role in the universe.

Kind of reminiscent of the Force, isn’t it. “It permeates all living things”..it certainly plays a role in evolution. DNA is nothing but an information storage and management system. Maybe even an information processing system.

Relating to the ‘simulation’ concept, it is fascinating that ‘information’ is popping up as an important quantity in more and more areas of cutting edge theoretical physics…

There is a a VAST amount of theoretical work on what happens to the information that falls into a black hole…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/do-black-holes-destroy-information/
And a new theory of gravity that I find very satisfying (Disclaimer: I dont have the background to evaluate this theory’s merits) relies on the INFORMATION contained in a volume, and as a result removes the need for dark matter:

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-theory-gravity-dark.html

In 2010, Erik Verlinde surprised the world with a completely new theory of gravity. According to Verlinde, gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but an emergent phenomenon. In the same way that temperature arises from the movement of microscopic particles, gravity emerges from the changes of fundamental bits of information, stored in the very structure of spacetime.

My unqualified opinion is that this theory is one that could revolutionize physics…
https://phys.org/news/2016-12-verlinde-theory-gravity.html

A team led by astronomer Margot Brouwer (Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands) has tested the new theory of theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde (University of Amsterdam) for the first time through the lensing effect of gravity. Brouwer and her team measured the distribution of gravity around more than 33,000 galaxies to put Verlinde’s prediction to the test. She concludes that Verlinde’s theory agrees well with the measured gravity distribution. The results have been accepted for publication in the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The concept of information seems bound up in the very nature of space-time… almost like the universe is a giant information … processor?

used to say “What if the entire universe is just a science project in God School?” Not that far from Kurzweil’s conjecture, is it? Did that insight come from the horrifying night in Vietnam when he earned the Silver Star and killed forty men, or from all the acid he dropped after he came home? Does it matter?

This theme has been explored repeatedly in science fiction, in films like “The Matrix” trilogy and novels like Simulacron-3 (the movie “The 13th Floor”), and “Inception”, “Existenz”and more recently, in some of the work of Iain M Banks. And we’ve talked about it here repeatedly on the Zone.

But it doesn’t really matter, does it? We all have to deal with the world as it presents itself to us, how the world “really” is is not only unprovable, it is irrelevant. Even more important, we get to pick the kind of world we want to have meaning for us, we then live in it as if it really mattered. If you are an athlete, or an artist, or a scientist or politician, you see yourself as an actor in a universe you have created that has great meaning and importance for you, yet may be sheer nonsense for anyone else.

Just think, a chess master is obsessed with the game, its history, and its subtleties. If he competes at a high level, he worries about his standings, his matches, his reputation, his training and his opponents, etc. If you don’t play chess, it all means nothing to you. If you are devoutly religious, your relationship with God is the single most important fact in your life. To the atheist, it is all an elaborate fantasy. And who’s to say who’s right, whatever that means?

To a very great extent, we all construct the universe we live in. And the real universe manifests itself in so many different ways, who’s to say which is the right one? Do we reside in the universe of the physicist, the chemist, the biologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian? Each of these realms encompasses the universe beneath it, all nested like the layers of an onion. We all seem blissfully unaware of these other layers, except when we’re being mugged, or divorced, or when we have a toothache, when our child dies or when our doctor gives us the really bad news.

Understanding that at the molecular level is what true freedom is.