I’m a simple lay person, however I find this kind of model fascinating, and appreciate the work you’re doing to popularize it and explore it further. It certainly echoes my intuition, whatever that’s worth. But "evolutionary processes,” generally, seems like something that are reflected at many scales across what we understand as “reality.”
Julian, do you think of the larger reality as the “multiverse” made up of interconnected individual universes? Or do we simply need to expand our definition of universe to be the larger webwork of what we’ve traditionally labelled “the universe?”
I’m also curious whether you think there’s an “initial genesis” to the process that kicked it all off, or is it weirder than that, and there’s really no “original universe” in a temporal sense?
Do I think "there’s an “initial genesis” to the process that kicked it all of?
No. I think there was always something. I think the idea of nothing is just that, a scary idea that we torment ourselves with. And it's the idea of nothing that requires a moment of genesis. Take away the idea of nothing, and you remove the need for a starting point.
In my view, there has always been something; there has always been time; there has (therefore) always been change; that's all you need. Eventually you will get evolution, and off you go. And the "something" gets richer and richer over time.
What does that look like? At this point, it looks like an evolutionary tree of universes. And we are at the tip of one branch of that tree. There are other branches to that tree, other kinds of universe that were also successful at reproducing, and that may be ASTONISHINGLY different to our own. But the whole possibility space is not occupied.
What is the relationship between those universes, if any? Does a parent universe have some kind of ongoing causal relationship with its child universe, or is there complete causal separation from birth, from the Big Bang? I don't know. Fascinating questions, but I am already in deep enough speculative waters, and I don't want to alienate those of my readers with a hard-science valence by wading in further till it's over my head!
I am wondering the same, and my head is spinning (in a good way) imagining the sorts of answers we may receive moving forward as the thinkers who ponder these questions adapt their meta-framework to this proposal
I'm a big fan not only of the theory but of the thought process behind it.
However...
There is one assertion that I am confused about. The piece says:
"That’s because if supermassive black holes – the earliest and most primitive structures, through which the earliest universes reproduced – are still to be found in our universe, then their production in our universe should precede that of any complex structures that evolved far later. The simple, original, reproductive mechanism shouldn’t depend on – and certainly couldn’t emerge from – later, more complex structures."
The second sentence is self-evidently True with a capital T. However, I don't see that the first is necessarily true.
Let's assume that supermassive black holes are indeed the earliest structures *in the evolutionary sense* i.e. that the earliest universes only have supermassive black holes. Now the question is, how long do supermassive black holes take to appear? Answer: it doesn't matter. As long as they are the only things around, they will appear eventually, and birth new universes.
Eventually, some of those universes birth universes that also have stellar mass black holes and other complex structures. And those universes birth more of their own, etc. Now the new question is, how long do stellar mass black holes take to appear? And the answer is, they could appear sooner IN OUR UNIVERSE than supermassive black holes do.
This can be true PROVIDED the theory here is NOT that supermassive black holes give birth to stellar mass black holes; BUT RATHER that supermassive black holes eventually give birth to universes that develop stellar mass black holes. In a GIVEN universe, the stellar mass black holes could "grow up" faster than the supermassive black holes.
Now, this suggestion that in a universe with both, the stellar mass black holes could appear before supermassive black holes just because they grow up quicker would NOT be true if one or both of the following holds:
1. The mechanism of forming stellar mass black holes requires the prior existence of supermassive black holes. Obviously, then, the supermassive black holes must come first in any given universe, not just in the evolutionary sense.
2. The process of creating - in a given universe - complex structures including stellar mass black holes shuts down the production of supermassive black holes, i.e. the latter get produced first or not at all.
NET NET:
- the theory definitely predicts that the process of formation of supermassive black holes does not depend on complex structures, because those evolved later
- if it is found that supermassive black holes appear early in a given universe, they cannot depend on complex structures, which is consistent with the theory (and disproves many other theories)
- if it is found that supermassive black holes appear after stellar mass black holes BUT DO NOT DEPEND ON stellar mass black holes for their formation, that is also consistent with the theory. It just means that once a universe with stellar mass black holes appears, the two classes of black holes form independently of each other, but the stellar mass black holes form sooner.
This is true, and well argued. But my contention is indeed your 1:
"1. The mechanism of forming stellar mass black holes requires the prior existence of supermassive black holes. Obviously, then, the supermassive black holes must come first in any given universe, not just in the evolutionary sense."
I'm arguing that you can't get galaxies without supermassive black holes and their jets. This will become clearer with my next big post on spiral galaxy formation (yeah, the one I've been working on for months), where I outline in detail exactly how I think supermassive black holes and their jets dynamically form spiral galaxies, and thereby optimize the conditions for star formation, and thus stellar-collapse black hole formation.
There's also a secondary argument in favor of 1, which is that the formation of supermassive black holes by direct collapse requires the universe to be structurally simple and featureless (as was the case in early, primitive universes). It can therefore only happen in the smooth gas of the early universe before star formation, and therefore the development of supermassive black holes will precede the development of stellar collapse black holes inside any given universe.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm looking forward to the next post now.
Also, your secondary argument is essentially my option 2, supermassive black holes get formed first or not at all. So it's a case of "why not both?", I guess.
Hi Julian, excellent writing as ever...is this idea a natural progression from the System of Systems you described in Connect? A concept which I did find quite elegant and pleasing.
Yes! It is. In Connect, I think I buried the ideas a bit too deep, so I'm being far more explicit here. But yes, an evolved universe is essentially a system of systems – much as a human being, being the result of an evolutionary process, is a system of systems. All the parts work at their different levels, in order to facilitate the goals of the whole. But of course, they also have their own goals, at their own level.
Absolutely fascinating. I was aware of Smolin's work a while ago and it has always been my favorite theory, so I'm super excited to see someone else working passionately at expanding it.
This feels like it would have some great synergy with Lee Cronin and Sara Imari Walker's Assembly theory. It's similarly beautiful and brain busting and I think you'd love it.
Yes, I think there is an overlap with their work. I think three-stage cosmological natural selection provides an explanatory frame for what they are describing. Our universe is a self-assembling, self-complexifying, self-organizing system, as a direct result of its evolutionary history, which fine-tuned the basic parameters of matter so that they generate that outcome.
Yes! Progressive increase in agency to explore combinatorial space over time, scale agnostic. 'Life begets life' is vastly more true than we think.
It's intensely nuts to imagine where such an evolutionary process would lead. Presumably, future (or current) cosmological offspring would be brimming with life busily producing artificial black holes in a cosmic cambrian explosion. Nested multiverse flora and fauna, unaware that the tiny particles inside them are getting wise. What happens when those creatures develop technics? What does an artificial universe look like?
This area of exploration would be well served by some solid speculative fiction in the vein of Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker.
This is always so cool to read and see evolving. You're really paving the way for more science that is bold and predictive; things that give vibes of the mood I'd read about 100 years ago as opposed to the risk-averse idea-bereft environs of academia today.
Hey Dexanth, thank you! I may well be moving with my family to your part of the world soon (early next year?); it would be great to meet up. Vesuvio Cafe in the springtime, perhaps!
Great to see a new update and beautifully put together writing.
I've been thinking more about the mechanism for inheritance of traits across generations, and keep coming back to the processes in fractals like the Mandelbrot set. Each location in that structure is deterministically driven by the specific values of those coordinates. You can zoom in infinitely, calculating the fate of ever finer refinements of those input values. In some ways the calculation is an illusion- the entire structure was always there. But in others there is some flow in the descent to finer levels of detail. This feels very much like an irreducible computation, of the likes of Wolfram.
Parent and daughter universes do not necessarily need to transmit anything like "genes" in a direct biological analogy. Instead, the parent universe occupies one approximate "location" in the fractal of reality, and the daughter universes occupy slightly more precise "locations", which give them broadly similar but slightly different structures and properties to the parent.
The "fertile" trajectory in the overall structure then is just one location on the original map, where you can look closer and closer to see ever more complex and curious universes computing themselves into existence.
Summary: assuming cosmological natural selection is true, (that is, that our universe is inside a black hole in a parent universe, and black holes in our universe contain baby universes), then super-massive black holes in every universe in our family tree of universes must form without requiring the collapse of stars, since early universes likely didn't have stars; later universes evolved to have stars since this allowed them to produce more black holes and hence more baby universes.
This is a lay person talking, but I was thinking about this theory in a more spiritual sense.
What I mean by that is what if life forms have been messing with this cosmic natural selection. Almost like a genetic parasite trying to make a habitable universe for themselves and the production of black holes.
This could explain some deviation in parts of the theories (bias I know), and why complex elements come to being.
One thing I don't understand about your work is why you frame CNC as in some way more meaning-oriented and less materialistically nihilistic than frameworks where our universe is an arbitrarily fine-tuned one-off. Natural selection is kind of the king-pin of materialistic nihilist theories! It completely eviscerated intelligent design and left no plausible room for divine intervention in the biological development of humanity. CNC arguably does the same thing to the big bang.
For my part I think CNC is quite compelling and I personally find theological meaning at a different level of reality so I don't feel particularly invested in that way in how the scientific cookie crumbles here, but I do feel confused about why you seem to talk about CNC as redeeming meaning in cosmology.
I keep thinking about this and actually the implications of CNC are so sweeping and revolutionary to the meaning of ontology, reductionism, causality, emergence, origin of life, and other fundamental problems at the frontiers of science that you kinda just gotta be struck with wonder considering it. I think my point above still stands but only in letter, not in spirit.
wake up baby new egg and the rock just dropped
I ran upstairs to tell my wife but she was in a meeting and wouldn't care anyway. :\
I’m a simple lay person, however I find this kind of model fascinating, and appreciate the work you’re doing to popularize it and explore it further. It certainly echoes my intuition, whatever that’s worth. But "evolutionary processes,” generally, seems like something that are reflected at many scales across what we understand as “reality.”
Julian, do you think of the larger reality as the “multiverse” made up of interconnected individual universes? Or do we simply need to expand our definition of universe to be the larger webwork of what we’ve traditionally labelled “the universe?”
I’m also curious whether you think there’s an “initial genesis” to the process that kicked it all off, or is it weirder than that, and there’s really no “original universe” in a temporal sense?
Do I think "there’s an “initial genesis” to the process that kicked it all of?
No. I think there was always something. I think the idea of nothing is just that, a scary idea that we torment ourselves with. And it's the idea of nothing that requires a moment of genesis. Take away the idea of nothing, and you remove the need for a starting point.
In my view, there has always been something; there has always been time; there has (therefore) always been change; that's all you need. Eventually you will get evolution, and off you go. And the "something" gets richer and richer over time.
What does that look like? At this point, it looks like an evolutionary tree of universes. And we are at the tip of one branch of that tree. There are other branches to that tree, other kinds of universe that were also successful at reproducing, and that may be ASTONISHINGLY different to our own. But the whole possibility space is not occupied.
What is the relationship between those universes, if any? Does a parent universe have some kind of ongoing causal relationship with its child universe, or is there complete causal separation from birth, from the Big Bang? I don't know. Fascinating questions, but I am already in deep enough speculative waters, and I don't want to alienate those of my readers with a hard-science valence by wading in further till it's over my head!
I am wondering the same, and my head is spinning (in a good way) imagining the sorts of answers we may receive moving forward as the thinkers who ponder these questions adapt their meta-framework to this proposal
Same here. I am looking forward enormously to seeing more minds working within this framework.
I'm a big fan not only of the theory but of the thought process behind it.
However...
There is one assertion that I am confused about. The piece says:
"That’s because if supermassive black holes – the earliest and most primitive structures, through which the earliest universes reproduced – are still to be found in our universe, then their production in our universe should precede that of any complex structures that evolved far later. The simple, original, reproductive mechanism shouldn’t depend on – and certainly couldn’t emerge from – later, more complex structures."
The second sentence is self-evidently True with a capital T. However, I don't see that the first is necessarily true.
Let's assume that supermassive black holes are indeed the earliest structures *in the evolutionary sense* i.e. that the earliest universes only have supermassive black holes. Now the question is, how long do supermassive black holes take to appear? Answer: it doesn't matter. As long as they are the only things around, they will appear eventually, and birth new universes.
Eventually, some of those universes birth universes that also have stellar mass black holes and other complex structures. And those universes birth more of their own, etc. Now the new question is, how long do stellar mass black holes take to appear? And the answer is, they could appear sooner IN OUR UNIVERSE than supermassive black holes do.
This can be true PROVIDED the theory here is NOT that supermassive black holes give birth to stellar mass black holes; BUT RATHER that supermassive black holes eventually give birth to universes that develop stellar mass black holes. In a GIVEN universe, the stellar mass black holes could "grow up" faster than the supermassive black holes.
Now, this suggestion that in a universe with both, the stellar mass black holes could appear before supermassive black holes just because they grow up quicker would NOT be true if one or both of the following holds:
1. The mechanism of forming stellar mass black holes requires the prior existence of supermassive black holes. Obviously, then, the supermassive black holes must come first in any given universe, not just in the evolutionary sense.
2. The process of creating - in a given universe - complex structures including stellar mass black holes shuts down the production of supermassive black holes, i.e. the latter get produced first or not at all.
NET NET:
- the theory definitely predicts that the process of formation of supermassive black holes does not depend on complex structures, because those evolved later
- if it is found that supermassive black holes appear early in a given universe, they cannot depend on complex structures, which is consistent with the theory (and disproves many other theories)
- if it is found that supermassive black holes appear after stellar mass black holes BUT DO NOT DEPEND ON stellar mass black holes for their formation, that is also consistent with the theory. It just means that once a universe with stellar mass black holes appears, the two classes of black holes form independently of each other, but the stellar mass black holes form sooner.
This is true, and well argued. But my contention is indeed your 1:
"1. The mechanism of forming stellar mass black holes requires the prior existence of supermassive black holes. Obviously, then, the supermassive black holes must come first in any given universe, not just in the evolutionary sense."
I'm arguing that you can't get galaxies without supermassive black holes and their jets. This will become clearer with my next big post on spiral galaxy formation (yeah, the one I've been working on for months), where I outline in detail exactly how I think supermassive black holes and their jets dynamically form spiral galaxies, and thereby optimize the conditions for star formation, and thus stellar-collapse black hole formation.
There's also a secondary argument in favor of 1, which is that the formation of supermassive black holes by direct collapse requires the universe to be structurally simple and featureless (as was the case in early, primitive universes). It can therefore only happen in the smooth gas of the early universe before star formation, and therefore the development of supermassive black holes will precede the development of stellar collapse black holes inside any given universe.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm looking forward to the next post now.
Also, your secondary argument is essentially my option 2, supermassive black holes get formed first or not at all. So it's a case of "why not both?", I guess.
Hi Julian, excellent writing as ever...is this idea a natural progression from the System of Systems you described in Connect? A concept which I did find quite elegant and pleasing.
Yes! It is. In Connect, I think I buried the ideas a bit too deep, so I'm being far more explicit here. But yes, an evolved universe is essentially a system of systems – much as a human being, being the result of an evolutionary process, is a system of systems. All the parts work at their different levels, in order to facilitate the goals of the whole. But of course, they also have their own goals, at their own level.
SPOILERS! I haven't finished Connect yet! :P
Absolutely fascinating. I was aware of Smolin's work a while ago and it has always been my favorite theory, so I'm super excited to see someone else working passionately at expanding it.
This feels like it would have some great synergy with Lee Cronin and Sara Imari Walker's Assembly theory. It's similarly beautiful and brain busting and I think you'd love it.
Yes, I think there is an overlap with their work. I think three-stage cosmological natural selection provides an explanatory frame for what they are describing. Our universe is a self-assembling, self-complexifying, self-organizing system, as a direct result of its evolutionary history, which fine-tuned the basic parameters of matter so that they generate that outcome.
Yes! Progressive increase in agency to explore combinatorial space over time, scale agnostic. 'Life begets life' is vastly more true than we think.
It's intensely nuts to imagine where such an evolutionary process would lead. Presumably, future (or current) cosmological offspring would be brimming with life busily producing artificial black holes in a cosmic cambrian explosion. Nested multiverse flora and fauna, unaware that the tiny particles inside them are getting wise. What happens when those creatures develop technics? What does an artificial universe look like?
This area of exploration would be well served by some solid speculative fiction in the vein of Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker.
This is always so cool to read and see evolving. You're really paving the way for more science that is bold and predictive; things that give vibes of the mood I'd read about 100 years ago as opposed to the risk-averse idea-bereft environs of academia today.
Great read as always!!
Hey Dexanth, thank you! I may well be moving with my family to your part of the world soon (early next year?); it would be great to meet up. Vesuvio Cafe in the springtime, perhaps!
If you end up out here, absolutely! Would love to be able to hang out on the regular :)
Great to see a new update and beautifully put together writing.
I've been thinking more about the mechanism for inheritance of traits across generations, and keep coming back to the processes in fractals like the Mandelbrot set. Each location in that structure is deterministically driven by the specific values of those coordinates. You can zoom in infinitely, calculating the fate of ever finer refinements of those input values. In some ways the calculation is an illusion- the entire structure was always there. But in others there is some flow in the descent to finer levels of detail. This feels very much like an irreducible computation, of the likes of Wolfram.
Parent and daughter universes do not necessarily need to transmit anything like "genes" in a direct biological analogy. Instead, the parent universe occupies one approximate "location" in the fractal of reality, and the daughter universes occupy slightly more precise "locations", which give them broadly similar but slightly different structures and properties to the parent.
The "fertile" trajectory in the overall structure then is just one location on the original map, where you can look closer and closer to see ever more complex and curious universes computing themselves into existence.
Summary: assuming cosmological natural selection is true, (that is, that our universe is inside a black hole in a parent universe, and black holes in our universe contain baby universes), then super-massive black holes in every universe in our family tree of universes must form without requiring the collapse of stars, since early universes likely didn't have stars; later universes evolved to have stars since this allowed them to produce more black holes and hence more baby universes.
This is a lay person talking, but I was thinking about this theory in a more spiritual sense.
What I mean by that is what if life forms have been messing with this cosmic natural selection. Almost like a genetic parasite trying to make a habitable universe for themselves and the production of black holes.
This could explain some deviation in parts of the theories (bias I know), and why complex elements come to being.
One thing I don't understand about your work is why you frame CNC as in some way more meaning-oriented and less materialistically nihilistic than frameworks where our universe is an arbitrarily fine-tuned one-off. Natural selection is kind of the king-pin of materialistic nihilist theories! It completely eviscerated intelligent design and left no plausible room for divine intervention in the biological development of humanity. CNC arguably does the same thing to the big bang.
For my part I think CNC is quite compelling and I personally find theological meaning at a different level of reality so I don't feel particularly invested in that way in how the scientific cookie crumbles here, but I do feel confused about why you seem to talk about CNC as redeeming meaning in cosmology.
I keep thinking about this and actually the implications of CNC are so sweeping and revolutionary to the meaning of ontology, reductionism, causality, emergence, origin of life, and other fundamental problems at the frontiers of science that you kinda just gotta be struck with wonder considering it. I think my point above still stands but only in letter, not in spirit.