Dark Matter and Dark Energy Explained through Consciousness - PhD Physics…

By Shaun Higgins, PhD.

(Warning: written language can only take you so far… mathematical literacy becomes essential at certain critical points )

We are accustomed to thinking of the Universe as a machine that happens to think.

Matter first, mind later.

Complexity accumulates, chemistry stumbles into biology, biology into brains, and at some late hour consciousness flickers on like an accidental light.

This story has explanatory power, but it also leaves something unresolved.

It explains how systems behave once they exist, yet says remarkably little about why coherence appears at all, or why information so persistently resists dissolution.

Basically, the question remains…

Why does entropy not result in complete chaos?

An unresolved question that is perhaps the most significant scientific puzzle left to humanity…

Where does structure itself originate?

Or more profoundly…

What “governs” the laws of physics?

Information as Physical Structure

At the foundation of modern physics lies an uncomfortable truth…

What we call “physical reality” is already abstract.

Fields, probabilities, wave-functions, symmetries, these are not objects you can hold, but structures you can only describe.

The closer we look, the more the Universe resembles not a collection of things, but a choreography of relations.

Information sits quietly at the centre of this picture.

Not information as metaphor, but information as quantity.

We measure it, conserve it, and pay an energetic price for erasing it.

A bit is not free.

A memory is not weightless.

Every act of organisation carries thermodynamic consequence.

DNA makes this unavoidable, as DNA provides a classical demonstration of how matter is engineered by information…

However one chooses to interpret its origin, DNA is a code in the strict sense, symbolic, ordered, error-correcting, recursive.

It does not merely participate in chemistry… it constrains chemistry.

It is less a substance than a set of instructions that matter agrees to follow.

Biology, in this light, is not driven by matter alone, but by matter under informational discipline.

This suggests a subtle inversion of the usual hierarchy.

Instead of information emerging from matter, matter may be the medium through which information expresses itself…

Structure first, substance second.

Pattern before particle.

Dark Matter, Gravity, and Invisible Order

Once this inversion is allowed, other puzzles begin to rearrange themselves.

Dark matter, for example, is typically treated as missing substance, some invisible mass we have yet to detect.

But what we actually observe are gravitational effects… galaxies rotating too coherently, structures holding together more tightly than visible matter alone permits.

Gravity responds not to substance, but to distribution, stress, and curvature.

It responds to structure.

So one may ask, without excess…

What if part of what gravity is responding to is informational structure itself?

Not particles hiding in the dark, but persistent patterns embedded in spacetime, patterns with energetic cost, but little interaction.

Information that bends geometry without lighting up detectors.

This is not as radical as it sounds.

Fields already do this.

So do vacuum energies.

The novelty lies only in recognising information as a legitimate contributor to physical structure, rather than a bookkeeping abstraction we pretend is immaterial.

Consciousness as Informational Coherence

Consciousness enters this picture not as a magical ingredient, but as a specialised case of informational organisation.

The brain is extraordinary not because it burns more energy than other organs, but because it maintains long-range coherence while remaining far from equilibrium.

It collects, compresses, and integrates information while carefully managing entropy.

From this perspective, conscious experience is not an epiphenomenon floating above neurons, nor a ghost hidden in circuitry.

It is what information feels like when it becomes locally coherent enough to reference itself.

When feedback loops stabilise.

When patterns persist long enough to notice their own persistence.

This reframing softens the measurement problem without dissolving it.

In quantum mechanics, measurement is often spoken of as a mysterious collapse, as though reality waits politely for an observer to arrive.

But what actually occurs is an irreversible transfer of information.

Possibilities become records.

Superpositions become correlations.

The system does not choose… it forgets alternatives.

A conscious observer does not cause this by awareness alone, but by being an efficient sink for information.

A system capable of locking in outcomes, distributing them into memory, language, and behaviour.

Measurement, or “observation”, is thermodynamics applied to possibility.

Non-Locality and Quiet Carriers of Memory

Non-locality fits naturally here.

Entanglement does not transmit signals, but it reveals that information is not strictly confined to space in the way objects are.

Correlations exist prior to distance.

Structure precedes separation.

This is unsettling only if one insists that locality must be fundamental rather than emergent.

Even neutrinos, those elusive, nearly indifferent travellers, begin to look interesting through this lens.

They interact weakly, carry phase information over immense distances, and pass through matter almost unchanged.

They are a “bookmark”, reminders that the Universe has channels of persistence that are subtle, quiet, and difficult to disrupt.

Memory does not always announce itself loudly.

Expansion, Entropy, and Cosmic Record-Keeping

At the largest scale, the Universe appears to be expanding faster over time.

Dark energy is the name we give to this behaviour, not an explanation for it…

One can ask, again without romance, whether this acceleration reflects an accumulation of irreversibility.

The Universe does not merely expand, it records.

Stars burn, structures form, information is processed, entropy increases, but not randomly.

Patterns emerge, interact, dissolve, and leave traces.

If the cosmos is an information-processing system, then expansion may be less like an explosion and more like a ledger growing in length.

Space stretching to accommodate history.

Shared Reality and the Interface of Experience

Where, then, is reality located?

Not solely in the brain, and not solely “out there.”

Reality appears at the interface, where informational structure meets a system capable of integrating it.

We share a world not because our perceptions are identical, but because the constraints shaping them are.

The same patterns impress themselves upon many observers, filtered differently but grounded in common structure.

I am aware that language strains here.

Words like information and consciousness carry philosophical baggage.

I use them not to inflate the argument, but to keep it honest.

We cannot pretend these concepts vanish simply because they are difficult.

What I am offering, if it deserves that term at all, is a change in emphasis.

From matter to pattern.

From substance to structure.

From asking how consciousness arises from the Universe, to asking whether the Universe has always been doing something similar to consciousness… organising, remembering, differentiating.

This is not a call to abandon science.

It is an invitation to take it at its word.

To follow its abstractions to their natural conclusions.

To accept that the equations have been hinting, for some time now, that the world is less a pile of things and more a web of relationships…

If there is a metaphysical note here, it is a restrained one…

That meaning is not an intruder in the physical world, but one of its native expressions.

That we are not spectators watching a finished Universe, but participants in an ongoing act of entropic organisation and expression…

The Universe itself, observing itself.

And for those who wish to go deeper, you might ask…

Why then, in such a system, would space expand at a rate faster than that of the speed of light?