That could mean intelligence is a fundamental property that structures like the brain interact with.
The universe has no brain. It has no gray matter, no nervous system, no neurons firing electrical impulses—and yet, that physical structure may not be where intelligence and consciousness actually come from. Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.
This is the latest hypothesis from biophysicist and mathematician Douglas Youvan, PhD, who spent decades working at the intersection of physics, biology and information theory. He merged research involving enzyme engineering and machine vision with his decades of knowledge in genetics, leading him to realize something remarkable.
“I began to see that life and intelligence weren’t just reactive—they were predictive, efficient, and often mathematically elegant,” Youvan said in an interview earlier this year. “Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI model, can tap into.”
His more recent work with AI only matured this hypothesis. With AI technologies advancing at what seems like light speed, Youvan felt that the many insights gained came so fast that “they felt more discovered than invented.” It was almost as if some outside force was generating them, and human researchers were pulling them out of the ether where they appeared, he thought. This experience fleshed out a controversial idea that suggests intelligence is a force of the universe that exists separately from living organisms.
“I suspect intelligence originates from what might be called an informational substrate of the universe—a pre-physical foundation where structure, logic, and potentiality exist prior to space and time,” he said.
Youvan’s concept of intelligence was partly inspired by quantum theory, whose outcomes are probabilistic until actually observed, such as Schrodinger’s cat paradox. In this case, the hypothetical cat, which is in a box with poison, can be both alive and dead until the box is opened. In other words, it exists in two states at the same time until it is measured. Likewise, our networks of neurons do not themselves create intelligence, but are instead made to connect with something that is much larger and outside of them. Youvan thinks this is how we give ourselves access to intelligence.
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