Is there an intelligence behind the origin of the Universe?
It’s always a risk answering a question like this because so many people believe they already know the answer. For example, almost everyone thinks that they know what “an intelligence” is because they assume it to be a kind of sentience, a kind of localized, top-down, executive intelligence very much like their own. Moreover they assume that their own intelligence is “real” and not an illusion created by the artifacts or evolution and linguistic convention. We are, in other words, made up of trillions of cells, each opperating semi-autonomously, in specialized organs–and the information of each is summarized and aggregated into to what appears to us as a single unitary consciousness, where it is indicated in terms of linguistic conventions, such as “I,” “me,” and “self.” If our culture were more collective and hive-like, we would no doubt have a different vocabulary through which we perceive our “intelligence.” Nonetheless, because we begin and end with the model of our own consciousn
