Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

Dark matter?

Most scientists that operate under the assumption that consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent property align toward panpsychism, matter and consciousness somehow being co-primitives in the ontology to kickstart reality. But there are many problems with panpsychism, the first being that it's a dualism, that is it requires two separate magic tricks at bootup. Since physics only knows about matter, panpsychism is not considered a scientific theory, just an interesting philosophy. The later problems with it are leftovers from the formerly popular materialist framework. How does the proto consciousness of matter grow to give us the taste of sugar, or love? Where is that conscious property? How to identify it? Etc.

Now, from an Occam's razor's perspective, I think the less popular idealism (consciousness is the primitive, then it boots up matter) is actually the most parsimonious. It's the least intuitive at first, but when you take the time to listen to arguments from a scientific and analytical philosophy standpoint (e.g Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup), it's the only one that actually makes any kind of sense, while in the process solving most of the numerous problems raised in physics and philosophy (e.g. local realism is false, so where is matter when consciousness doesn't experience it? If the probability that we're in the one real reality 1/N, why would we assume that we are? And many more). It also gives us as a bonus that it manages to reconcile those fields with the nondual intuition from traditions that document accounts of people who have lived with that realization (e.g. Buddhism, Advaita, Taoism, Sufism, Christian mysticism).

It does require a profound conceptual paradigm shift. Way deeper than at first glance we realize is necessary. So I generally just recommend that people dive into it by reading or listening to discussions by the people that I've mentioned, rather than knee-jerk responding.

You’d need to detect life or rule it out on a variety of planet sizes, ages and compositions at a variety of distances around a variety of star types, ages and sizes at varying locations in the galaxy before we’d have enough data to make confident predictions.

Assembly theory is a theory that tells us that when we observe the complexity of something that is not unoque, we can determine probabilistically from it's complexity the likelihood of it being created by some type of active agent, mind or something. Lee continues with this to speculate a lot more (and I think he's on to something) about time being fundamental and what a mind is. It's sort of a computational complexity theory applied to intelligence.

This "phase transition" hypothesis is basically saying that life is emerging in the universe in a stage akin to recombination[0] as a more stable state, and that the universe without life is a metastable state[1]. This would mean that life will ultimately absorb all matter in the universe, as if it were a phase transition the cosmological principle says that the universe is uniform[2].

It sounds like a pretty idea but I'm not really convinced, phase transitions propagate at the speed of light. An exponential curve where the transition ramps up is am interesting idea to ponder. There are existing fantastic explanations for life that exist that are very interesting that don't require the universe to undergo a phase transition. Simple entropy and the red shifting of energy explain it's existence just fine. Nevertheless, all this research and these attempts to understand what life, consciousness, minds, creative agents and all that are in the context of our universe are really fun and I think all this exploration will bear some delicious fruit.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle