I am realising that most people here aren’t likely to be following what is going on in cosmology, and may not be aware of how serious and deep the crisis is (and the cosmologists themselves are playing it down, not advertising this). There is considerable public awareness of both the failure to explain consciousness scientifically, and the “quantum weirdness” situation…although this tends to result in people assuming these problems are evidence to support whatever they already believe. And while it is justified to link the two problems, the precise nature of the link is problematic, and the science people tend to just dismiss it. This is different, because most cosmologists have got no idea that has got anything to do with consciousness or QM, let alone both of them. It is indisputably their problem, and they believe they are ones who set the rules that determine which sort of solution is even considered.
Until 10 years ago, cosmology wasn’t obviously in trouble. It actually was, but because the problems were long-running, they had been normalised. There was no sense of crisis, because things weren’t obviously getting worse. But the Hubble Tension changed all that. This is a conflict between two different methods of measuring the cosmic expansion rate. The local value is determined by measuring the brightness of type 1a supernovae in our own galaxy, and gives a figure around 73 (units don’t matter), while the figure determined from the Cosmic Microwave Background, when fed in to the LambdaCDM (LCDM) model of the early history of the cosmos (which includes a brief period of faster-than-light "inflation), gives a figure around 67. It is supposed to be constant, so this was a major difficulty. Many possible solutions have been proposed, and because 10 years ago there was quite a large margin of error on both figures, most people assumed that better measurements and tweaks to the theory would resolve the tension.
That is not what happened. Instead, one by one, the possible solutions have been eliminated. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope and other new instruments have greatly increased the accuracy of the raw data, and it is now an inescapable fact that this is not a measurement error. The discrepancy is real. As things stand, the cosmologists have basically run out of ideas. They know there is a problem with their model, but every single proposed fix to this problem creates bigger problems elsewhere in the model. This leaves them with two options (they think). The first is “new physics”…but nobody ever explains what this “new physics” could be. The second is “a completely new theory”, but again, nobody is providing any details about what such a theory might look like.
There is a reason for this, and it is that LCDM is the best possible theory naturalistic physicalism can provide. They are not doing their science wrong. If you assume physicalism/naturalism, and accept the raw data, then you end up with LCDM. This situation has now reached a point of ongoing crisis, and no cosmologist knows how it ends. On the surface they say “this is exciting…new physics!”. Underneath, panic is beginning to set in. Lots of careers and lots of expensive kit is at stake.
The Hubble Tension alone is serious enough to question the validity of LCDM, but it is far from the only problem. More problems are appearing all the time, and some are just as serious. The overall impression is of a field which is heading for the biggest paradigm shift in the history of science. If you would like to explore the whole mess, go here: Introduction | Two-Phase Cosmology and explore the “cosmology problems” part of the wiki.
I believe I know exactly what is wrong (because it fits perfectly with all the other problems), and it can be explained very simply. This kind of certainty is taboo here, but please understand that we are talking about science now, and that works via evidence and compelling arguments, not negotiation. It is no use if this is “just another proposal” – it needs to involve more compulsion than that - it needs to be obviously the correct answer, once understood, even if some of the details are missing (evolution was like this, and also had metaphysical implications).
Another major problem is the fine-tuning problem (or rather problems, because there are lots of them). It looks very much like the cosmos was set up for life to evolve. Thomas Nagel has provided a detailed analytic argument as to why consciousness must have evolved teleologically, so this looks like a setup too. This is heresy to the physicalists, so anything which looks like fine-tuning, they try to invent dynamic laws to explain. This is why inflation was invented. The CMB shows us that the very early cosmos was unbelievably uniform and flat, the probability of which is so small that this cannot be explained as a random co-incidence. They therefore invented inflation to “stretch” the universe, flattening it and making it uniform. This also allowed them to explain the non-detection of large amount of magnetic monopoles which their theories say should have been produced in vast quanties, so much so that they would collapse the early cosmos with their gravity. These were “diluted” by inflation. BUT…if we accept fine-tuning as a fact (in need of explanation, but undeniable as a brute fact), then additional examples of fine-tuning aren’t a problem. If the cosmos is fine-tuned then it is fine-tuned - only one explanation is required, regardless of how many examples there are. It follows that the low entropy (highly ordered) start condition does not need a dynamical explanation – it is just another case of extreme fine tuning. This means we can get rid of inflation…if only we can account for the monopoles. BUT…if the monopoles can be fine-tuned then another new explanation is possible: instead of being the most probable monopoles (which would collapse the universe without inflation), they can be just the right monopoles to bind together as inert, almost undetectable “monopolium” and provide the gravitational scaffolding required to allow large scale structure formation (necessary for life). They immediately become the obvious candidate for the identity of “Dark Matter”, and cosmologists haven’t found them because they are looking for the wrong sort of monopoles. The right sort were described in this paper from last year: The physics of monopolium | Two-Phase Cosmology
Why does this matter? Because if this explanation is correct, then we can get rid of inflation, which means we have our explanation for the Hubble Tension: the CMB derived figure is wrong, because it is a model-dependent extrapolation, and the model is wrong. Scientists are deeply resistant to this explanation, because it requires them to admit that fine-tuning (for conscious life, or life generally) is a feature, not an anomaly to be explained with dynamic laws. It threatens both naturalism and the Copernican assumption that life is not special.
This crisis opens the door to a revolution which forces scientists to accept that the cosmos was fine-tuned to produce conscious life. In terms of paradigms shifts, this is enormous, because it proves that consciousness is a cosmically relevant (and critical) phenomenon. I know people here hate this idea of forcing, because it has major implications for the nature of the revolution itself. It means that instead of finding a purely negotiated and psychological solution to our problems, that science and logic are going to make the revolution inevitable. I am acutely aware that this is not the way 2R wants the revolution to happen, but it is also very clear that 2R’s strategy of endless talk and zero tangible progress cannot actually deliver the paradigm shift. But a crisis in cosmology, which can only be resolved with a metamodern-compatible new cosmological-metaphysical model of reality can deliver it, and if only 2R could get over its own strategic problems, organisations like this one could have a central role to play as communicators of the situation to the wider integral movement. The problem, as is now painfully clear, is that this would require 2R as a group to accept something which forces worldview change. At which point I must ask you to consider how major paradigm shifts happened in the past. When heliocentrism came along, was it appropriate to reject it on the grounds that this would force changes to people’s worldviews?
NOTE: if you show this post to an AI, it will knee-jerk defend the old paradigm. It won’t understand. It does not have enough context. AI analysis requires showing it the whole theory.