Hawking has referred to the initial singularity, from which our universe’s space-time manifold emerges, as the ‘God-point’, and pointedly quipped that no God can be found there. This may sound like a purely metaphysical question, on which no physics can shed light, and on which no scientific commentary can be made. This essay discusses a way in which complexity may be able to do so. Recent advances in our understanding of the physics of complexity biology have made it possible to identify a previously unsuspected way, in which subjective awareness couples to organisms: it does so at the critical instabilities that organisms choose to make the loci of control of their regulatory systems. Cogent arguments have been given why instabilities are preferred loci of control, and why the essentially non-linear physics of their mathematical singularities give rise to information states that support self-awareness. These states also reduce quantum wave-packets. What has not hitherto been noted is that conditions at the source of the inflationary process are very similar. The spontaneous breakdown of Grand Unified Symmetry involves an instability of considerable complexity. This essay suggests reasons why that initial singularity, from which space-time was created, is sufficiently complex to support a self-conscious awareness. Maybe our universe really is more like a ‘great thought’ than a ‘great machine’, as Jeans once suggested. Undoubtedly, these ideas could fruitfully be examined in much greater detail.
Alex Hankey