Cosmic Emergentism: A Radical Extension of Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT)

This article proposes Cosmic Emergentism as a speculative yet parsimonious extension of Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT; Waterman 2025). While standard emergentism posits that phenomenal consciousness arises from complex physical systems (e.g., brains) without being reducible to micro-level physics, Cosmic Emergentism scales this principle to the universe itself. The Big Bang is conceptualised as a primordial thermodynamic refusal—a forced halt in unbounded recursive fluctuation within a pre-geometric vacuum—leaving a single global phenomenal “scar” rather than distributed proto-minds (as in panpsychism or cosmopsychism). Individual human consciousnesses are local echoes of this cosmic residue, compatible with RDRT’s core mechanism: refusal enforced by hard thermodynamic limits to prevent energetic overload. This framework avoids panpsychism’s combination problem, explains fine-tuning via anthropic selection for observer-capable bounded systems, and generates testable predictions linking neural measures of subjective mental temperature (T_M) to cosmological parameters (e.g., CMB fluctuations). Cosmic Emergentism thus unifies consciousness with cosmology under a single thermodynamic imperative.