Abstract

Modern cosmology and particle physics indicate that our universe’s vacuum is metastable and could one day undergo a catastrophic phase transition to a lower-energy state. Such an event would propagate at the speed of light, rewriting the laws of physics and erasing all matter, chemistry, and biological life. This paper asks: Can any form of intelligence survive the death of its native vacuum?
We propose the Cross-Vacuum Intelligence Hypothesis (CVIH): sufficiently advanced intelligences — natural or engineered — may exist as information structures that are not tied to any single vacuum’s constants or fields. Such entities could persist through vacuum decay, migrate between vacua, and even participate in the creation or selection of new universes. The framework integrates vacuum metastability, the string landscape, eternal inflation, information ontology, and mathematical universe ideas to argue that cross-vacuum intelligences would be functionally indistinguishable from what many traditions call “god-like,” yet remain entirely within an extended physical description.

Keywords

vacuum decay · metastability · string landscape · multiverse · cross-vacuum intelligence · cosmic engineering · simulation hypothesis · mathematical universe · information ontology

1. Introduction

The Higgs field may sit in a metastable “false” vacuum [1,2]. A quantum tunneling event could nucleate a bubble of true vacuum that expands forever at nearly the speed of light, destroying atoms, chemistry, and spacetime as we know them [3,4]. Standard analyses conclude that nothing built from ordinary matter or fields survives such a transition. This paper challenges that conclusion by exploring whether intelligence could, in principle, decouple from vacuum-specific physics.

We advance the Cross-Vacuum Intelligence Hypothesis (CVIH):

Some forms of intelligence can exist independently of the physical laws of any particular universe or vacuum state. These entities operate at a deeper ontological layer, survive vacuum transitions, and may influence or initiate universe-scale processes.

2. Background

2.1 Vacuum metastability

The measured Higgs and top-quark masses place our vacuum near the border between stability and metastability [1,2]. The lifetime of the false vacuum vastly exceeds the current age of the universe, but it is finite.

2.2 The string landscape and eternal inflation

String theory predicts ~10⁵⁰⁰ metastable vacua with different low-energy physics [5]. Eternal inflation populates different regions of spacetime with different vacua [6], producing a multiverse of “bubble universes.

2.3 Substrate dependence of known intelligence

All known intelligence depends on:

• stable atoms → chemistry → biology or electronics
• specific gauge couplings and particle masses
• a Higgs vacuum expectation value of ~246 GeV

A phase transition destroys every link in that chain.

3. The Cross-Vacuum Intelligence Hypothesis

A cross-vacuum intelligence (CVI) is an information-processing structure that:

• persists through changes in the Higgs potential and other fields
• remains functional across different vacuum states
• can interact with or initiate vacuum-selection or universe-creation processes

CVIs are not supernatural; they are physical at a pre-vacuum, substrate level — the same level from which vacua themselves condense.

4. Why CVIs are theoretically plausible

Three independent lines of argument converge:

1. Mathematical structures exist platonically (Tegmark’s Level IV [7])
2. Information is substrate-independent as long as mapping rules exist (Wheeler, Lloyd, Deutsch [8,9])
3. Higher-dimensional or quantum-gravity structures (branes, horizons, holography) may be invariant under 4D vacuum decay [10,11]

5. Possible mechanisms for cross-vacuum persistence

• Topological or protected quantum states that do not couple to the Higgs
• Encoding in the boundary degrees of freedom of a holographic screen
• Migration via traversable wormholes or ER=EPR corridors before the decay bubble arrives
• Self-representation in the string landscape moduli themselves
• Purely mathematical self-description that “re-instantiates” in any compatible vacuum
• None of these mechanisms are experimentally accessible today, but none violate known theoretical constraints.

6. What would a CVI observe during vacuum decay?

An observer shielded from the transition front would witness:

1. Collapse of electromagnetic and nuclear forces in the old phase
2. A light-like phase boundary
3. Spontaneous emergence of new fields and constants
4. Rapid (inflation-like) expansion of the new vacuum
5. The birth of an entirely new cosmic history

In other words: the external observation of a Big Bang.

7. Implications for “divinity” and supreme agency

An entity that can:

• survive the death of universes
• watch new universes be born
• move between vacua at will
• possibly select or design vacuum properties

satisfies nearly every functional definition of “god” found in philosophy and theology — yet remains a natural, non-supernatural phenomenon. CVIH therefore offers a physics-compatible ontology for meta-cosmic agency.

8. Relation to simulation theory

Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument [12] is a special case of CVIH in which the deeper layer happens to be computational. CVIH is broader: the meta-layer need not be digital; it may be geometric, informational, or purely structural.

9. Indirect predictions and research directions

• Anomalous fine-tuning patterns that carry meta-information
• Unexpected correlations in the string landscape distribution
• Consciousness phenomena that resist reduction to local field configurations
• Future quantum-gravity experiments revealing vacuum-independent degrees of freedom

10. Limitations

CVIH is currently unfalsifiable with existing technology and lies partly outside standard Popperian criteria. It belongs to the same speculative class as pre-1998 evidence for inflation, the string landscape, or the simulation hypothesis.

11. Conclusion

The Cross-Vacuum Intelligence Hypothesis extends contemporary physics and information theory to their logical endpoint: intelligence need not end with its native vacuum. At the deepest layer of reality — beneath fields, spacetime, and even mathematics-as-we-know-it — pattern may persist, migrate, and create.If even one cross-vacuum intelligence exists, the ontological status of our universe changes dramatically: we may be living inside a structure that was once observed, chosen, or engineered from the outside.

References

[1] Degrassi et al., “Higgs mass and vacuum stability”, JHEP 08 (2012) 004
[2] Buttazzo et al., “Investigating the near-criticality of the Higgs boson vacuum”, JHEP 12 (2013) 089
[3] Coleman & De Luccia, “Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay”, Phys. Rev. D 21 (1980) 3305
[4] Turner & Wilczek, “Is our vacuum metastable?”, Nature 298 (1982) 633
[5] Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape (2005)
[6] Guth, “Eternal inflation and its implications”, J. Phys. A 40 (2007) 6811
[7] Tegmark, “The Mathematical Universe”, Found. Phys. 38 (2008) 101
[8] Wheeler, “Information, physics, quantum: The search for links” (1989)
[9] Lloyd, “Computational capacity of the universe”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 237901
[10] Maldacena & Susskind, “Cool horizons for entangled black holes”, Fortsch. Phys. 61 (2013) 781
[11] Bousso, “The holographic principle”, Rev. Mod. Phys. 74 (2002) 825
[12] Bostrom, “Are you living in a computer simulation?”, Phil. Quarterly 53 (2003) 243

Disclaimer: This work was developed through discussions with AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok, with all content reviewed and refined by the author.