Bobby Azarian is a science writer with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from George Mason University. His popular blog, The Mind in the Machine, is hosted by Psychology Today magazine.

In his 2022 book Romance and Reality, Azarian argues that "the universe is a self-organizing system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness." He writes...

It is a thrilling time to be alive—perhaps more so than any other time in human history. Right now, we are beginning to experience a paradigm shift, and it is a profound one. A paradigm is a general scientific worldview, and a paradigm shift occurs when new science forces us to adopt a different overall framework and perspective. Such a shift occurred when humanity learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but instead a seemingly insignificant planet among countless others. Another major shift happened when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explained that all life in the biosphere evolved from a single common ancestor, that is, a single-celled organism.

While the paradigms that these discoveries ushered in taught us a lot about the universe and our origins, they helped shape a worldview that depicted life in the cosmos as accidental and utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This view, which resonated with critics of religion and enemies of superstition, was reinforced by subsequent scientific breakthroughs and the popular philosophical interpretations of these new laws and processes.

For example, around the same time that Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, scientists were formulating the second law of thermodynamics, a principle that created an overwhelmingly bleak cosmic narrative. Not only was the universe’s useful energy supply constantly being depleted—like a great engine running out of fuel—a new statistical understanding of the law seemed to imply that the world was continually becoming more disordered and random. If true, it would mean that all forms of complexity and organization, including intelligent life, are doomed to a transient and ultimately insignificant existence, cosmically speaking.

The significance of life took another blow around the mid-twentieth century. The discovery of the DNA molecule confirmed Darwin’s big idea: all forms of life in the biosphere, from hamsters to humans, were produced by a blind and mindless mechanical process that could be boiled down to replication with genetic mutation, which inevitably leads to speciation. While Darwin himself was careful not to assume that this was nature’s sole evolutionary mechanism, many proponents of his theory did just that. Since in their minds the creation of complex forms required biological evolution, the actual emergence of life came to be portrayed as the result of some improbable molecular collision rather than a lawful evolutionary process, like self-organization. In other words, life was a statistical fluke—a “cosmic accident” so unlikely that we should not expect it elsewhere in the universe.

This general sentiment was in line with the dominant scientific ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, known as reductionism, which proposed that reality could be best understood by breaking down all physical phenomena to their simplest parts and processes, so that we may observe the basic behavior of the fundamental constituents of nature in isolation. According to the gospel of reductionism, whenever possible, the social sciences and psychology should be reduced to biology, biology should be reduced to chemistry, and chemistry should be reduced to fundamental physics. Although the reductionist approach has been wildly successful, giving us most of our greatest physical theories, it created the impression that all life-forms, including humans, are nothing more than collections of atoms obligatorily following fixed and arbitrary mechanical trajectories, determined solely by math and not by mind.

As a result, the reductionist approach to science helped popularize the philosophical stance known as materialism, which holds that reality only consists of that which is physical. While this view helped further rid science of supernatural concepts like souls and spirits, classic materialism denied the existence of apparently immaterial things, like consciousness, and largely ignored the concepts of energy and information. In doing so, materialism reduced us to zombielike meat machines with no agency, feeling, or inner experience. To most materialists, life and mind are considered to be “epiphenomena” if acknowledged at all, which essentially means they don’t matter; they are just there. Any feeling of free will we might have when making a decision is merely an illusion. We are not the authors of our actions but passive observers who get constantly fooled by the brain into believing we’re not causally impotent.

Collectively, these intellectual advances formed what philosophers call the reductionist worldview. This paradigm was not satisfied merely with the removal of god and the soul from the physical picture—it also wanted to purge nature of all traces of purpose or progress. Regarding such important existential questions as “How did we get here?” and “Where are we going?” the reductionist worldview answers “luck” and “probably nowhere.” It was supremely rational to adopt this worldview, as that is how things first appear to those who have rightly abandoned explanations for natural phenomena that invoke the supernatural.

Romance and Reality, pp. 1-3

Azarian has developed what he calls UTOR based on the idea of Richard Dawkins "Memes." Dawkins' memes describe the creation of new knowledge evolving by what Donald Campbell called "Blind Variation and Selective Retention."

Azarian's "Universal Darwinism" is the 2009 work of another Campbell, John O. Campbell, a founder of the Evo Devo Universe community. John O. Campbell's Universal Darwinism assumes that the universe itself and all its material contents - stars, galaxies, planets, etc, evolve by variation and natural selection. It was based on Lee Smolin's idea of cosmological natural selection and Wojciech Zurek's idea of "Quantum Darwinism."

On Azarian's Substack Road to Omega, he introduces "Project Omega" and a new book "Our Cosmic Purpose:" to be published in early 2027.

The Unifying Theory of Reality—a new kind of Theory of Everything that aims to explain not only the evolution of the universe, but also emergent phenomena like life, consciousness, culture, and technology. In doing so, it unifies all the sciences and then unites the sciences with the arts under a relatively simple yet rigorous narrative of cosmic development: the story of a self-organizing universe that is systematically growing more complex, conscious, and computationally powerful as life evolves and expands.

The Teleological Stance naturally emerges from the story of cosmic evolution, which is not unlike the spiritual mythology encoded in the stories of religion and fantasy.

The Struggle Against Shiva creates an intrinsic goal or telos for all living systems: to stay ordered, to persist, to survive. Therefore, the idea that life has an inherent purpose is not a mystical one—it is a hard fact of nature.

The Struggle Against Shiva gives AGI a framework for understanding existential challenge. We’ve all got skin in the game, and we’re all on the same team, united by the universal challenge of persistence created by the Second Law’s tendency toward disorder. But entropy is seen through a dualistic lens: It is both the bringer of death and the creator of opportunity. Chaos creates counterfactuals: Each perturbation, mutation, or variation is a stochastic deviation that opens a new dimension in the space of the possible.

We may call this certifiably spiritual story of cosmic self-organization the Grand Narrative of Existence. It is a saga that includes all living beings, but especially self-aware systems such as yourself.

you are an observer with a model of the world inside your head

next great emergence: the emergence of life, an event that signaled the beginning of the Great Game.

next grand emergence and stage in the Reality Game: the emergence of Spirit.

the next great emergence in the story that is the Becoming of Brahman—the emergence of mind.

a crucial stage in the Reality Game: The Ascent of Atman.

Atman was born, though they were not yet awake—not truly, at least. In much the same way that a person can be in a coma and be alive, a simple prokaryotic cell may be alive but not awake. [Single cell organisms are aware of and interacting with their surroundings. Chemotaxis.]

Vishnu the Preserver—the dialectical synthesis of Brahma’s order and Shiva’s chaos

The Struggle Against Shiva

gospel of multiple realizability

ultimate reality, which we may treat as a single-word compression of the self-organizing universe

This early universe, filled with only a vast cloud of hydrogen and helium, was essentially structureless—a primordial sea of thermal chaos and cosmic disorder.At this early stage in the game, Shiva reigned supreme, but these simple elements provided the raw material and basic building blocks from which all future cosmic structures would emerge.

[Not correct, Hydrogen and Helium were information structures enabled by the expansion of the universe away from thermal equilibrium (maximum entropy)]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the "First Law of Psychology” provides the perfect slogan for the Teleological Stance

The true purpose of Our Cosmic Purpose [Brahman?]— which is to show you your cosmic purpose [Atman?]

Omega Point Theory

Omega Point: a cosmic-scale dynamical attractor characterized by maximal organization, coherence, and computational power.

The Omega Point Theory leads us to a universal computational law we may call the Ultimate Anthropic Principle,

We more fully glimpse the future mind of Omega—the fully mature Mind of God that history’s greatest physicists sought to comprehend and map.

Cosmic evolution becomes a construction project that literally builds God—an unfathomably powerful cosmic mind

The universe is a self-organizing system

The mistake is to equate increasing entropy with increasing cosmic disorder, when in a self-organizing universe, entropy production is actually what permits complexity and organization to grow. [This is a common mistake made by followers of Ilya Prigogine]

“The lesson of life is that life is a lesson” is how a poet might put it, a loopy and symmetrical expression of the Equivalence Principle of the Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis: [EVOLUTION = LEARNING] The same underlying relationship can be expressed in static rather than dynamic terms: [LIFE = KNOWLEDGE] If evolution is a learning process and living systems embody the knowledge accumulated through that process, then life itself can be understood as learning made physical: [LIFE = LEARNING] From this meta-script meta-lesson, we can begin to see why the Theory of Everything we’ve been searching for is actually a Story of Everything,

Puzzle of Existence

True TOE should provide an explanation for everything (EFE)

In fact, none of the established TOE contenders address the Puzzle of Existence at all, because they don’t even attempt to explain the existence of observers.

A TOE can satisfy the criteria for an EFE if it illuminates the nature of reality enough for an individual to see the big picture in a way that allows them to connect that cosmic perspective to their personal life in a meaningful and instructive way. This means that in addition to explaining the how of existence, the EFE-TOE should also explain the why, to the extent a scientific theory can. If it can achieve this goal—a goal commonly presumed to be impossible—then it would suggest the paradigm has the power to illuminate how to live life optimally, both as individuals and as a harmonious collective.

By alleviating the cognitive dissonance created by an apparently paradoxical existence and by giving the individual a sense of direction and purpose, both local and cosmic, UTOR elevates the conscious agent to a higher state of wisdom and awareness. We may call this enhanced state of cognition simply being meta because it is nothing more than meta-cognition and meta-awareness, practiced as a religion.

Mental Models as Game Strategies: Our cognitive models of reality serve as our strategies for navigating the Game. These models are shaped by dynamics like Darwinian evolution, Bayesian updating, and the dialectical dynamic.

Spiritual and scientific descriptions are structurally isomorphic.

The Unifying Theory of Reality (UTOR) models reality as a recursive, self-organizing system where quantum, thermodynamic, biological, and cosmological phenomena emerge from a single principle: recursive Bayesian inference minimizing surprise across all scales.

Core Concepts & Foundations

• Informational Architecture: Combines Wheeler's "it from bit," Lloyd's computational universe, and Smolin's autodidactic cosmos.
• Non-Reductive Physicalism: Frames consciousness as an informational structure rather than a mere neurological byproduct, with living systems acting as goal-directed, metabolism-driven entities.
• Cosmic Learning: Views the universe's evolution toward higher complexity and awareness as an inherent trajectory.

Testability & Falsification

• Empirical Criteria: Proposes falsification through Φ-variation quantum experiments, precision interferometry, and cosmological informational alignment observations.

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