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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Science Memes
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It doesn't. But "needing" itself is an undefined term without consciousness - definition itself is a product of conscious experience.
The point is that there is no fact of a universe existing without something that can know facts. It's necessarily tautological, after all we cannot know not existing.
Were we not, the universe could not be as we know it. Whether or not it exists at all without us cannot matter, because mattering itself cannot be defined without a definer, nor can existence itself be verified without a verifier.
That which "just is" could be absolutely anything at any time.
In other words, Maybe the big bang happened some 13.8 billion years ago and over all this time events transpired until the first consciousnesses came online. Suddenly the universe knows being. Then one day you come online, somewhere around the age of 5 or 6.
Or... That is just what it looks like to you and in reality someone preprogrammed the simulation and switched it on and you came into existence at the moment of your oldest memory. All that history is true only in the sense that it's what the simulation shows you. But 13.8 billion years never really happened.
That's basically how it is, and it doesn't need to be an external simulation. Those 13.8 billion years had nothing in them to experience, to remember, or to document concepts like duration, and years are a relational measurement we invented.