HORIZONS-2000 PROJECT

Cosmology

Horizons-2000 Project

Anil Mitra
With assistance from Microsoft Copilot

May 2026

CONTENTS

I. Preamble and Introduction

II. Preliminary

II.A Metaphysics — The Fundamental Principle

II.B Consequences of the Fundamental Principle

III. General Cosmology

III.A Cosmological Levels

III.B The Three Modes of Cosmogenesis

IV. Conclusion

SECTION I

I. Preamble and Introduction

The inquiry presented in this document is one of general cosmology — an account of the universe in the most encompassing sense of that term, conceived not merely as the physical cosmos accessible to empirical investigation, but as the totality of all that exists, has existed, or can exist. This cosmology does not begin with observation; it begins with metaphysics which is empirical in that it begins in the givenness of being, experience, and the elementary analytic of propositional logic. It proceeds from a foundational argument concerning the nature of the void — the absolute absence of all being — and arrives, by rigorous logical steps, at an account of why there is something rather than nothing, and what the character of that something must be. The metaphysical foundations on which this cosmology rests are developed at length on the author's website, horizons-2000.org, to which the reader is directed for a fuller treatment of the underlying philosophical argument.

The structure of the argument moves through several stages. First, the void is defined and its ontological status examined; from that examination emerges a single, powerful principle — the fundamental principle — which asserts that everything logically possible emerges from the void. Second, the consequences of this principle are drawn out systematically: the universe is limitless, requires no external cause, is self-similar across scales, and culminates in a state of maximal unity. Third, these consequences are brought to bear on cosmological structure, yielding an account of how the cosmoses we inhabit — ordered, law-governed, experience-sustaining — arise from an underlying generative process that admits no exceptions and imposes no prior constraints.

It is worth marking clearly at the outset how this cosmology differs from two important points of comparison. Standard physical cosmology is an empirical enterprise: it investigates the history, structure, and dynamics of the observable universe, drawing on data, models, and physical laws that are themselves taken as given. This cosmology, by contrast, takes nothing as given — not even the existence of laws. It seeks to account for laws themselves, treating them as emergent features of a more fundamental generative process. A second comparison is with the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis advanced by Max Tegmark, which holds that all mathematical structures have concrete existence. This framework encompasses Tegmark's proposal and then exceeds it: the domain of logical possibility is broader than the domain of currently formalizable mathematics, and it is that broader domain — all of what can be consistently conceived — that constitutes the generative ground of the universe.

What follows is written for a philosophically and scientifically informed readership willing to engage with arguments that press beyond the boundaries of established disciplines. The aim is precision, not provocation; rigor, not rhetoric. The inquiry is genuinely open in several of its dimensions, and those openings are acknowledged where they arise. The cosmology presented here is a framework — a structured account of the possible and the actual — and it is offered in that spirit.

SECTION II

II. Preliminary

II.A Metaphysics — The Fundamental Principle

The void is defined as the absolute absence of all being: no entities, no properties, no structure, no relations, no laws, no time, no space. It is not a quantum vacuum — the quantum vacuum is a physical state, replete with fields and fluctuations, and it presupposes a physical framework that the void, by definition, cannot presuppose. The void is prior to all such frameworks. It is the null state in the strictest possible sense: nothing whatsoever.

From this definition, a crucial equivalence follows. We ordinarily distinguish between the existence and the nonexistence of a thing by pointing to some feature or effect that marks the difference. A stone exists because it occupies space, has mass, and produces detectable causal consequences; its nonexistence is distinguished by the absence of these features. But the void, being the absence of all being, has no features. There is nothing in or about the void that could mark the distinction between its existing and its not existing. No property is present in the one case that is absent in the other. The distinction between "the void exists" and "the void does not exist" is therefore a distinction without a difference — it collapses. Since existence and nonexistence of the void are equivalent, we take the void to exist. This is not an arbitrary stipulation; it is a recognition that the question of the void's existence has no non-trivial answer — and from a null answer, existence follows as naturally as nonexistence.

From the void's existence and definition, a second consequence follows immediately. Laws are beings — they are structures, relations, constraints — and as such they possess being. But the void contains no beings. It therefore contains no laws. There are no laws of the void and no laws in the void. Nothing constrains, governs, or restricts what can or cannot emerge from the void. The void is not a lawful domain from which certain possibilities are excluded; it is a lawless ground from which no possibility is excluded.

This yields the fundamental principle (hereafter: fp): since there are no constraints on what can emerge from the void, everything that is logically possible does emerge. The universe — taken in its most general and inclusive sense — is the realization of all logical possibility. Nothing that is logically possible is absent; everything that is logically consistent with itself is, in some sense and at some level of the cosmological structure, actual.

At this point, the comparison with Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is instructive. Tegmark proposes that all mathematical structures have concrete existence — a proposal that is already radically expansive by the standards of conventional ontology. The fp extends further still. The domain of logical possibility encompasses all that is consistently conceivable, whether or not it is expressible in any currently known mathematical formalism or formalizable within any known logical system. Mathematics as currently practiced is a subset of logical possibility, not its entirety. There may be structures — modes of organization, forms of being — that are logically coherent yet lie beyond the reach of presently available mathematical languages. The fp includes those structures as well.

Two important epistemic qualifications must be acknowledged here. First, we do not yet know the full range of possible logics: our knowledge of formal systems remains incomplete, and the boundaries of logical possibility have not been — and may never be — exhaustively charted. Second, even if the full landscape of logical possibility were known in principle, computing or surveying its totality would exceed any finite cognitive or computational capacity. These are genuine limitations on our knowledge, not limitations on the fp itself. They are reasons for intellectual humility about our grasp of the principle's consequences, not objections to the principle. The fp stands on its own logical grounds; our failure to enumerate all its consequences is a feature of our epistemic situation, not a crack in the underlying argument.

II.B Consequences of the Fundamental Principle

Pure necessity as cause. The emergence of the manifest universe — of whatever exists — requires no external cause, no creating agent, no prior condition, and no initial input of energy or information. It follows by pure logical necessity from the structure of the void and the fp. The usual demand for a cause arises when we are dealing with contingent states of affairs that could have been otherwise; but the fp is not contingent. Given the void and the logical equivalence of its existence and nonexistence, the realization of all logical possibility is not one outcome among others — it is the only coherent account of what results. Necessity itself is the cause, if cause is even the right word for a process that has no temporal precedent and no external precipitant.

Limitlessness. The universe, conceived as the realization of all logical possibility, is without limit in spatial extension, temporal duration, and variety. It admits no outer boundary, no final state, and no ceiling on the diversity of forms it contains. Its history — to the extent that temporal language applies at the most general level — is not a linear progression toward a single end but an endless cycling through peaks and dissolutions: states of maximum organization, complexity, consciousness, and experience alternate with states of relative simplicity or void-like undifferentiation, in a process that has no terminus.

Fractal cosmology — the cosmos/atom identity. Among the consequences of the fp is a structural self-similarity that operates across all scales. There are limitlessly many cosmoses. Every cosmos, examined at sufficient depth and resolution, reveals itself to be an atom within a larger cosmological structure; every atom, scaled upward and outward, reveals itself to be a cosmos. The relationship between cosmos and atom is not merely analogical — it reflects a genuine ontological identity that recurs across levels of structure. The universe is fractal in this precise and radical sense.

The boundary question. Whether any given cosmos — including our own — has a spatial edge remains an open question, and the framework does not resolve it by fiat. One coherent possibility is that cosmoses do not end sharply but merge continuously into one another, as different sections of a convoluted surface connect without a well-defined seam. There may also exist a more fundamental substrate — a medium or ground underlying cosmological structure — with which our cosmos interacts, but so weakly that present instruments cannot detect the interaction.

The peak and union. At the greatest peak or peaks of the process described by the fp — where organizational complexity, consciousness, and experience reach their maximum — all beings merge as one. This is not a mystical assertion imported from outside the framework; it is a logical consequence of the drive toward maximum realization. At the absolute limit of all possibility, all distinctions among beings become distinctions without a difference, just as the distinction between the void's existence and nonexistence collapses.

A robust conception of God. The framework yields a precise and non-arbitrary conception of what, in many traditions, is called God — without recourse to a personal creator external to the universe, to revelation, or to theological convention. God, on this account, is a process: the ongoing movement of all being toward the peak state. Every entity, at every level of cosmological structure, participates in this process in the present moment. The God-state or peak is not a remote future event unconnected to the present; it is the direction in which the whole of being is oriented.

Death, the void, and experiential continuity. Our cosmos appears to be discrete and subject to a fundamental speed limit — the pragmatic limit imposed by the velocity of light. Yet when spacetimebeing collapses to a point — or below the threshold of any meaningful metric — in the void state, communication across that collapse is, in effect, instantaneous. Even if an infinity of objective time separates the death of one experiential form from the emergence of the next, that interval has no experiential duration in the void. Death, on this account, is not a gap of any duration that an experiencing being must suffer through.

SECTION III

III. General Cosmology

III.A Cosmological Levels

General cosmology, as developed here, is organized around a hierarchy of levels — but that hierarchy inverts the order one might initially expect. The general level is the highest level of the cosmological structure, not the lowest. It is the most inclusive: it encompasses all logical possibility without restriction, and every more specific cosmological level is a manifestation or specialization of it. The lower levels — more structured, more law-governed, more dynamically specific — do not generate the general level; they inherit from it and add determinate forms on top of it.

The lower levels serve as paradigms for understanding what occurs at the general level. When we observe variation and selection operating in biological systems, or when we observe the emergence of stable structures from random initial conditions in physics, we are witnessing, in a determinate and tractable form, processes that have analogues at every higher level of generality. The lower levels make the higher levels legible. Paradigmatic behaviors — selection, stability, self-organization — occur with greater specificity and predictability at the lower levels, and it is by reference to these paradigms that we come to understand what the fp implies at the most general level.

Among all the cosmoses that are logically possible, those that sustain high levels of experience, consciousness, complexity, and self-reference may be rare. Yet the cosmoses that matter — the ones that are actual from any experiential standpoint — are precisely those that sustain experience. This is the cosmological application of the anthropic principle. Robust cosmoses — those that sustain rich, self-perpetuating structures of experience — are the ones that have effective existence for any experiencing being. Cosmological theory must account for this selection effect: the rarity of robust cosmoses does not diminish their importance; on the contrary, it is exactly what the anthropic filter predicts.

III.B The Three Modes of Cosmogenesis

Given the fp — the emergence of all logical possibility from the void — the question arises: how do the cosmoses we inhabit come to exist? The framework identifies three distinct modes by which cosmogenesis occurs. These are not stages in a temporal sequence; they are categories of emergent configuration, distinguished by their stability, their internal structure, and their capacity to propagate and sustain themselves over time. Together, they populate the entire space of possible cosmological outcomes.

1. Mere Transients. The most common mode of emergence from the void is the production of mere transients: configurations that arise momentarily but possess no internal stability, no structure capable of self-perpetuation, and no dynamics that propagate their features forward. They flicker into momentary actuality and dissolve without trace, leaving no lasting imprint on the cosmological landscape. A mere transient does not generate laws, does not accumulate structure, and does not support any form of enduring experience. It is, in a sense, the null result of the void's inexhaustible generativity — the background hiss of logical possibility becoming actual without consequence. Because the void constrains nothing, the overwhelming majority of what emerges from it has this character: brief, structureless, and cosmologically inert.

2. Random Transients to States of Near-Symmetry. Less frequent than mere transients, but cosmologically decisive, are those emergent configurations that happen to land in states of near-symmetry — configurations in which the internal forces, relations, or structural tensions among constituent elements approximately balance, producing persistence without requiring any external sustaining cause. A near-symmetric state is one that holds together not because it is perfect or uniquely stable, but because its internal imbalances are small enough that the configuration survives long enough to interact with other configurations, accumulate structure, and propagate its features. These are the configurations that count.

This second mode is the source of the laws, dynamics, and causal structures we observe in our cosmos. Law-like regularities do not pre-exist the cosmos or arrive from outside it; they emerge as the residue of random generative processes that happened to produce near-symmetric configurations with sufficient persistence to accumulate and interact. The appearance of lawfulness in nature is, on this account, a selection effect of the deepest kind: we observe laws because we inhabit a cosmos that arose through this second mode — one in which random transients produced near-symmetric states that eventually gave rise to the conditions for experience and observation.

3. Saltations. Rarer still — and, within the framework, genuinely exceptional — are saltations: events in which a fully formed cosmos, complete with stable internal structure, law-like dynamics, and the conditions for complex experience, arises in a single step or very few steps, without passing through the gradual accumulation of near-symmetric configurations characteristic of the second mode. A saltation is not a violation of the fp — it falls entirely within logical possibility — but its probability is vanishingly small within the space of all possible emergent configurations. Saltations do occur, because nothing in the fp forbids them; but they are exceedingly rare. They represent the most dramatic form of cosmogenesis: the leap from near-nothingness to full cosmological structure without the long selective history that the second mode requires.

Synthesis: The Three Modes Together. Mere transients, near-symmetric accumulations, and saltations together populate the entirety of cosmological space as defined by the fp. The first mode is overwhelmingly dominant by number but leaves no lasting structure. The second mode is the primary engine of cosmological structure as we know it: it produces the law-governed, experience-sustaining, dynamically rich cosmoses that the anthropic filter selects as the domain of observation. The third mode — saltations — contributes a small but non-negligible population of fully formed cosmoses without a gradual generative history. This is why the cosmos we inhabit has the character it does — not because the fp favors law and structure, but because law and structure are what survive the twin filters of near-symmetric stability and experiential robustness.

SECTION IV

IV. Conclusion

The arc of this cosmology is, at its deepest level, remarkably simple. It begins with the void — the absolute absence of all being — and shows, by a short chain of rigorous argument, that the void's existence and nonexistence are equivalent, that the void contains no constraining laws, and that from these two facts the realization of all logical possibility follows as a matter of pure necessity. From that single foundational principle, an entire cosmological structure unfolds: a universe that is limitless, self-similar, causally self-sufficient, and oriented toward a state of maximal unity. The three modes of cosmogenesis — mere transients, near-symmetric accumulations, and saltations — account for the full range of cosmological outcomes, and the anthropic filter explains why the cosmos we observe has the law-governed, experience-sustaining character that it does. No initial conditions are required. No external cause is invoked. No arbitrary parameters are stipulated.

What distinguishes this cosmology from its nearest intellectual neighbors is the breadth and purity of its generative ground. Standard physical cosmology takes laws, constants, and initial conditions as inputs and investigates what follows from them — a profound and indispensable enterprise, but one that cannot explain its own starting points. Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis extends existence to all mathematical structures, but remains bounded by the scope of currently formalizable mathematics. This framework takes as its domain all of logical possibility — a domain that includes, subsumes, and exceeds both of these approaches. The fundamental principle does not rest on any assumption about what mathematics exists or what physics allows; it rests only on the nature of the void and the meaning of logical consistency.

The inquiry presented here is not complete; it is a framework whose full articulation remains an ongoing task. The boundaries of logical possibility are not yet known. The detailed cosmological implications of the three modes of cosmogenesis await further development. The relationship between the general cosmological levels and the specific structures of our cosmos remains to be mapped with greater precision. These open questions are not weaknesses of the framework — they are its growing edges, the places where the work of the Horizons-2000 project continues. The project's broader aim, pursued across the full range of materials at horizons-2000.org, is to develop a unified account of being, mind, value, and cosmos grounded in the kind of foundational logical necessity demonstrated here. This document is a contribution to that ongoing work — a statement of the cosmological core from which the project's wider inquiries proceed.