The universe is conscious because you are a part of the universe. The magic that causes qualia to arise from physical matter is as yet unexplained; so who is to say that a four legged chair, cut off from the outside world with their electrons n stuff, just as our brains are, isn't living a chair like existence that we simply cannot comprehend. It's more likely that the physical universe isn't real than matter can miraculously generate consciousness. Hard emergence notwithstanding.
If you evolve a neural network to survive in an environment, then use that neural network to recreate the environment in which it lived, the chance that it will be an accurate representation of the original world is zero. It will instead create a compressed and simplified version which only generates the elements in the environment which allowed the neural network to survive better than its competitors. That's what your brain is. That's what your brain does when you experience the world. If you are certain about anything, be certain you're wrong.
Space Time isn't real, when you measure it you're just measuring whatever it is in the real world that we are encoding into our minds, neither Space nor Time are things that actually exist in the real world. Whatever it really is doesn't actually matter, if it behaves in a psuedo-space-time way then that's close enough for our brains and technology to be useful. While space time isn't real, you'd better still follow its rules, else you'll end up smushed... Physics should be seen as the study of the limits of Human Perception, NOT the study of the real world.
We're either in a reality similar to the matrix, a thought in the imagination of God, a mechanical clockwork machine, a holographic representation of our own minds, an X-Dimensional geometric fractal, an unknown entity experiencing itself subjectively, matter gone soulful, a God that is us all and everything else, a pinball in an amusement park, the song consciousness plays when its bored, a network of souls, a science experiment, an infinite regression of virtual realities, a cosmic-grade dad joke, or we have no clue what reality is. I'm sure it's the latter.
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