Looking at your Medium article and the quote from Charles Pinter’s book…
“Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed…
I think the mistake being made here is what the hindsight fudges - thus the results of the thought experiment are predictable to that.
( The thought experiment assumes a universe that once had consciousness - and then removes it. But that is not the same as a universe that never had consciousness.)
What I think requires imagining is that the universe never had consciousness in it - and nothing outside of it was conscious of its existence, then it could not be said to exist, regardless of whether it actually did or not.
In the same way, we cannot say that “Heaven” or some other alternate universe exists. We can surmise. We can believe. But until we actually experience, we cannot know - for it is in the experiencing that we have, at least - something known. In that knowing, we may not a complete knowledge, or our language may be inadequate to even explain what we know we experienced.
I think that this points to - is not what is experienced as being real - but that which is having the experience as being real.
For example, imagine a void. Simply in that, the void seemingly becomes real, because that which imagined it, made it so.
Yes, we could say to that “but I only imagined it!” and this would be true. But how can we be certain that whatever we imagine isn’t real, even just for the brief time we imagine it?
But here we appear to be in a steady state universe…only in its infant years - and for us it is more like a thing that we briefly experience in what we call a “lifetime”.
Could it be that this universe itself is something being imagined - a mind (mindfield) so vast as to be able to build it in the way physics explains it - from inception (that singularity of potential) to what it is in our time in our (The Humanities) here and now?
So then, what are “we” and what else could we be, but that very same mindfield fragmented into countless individuate “minds” which have traversed deeper and deeper into the imagined universe, exploring, experimenting and experiencing…and in our human capacity - forgetting we are the real that makes anything and everything real…