Cosmic Cooling as Admissibility Pathway: Expansion, Durable Structure, and the Selective Power of Computational Terminal States

Abstract

Standard cosmology treats the hot-to-cold thermal evolution of the universe as a thermodynamic consequence of metric expansion, and standard quantum mechanics treats indeterminacy as ontologically primitive. A prior framework developed by the present author proposed that a final boundary condition can constrain the admissible-history ensemble of quantum cosmology, with a tiering of terminal states—trivial, structured, and computational—in which computational terminal states exert the strongest selective pruning. That earlier work left open a cosmological question: how does thermal history relate to endpoint-conditioned history selection? The present paper advances the thesis that cosmic cooling is not itself selective, but that it establishes the intermediate regime within which a computationally organized terminal condition can exert non-trivial pruning on the admissible-history ensemble. Under this reading, quantum indeterminacy functions not as the ultimate explanatory terminus of physical theory, but as the permissive admissibility substrate through which endpoint-conditioned selection operates. This is an interpretive claim about explanatory role, not a revision of the quantum formalism or a denial of its fundamentality. The paper formalizes cooling as an intermediate-regime condition, distinguishes forced from selectable features of thermal history, addresses the trivialization, teleology, anthropic, underdetermination, and fundamentality objections, and offers three candidate differential predictions concerning error-correcting substrate prevalence, the selective fine-tuning profile of constants, and the relative timing of cosmogenic transitions. The proposal is situated against Wheeler’s participatory universe, the two-state vector formalism, the transactional interpretation, Price’s time-symmetric program, Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and Smolin’s cosmological natural selection.

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