"Could a universe exist without any conscious inhabitants whatever? (Emperor's New Mind, Penrose)"

I skipped through all the math of the book to a section called "anthropic principle"

Apparently there is a strong and weak anthropic principle similar to strong and weak AI.

And then "strong determinism" which means "the entire history of the universe is fixed ...for all time."

And then Penrose quotes Einstein who wondered, "What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all!"