[friend_and_foe]

I'm trying to understand what you're saying here.

If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition would only be able to ponder things it observes or experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us nowhere.

I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe, if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and distinct locally, if that makes sense.