Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sy Borg]

When you speak of the 'last conscious being in the universe not being remembered', it raises the issue of whether that will happen. There is the possibility of the end of human civilisation, which disturbs me greatly. However, that doesn't mean that no other conscious beings, human or animal will ever exist again at some point in this universe or some future universe, although these are only possibilities.

I am not sure what information you are concerned
about being lost specifically, or the 'extra layer of information not to be accounted for by the physicists. It sounds interesting, like some kind of elixir, or the 'philosopher's stone.'

When I spoke of the last conscious being, I did not mean "last conscious Earthling", I'm talking about trillions of year into the future.

The extra information is unrelated to the philosopher's stone. Think of it was the emergent synergistic whole.

[mattergauge]

No information is lost at all. When a black hole forms, all the infalling stuff becomes entangled with the virtually on the boundary, the event horizon, or the Schwarzschild surface. Say the collapsing stuff has the form of a bike (one can say "in"form, like in-formation). The real kinetic and potential fields that fall in in form (the bike) and form the hole (I'm considering here an irrealistic supermassive bike to make it clear). In the process, taking virtually no time in the perspective from the hole) these real matter fields, connected by virtual gauge fields, entangle with the quantum vacuum. As the process takes that little time (in a hole time stands still, as compared with us (from the outside, all infalling stuff, right after the bike has formed a hole). The entangled virtual field just on the outside gets ripped apart by the gigantic tidal powers of gravity. This all happens in a tiny time. All information of the bike's form gets encoded in the Hawking radiation, which seen from the outside, can take enormous time, depending on the mass of the bike. So, in principle, the form of the bike is encoded in the Hawking radiation, though in a pretty scrambled form.

[AmosMorrison]

Physicists have proven that black holes can shed information, despite the fact that this appears to be impossible by definition. The technique appears to answer a paradox initially described by Stephen Hawking five decades ago. You may argue that the data in the black hole isn't really lost. It's just locked up and out of reach. Theorists were comfortable with this viewpoint until 1975, when Stephen Hawking came to a groundbreaking conclusion concerning black holes: A black hole will dematerialize over time, radiating away through a process known as Hawking evaporation. That radiation, according to Hawking's calculations, would be random, revealing nothing about the black hole's contents.

[Atla]

No information is lost at all. When a black hole forms, all the infalling stuff becomes entangled with the virtually on the boundary, the event horizon, or the Schwarzschild surface. Say the collapsing stuff has the form of a bike (one can say "in"form, like in-formation). The real kinetic and potential fields that fall in in form (the bike) and form the hole (I'm considering here an irrealistic supermassive bike to make it clear). In the process, taking virtually no time in the perspective from the hole) these real matter fields, connected by virtual gauge fields, entangle with the quantum vacuum. As the process takes that little time (in a hole time stands still, as compared with us (from the outside, all infalling stuff, right after the bike has formed a hole). The entangled virtual field just on the outside gets ripped apart by the gigantic tidal powers of gravity. This all happens in a tiny time. All information of the bike's form gets encoded in the Hawking radiation, which seen from the outside, can take enormous time, depending on the mass of the bike. So, in principle, the form of the bike is encoded in the Hawking radiation, though in a pretty scrambled form.

I haven't looked into this, why do the matter fields only entangle with the quantuum vacuum at the event horizon, but not elsewhere?

[Sy Borg]

A fascinating article in SA discusses this issue: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... were-gone/

In it, Susskind agrees with Mattergauge's contention that information is preserved, referring to conservation of information as "Susskind calls conservation of information the "minus-first law".

In the 1980s Stephen Hawking challenged the minus-first law, claiming that black holes destroy information. Hawking’s hypothesis “touched off a crisis in physics, a clash of basic principles like no other since Einstein was young,” Susskind said in 2008. He rebutted Hawking in papers and a popular book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics.

All the information sucked into a black hole, Susskind argues, is preserved in its outer membrane, or “event horizon,” where space and time undergo bizarre distortions. In a review of Black Hole War, journalist George Johnson bravely takes a stab at explaining Susskind’s thesis: “A description of everything that falls into a black hole, whether a book or an entire civilization, is recorded on the surface of its horizon and radiated back like imagery on a giant drive-in movie screen.”

The writer goes on to say:

... I’m suspicious of all “laws” of physics, which strike me as manifestations of scientific hubris. Scientists take an assumption that applies under certain very tightly controlled conditions, usually with lots of qualifications, and transform it into a cosmic principle that applies to all things at all times in all places. But I’m especially skeptical of the minus-first law.

Never mind Hawking’s conjecture that black holes destroy information. I’m worried about far more mundane processes. Three years ago, strokes severely damaged my father’s memory, making it hard for him to recognize me and my siblings. Last June he died, at the age of 96, and my stepmother had his body cremated. My father persists, sort of, in the fragmentary, fading recollections of those who loved him. Polymath Douglas Hofstadter coined the heartbreaking phrase “soular coronas” to describe our memories of those eclipsed by death. But one day we’ll die too.

... The minus-first law implies that the universe will bear the imprint of my father’s life forever. Long after our sun and even the entire Milky Way have flickered out, aliens with the godlike powers of LaPlace’s demon could in principle (that handy, all-purpose hedge) reconstruct the lives of my father and every other person who has ever lived.

That’s a nice thought (which inspired the 1996 book The Physics of Immortality by physicist Frank Tipler.) But I don’t buy conservation of information any more than I buy reincarnation or heaven—or a god who cherishes us.

So we have these opposing views - Susskind and Hawking - neither proved. Certainly the information is so mangled that it will be practically irretrievable, even though theoretically accessible.

[Atla]

My layman opinion is that maybe they are both wrong.

As I mentioned above, I haven't looked into the idea that information gets stored on the event horizon, and then radiated back into the universe. Because I find the idea highly suspect, just why would the event horizon have this "extra ability", while the rest of universe doesn't? Unless I'm misunderstanding something. But to me it comes across like: we invented this "extra ability" for event horizons, just in order to fix a problem. And we can't test the idea so it's safe.

I don't think information gets imprinted on the event horizons of black holes. I also don't think information is destroyed (or more like I "hope" it's not). But both sides in the Black Hole War operate under the same basic assumption: that the quantum fluctuations of the Hawking radiation are random. This kind of randomness of the quantum vacuum, and of the quantum behaviour in general, are a basic axiom of QM. But what if it isn't random on a universal-scale, we just can't test this either? After all it could very well be that the entire universe is nonlocally entangled, and maybe that includes the quantuum vacuum, why wouldn't it? Then maybe there would be information loss by default. But all we have is speculation vs speculation vs speculation.

[Atla]

Meant to write: then maybe there would be no information loss by default bah.

[Sy Borg]

My understanding is that the event horizon is the only part of a black hole that we can observe changing after material falls in. The "singularity" or Planck scale particle is not going to change, already being crushed maximally, so the only change is an increase of the radius of the event horizon.

How information is stored on the horizon, though, appears to be more involved than my simple brain can handle: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... lack_Holes

[Atla]

From the article:

Adapting Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the quantum world we have a quantum time wave stretching to infinity similar to space in our real world. This quantum time wave can also represent zero energy particles (soft particles) that can encode information (particle / wave duality).

Looks highly suspect to me. Yes from our perspective, time should get stretched out infinitely at the event horizon. But as time stretches out to infinity, shouldn't the frequency of the occurence of the quantum fluctuations at the event horizon do the opposite, and tend to zero, from our perspective?
So the capacity for "information storage" at the event horizon from our perspective, would remain constant, not tend to infinity.

But even if unifying QM and relativity affects time, but not the occurence of quantum fluctuations in time:
Why should we be able to do with this infinite value whatever we want to do? And isn't it convenient that of all the things we could use an infinite value for, we use it for the one thing that would fix our problem? And wouldn't finite amounts of falling in matter create infinite amounts of information, breaking the universe?

And even if all the above are valid, what about the inside of the black holes? Shouldn't there be an infinitER capacity for information storage there, from our perspective? Wouldn't the black holes create infinitER amounts of information as matter keeps falling into them deeper, again breaking the universe?

[Atla]

From the article:

Adapting Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the quantum world we have a quantum time wave stretching to infinity similar to space in our real world. This quantum time wave can also represent zero energy particles (soft particles) that can encode information (particle / wave duality).

Looks highly suspect to me. Yes from our perspective, time should get stretched out infinitely at the event horizon. But as time stretches out to infinity, shouldn't the frequency of the occurence of the quantum fluctuations at the event horizon do the opposite, and tend to zero, from our perspective?
So the capacity for "information storage" at the event horizon from our perspective, would remain constant, not tend to infinity.

But even if unifying QM and relativity affects time, but not the occurence of quantum fluctuations in time:
Why should we be able to do with this infinite value whatever we want to do? And isn't it convenient that of all the things we could use an infinite value for, we use it for the one thing that would fix our problem? And wouldn't finite amounts of falling in matter create infinite amounts of information, breaking the universe?

And even if all the above are valid, what about the inside of the black holes? Shouldn't there be an infinitER capacity for information storage there, from our perspective? Wouldn't the black holes create infinitER amounts of information as matter keeps falling into them deeper, again breaking the universe?

And even if all the above is valid, wouldn't we still get random information back from the event horizon? It's just that there would be infinite time to radiate back all the random information.

[Atla]

This perspective has always bothered me - the idea that no information would lost if you fell into a black hole. I am not sure why experts don't seem death itself to be a loss of information. If Middle Eastern mystics of the Iron age are wrong, then a huge amount of order in the synergy of body parts is clearly lost forever at death.
It could be said that, at death, an animal's body system is replaced by colonial microbial communities, but those communities were already busy, just that the overarching ordering consciousness is gone. Does anyone here know why the loss of life and consciousness are not considered to be a loss of information?

Because those "synergies" are also made of matter, energy etc. and these, like everything else, only get transformed. The universe just gets rearranged, after we die, we leave behind a corpse.

But with the Information paradox at black holes, it would look like this: after we die, our corpse simply vanishes from existence and gets replaced by random matter/energy.

[Raymond]

Waiting enough time, all matter in our universe will be transformed in photons only. The two massless basic fields (Weyl fields) have disappeared and only an eternal gauge field is left, accelerating into oblivion at infinity. All the information of the two Weyl fields is contained in them but all the matter it refers to is gone! Only a space and timeless shadow is left diluting into infinity...

Then...A new big bang behind this! A fresh and causally almost disconnected new start and mass can turn alive again. Eternally.

[Raymond]

No information is lost at all. When a black hole forms, all the infalling stuff becomes entangled with the virtually on the boundary, the event horizon, or the Schwarzschild surface. Say the collapsing stuff has the form of a bike (one can say "in"form, like in-formation). The real kinetic and potential fields that fall in in form (the bike) and form the hole (I'm considering here an irrealistic supermassive bike to make it clear). In the process, taking virtually no time in the perspective from the hole) these real matter fields, connected by virtual gauge fields, entangle with the quantum vacuum. As the process takes that little time (in a hole time stands still, as compared with us (from the outside, all infalling stuff, right after the bike has formed a hole). The entangled virtual field just on the outside gets ripped apart by the gigantic tidal powers of gravity. This all happens in a tiny time. All information of the bike's form gets encoded in the Hawking radiation, which seen from the outside, can take enormous time, depending on the mass of the bike. So, in principle, the form of the bike is encoded in the Hawking radiation, though in a pretty scrambled form.

I haven't looked into this, why do the matter fields only entangle with the quantuum vacuum at the event horizon, but not elsewhere?

Actually, the infalling matter fields entangle with all virtual fields through the whole region they travel through. But only around the Schwarzschild radius they get turned real by the strong gravity. Just like virtual loops (quantum bubbles) can get excited by real particles, so can they be excited by gravity. A negative energy solution is send in and positive solutions (particles as well as anti particles) annihilate and turn into photons, taking away the information (the entire evaporation takes just a few seconds in the free falling frame).

[Raymond]

So... All matter traveling through the universe leaves an imprint on the fluctuating virtual fields (the closed one particle propagators seen in Feynman diagrams). By entanglement. If these virtual flelds are excited they contain information.

[Atla]

So... All matter traveling through the universe leaves an imprint on the fluctuating virtual fields (the closed one particle propagators seen in Feynman diagrams). By entanglement. If these virtual flelds are excited they contain information.

Ah now I remember, I rejected this line of thinking long ago. Imo we can't just decide that "X is real when it suits us. X isn't real, it's just virtual, when it suits us."

Those "virtual fields" should represent some perfectly real underlying substratum of the universe or multiverse, that always carry information like everything else does. So this would solve nothing about the information paradox, it just delegates the paradox to the underlying substratum.