Philosophy Discussion Forums

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 30th, 2021, 7:34 pm Usually the idea of information destruction, or not, is framed around black holes.

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years.

Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects.

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?

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 30th, 2021, 7:34 pm Usually the idea of information destruction, or not, is framed around black holes.

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years.

Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects.

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?

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Information is just the 4-momenta of the particles that fall inside. Classical GR says you can never find info about these on the outside. Entanglement of these momenta (energy and 3-momenta) with stuff on the horizon facilitates information conservation for the outside.

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 30th, 2021, 7:34 pm Usually the idea of information destruction, or not, is framed around black holes.

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years.

Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects.

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?

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Considering your bike. Your bike falls in. The particles making up your bike pass the horizon "layer per layer". The whole bike gets encoded on the horizon, or better, just above it. Entangled with the vacuum. In the blink of an eye, this information is radiated away by Hawking radiation. The matter has changed into radiation though (photons).

Raymond wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 3:31 am

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 30th, 2021, 7:34 pm Usually the idea of information destruction, or not, is framed around black holes.

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years.

Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects.

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?

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Considering your bike. Your bike falls in. The particles making up your bike pass the horizon "layer per layer". The whole bike gets encoded on the horizon, or better, just above it. Entangled with the vacuum. In the blink of an eye, this information is radiated away by Hawking radiation. The matter has changed into radiation though (photons).

Thanks for the reply Raymond. My question is more basic, what exactly is meant by the word information in a scientific explanation like this?

I can understand, in principle, particles get radiated away. But as I said information isn't a thing in itself in my understanding, it's a type of description. And descriptions don't get radiated away.

Gertie wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 6:01 pm

Raymond wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 3:31 am

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 30th, 2021, 7:34 pm Usually the idea of information destruction, or not, is framed around black holes.



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?

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Considering your bike. Your bike falls in. The particles making up your bike pass the horizon "layer per layer". The whole bike gets encoded on the horizon, or better, just above it. Entangled with the vacuum. In the blink of an eye, this information is radiated away by Hawking radiation. The matter has changed into radiation though (photons).

Thanks for the reply Raymond. My question is more basic, what exactly is meant by the word information in a scientific explanation like this?

I can understand, in principle, particles get radiated away. But as I said information isn't a thing in itself in my understanding, it's a type of description. And descriptions don't get radiated away.

Say a black hole is formed by various massive structures. A heavy bike, an ultraheavy table, a bottle of wine, a mega heavy tree, or even a superheavy version of you. All these structures, the positions and the momenta of the constituent particles, can be entangled with the vacuum's quantum bubbles on the horizon. The value of the information might be the same in all cases (if the masses are comparable, then the Bekenstein-Hawking information is the same for all black holes with the same mass). But what's different for all holes is the information of the form of the structure that is contained in this information. The information of the bike structure BH might be the same as for the wine bottle BH, but they contain different information. One corresponding with a bike, one corresponding to a bottle. Of course it needs us to see the difference between a bottle and a bike. As you know, the maximum amount of information in a volume of space is the information contained in a BH with a Schwarzschild radius corresponding to that volume.

Raymond wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 7:45 pm

Gertie wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 6:01 pm

Raymond wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 3:31 am

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Considering your bike. Your bike falls in. The particles making up your bike pass the horizon "layer per layer". The whole bike gets encoded on the horizon, or better, just above it. Entangled with the vacuum. In the blink of an eye, this information is radiated away by Hawking radiation. The matter has changed into radiation though (photons).

Thanks for the reply Raymond. My question is more basic, what exactly is meant by the word information in a scientific explanation like this?

I can understand, in principle, particles get radiated away. But as I said information isn't a thing in itself in my understanding, it's a type of description. And descriptions don't get radiated away.

Say a black hole is formed by various massive structures. A heavy bike, an ultraheavy table, a bottle of wine, a mega heavy tree, or even a superheavy version of you. All these structures, the positions and the momenta of the constituent particles, can be entangled with the vacuum's quantum bubbles on the horizon. The value of the information might be the same in all cases (if the masses are comparable, then the Bekenstein-Hawking information is the same for all black holes with the same mass). But what's different for all holes is the information of the form of the structure that is contained in this information. The information of the bike structure BH might be the same as for the wine bottle BH, but they contain different information. One corresponding with a bike, one corresponding to a bottle. Of course it needs us to see the difference between a bottle and a bike. As you know, the maximum amount of information in a volume of space is the information contained in a BH with a Schwarzschild radius corresponding to that volume.

Still, there is destruction of information if a living being falls in. One can theoretically reconstruct the physicality of a person who is spaghettified in black holes but the person's mind - with all that accumulated knowledge in life, is lost, seemingly evaporated into nothing.

Raymond wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 7:45 pm

Gertie wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 6:01 pm

Raymond wrote: ↑February 5th, 2022, 3:31 am

Gertie wrote: ↑February 4th, 2022, 4:23 pm

A bit of a tangent here, but as a scientific ignoramus I've never really understood what ''information'' means when spoken of in these ways.

To me information isn't something which exists, it's an abstract, conceptualised way of describing things. So to talk about information being destroyed makes no sense in my interpretation. And I've considered it as a metaphorical way of talking about actual stuff, in that if something, a bicycle for example, 'contains' a lot of information, what is really being said is that a bicycle can be described in a lot of ways. More ways than its handle bar, or a particle which is part of the bicycle.

Using my understanding then, if a bicycle enterring a black hole has its information 'destroyed', what is really being said is there is nothing left of the bicycle to be described. But it is the bicycle which is the actual thing which is destroyed, not information (the possible descriptions of the bicycle which only exist in our minds).

So if there is nothing left of the stuff of a bicycle enterring a black hole, then a consequence is we have nothing left to describe. As opposed to me smashing up my bicycle in my garden, where the parts of it still remain and can still be described, but not in the exact same ways (eg part of a description of a complete bicycle is its location, which is now scattered, or when pressure is applied to a pedal the wheels go round - some informational ways of describing the bicycle have changed and some lost). And IT encodes and decodes descriptions in different formats.

I've kind of cobbled this understanding together from bits and pieces I've read. Is this about right? Or am I missing some significant understanding of what information means?

Considering your bike. Your bike falls in. The particles making up your bike pass the horizon "layer per layer". The whole bike gets encoded on the horizon, or better, just above it. Entangled with the vacuum. In the blink of an eye, this information is radiated away by Hawking radiation. The matter has changed into radiation though (photons).

Thanks for the reply Raymond. My question is more basic, what exactly is meant by the word information in a scientific explanation like this?

I can understand, in principle, particles get radiated away. But as I said information isn't a thing in itself in my understanding, it's a type of description. And descriptions don't get radiated away.

Say a black hole is formed by various massive structures. A heavy bike, an ultraheavy table, a bottle of wine, a mega heavy tree, or even a superheavy version of you. All these structures, the positions and the momenta of the constituent particles, can be entangled with the vacuum's quantum bubbles on the horizon. The value of the information might be the same in all cases (if the masses are comparable, then the Bekenstein-Hawking information is the same for all black holes with the same mass). But what's different for all holes is the information of the form of the structure that is contained in this information. The information of the bike structure BH might be the same as for the wine bottle BH, but they contain different information. One corresponding with a bike, one corresponding to a bottle. Of course it needs us to see the difference between a bottle and a bike. As you know, the maximum amount of information in a volume of space is the information contained in a BH with a Schwarzschild radius corresponding to that volume.

Actually I know roughly nothing about black holes, you're answers are way over my head, sorry!

I just tagged on to this thread to ask really basic question - what do scientists mean when they use the word ''information'' in contexts like this? What actualy is information, in the scientific sense? I probably should have been clearer in the first place.

Information is the configuration of matter. So all matter will contain some information, and information describes states of matter.

Google:

What is meant by information in physics?
In short: information contained in a physical system = the number of yes/no questions you need to get answered to fully specify the system.

Imagine a rubber ball and a mobile phone of the same mass. While they are basically the same mass, their information - their configurations - are different.

In terms of the OP, if you fell into a black hole, you could be reconstituted from the information (ie. the component atoms into which you would be crushed) stored in the black hole with sufficiently advanced technology - theoretically. A more familiar example would be the restoring of a burnt book. Theoretically, it would be able to restore every word, as long as all the gases released were retrievable. But restoring a mind?

My argument was that, even if all the physical aspect6s of you were reconstituted, this would surely not include all of your hard won accumulated knowledge. If you fell into a black hole, I can't see how the quantum states in your brain would be replicable.

Thus, it seems that some information would be destroyed, and I don't know how this works with physics's claim that information cannot be destroyed.

Gertie wrote: ↑February 6th, 2022, 8:31 pm Actually I know roughly nothing about black holes, you're answers are way over my head, sorry!

I just tagged on to this thread to ask really basic question - what do scientists mean when they use the word ''information'' in contexts like this? What actualy is information, in the scientific sense? I probably should have been clearer in the first place.

Information here strictly means "physical information". This electron has position X, momentum Y etc. in other words this electron IS position X, momentum Y etc.

As you say, this kind of information is strictly non-abstract, it's always concrete, and that's something even some scientists keep forgetting when they are dealing with the information paradox. For example saying that information is "encoded" in an electron, is nonsense, a double-vision, because the electron IS the sum of its information.

Raymond seems to think that we can freely "take out information" from the fluctuations of the virtual field, without changing the virtual field, I think that doesn't make sense either.

The entropy of a bike, a phone, a bottle, or you, if they all wouĺd be blown up to the mass needed to form a black hole, would be roughly the same, if the masses of the holes would be about the same. The event horizon of the hole gives a measure for the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space if the hole is not present. This amount is actually achieved for the hole. So consider the bike. Let its mass increase. A hole will form. On the horizon of this hole, information is stored about the "(in)formation of the bike. This is of course different information than that of a bottle, a phone, or you. Ìt's maybe hard to understand that all the information of your brain and body is stored on the horizon after you felt in a hole.It's only the last you that falls in though. You as a child is not in there!

Consider a whìte convas. I can let it white. No information, zero entropy, zero temperature. I can paint it black. Maximum information, maximum entropy, maximum temperature. I can paint zillions of lines or figures or whatever on it. They all contain more or less the same entropy, at middle temperature. But the information is different in all cases, while the minimum and maximum entropy (the white and black canvas) contain in fact the same entropy! That is, nothing at all, or too much. Like a solid at zero kelvin and the same atoms in a hot gas.

Thanks all, sorry to have been so dense (a little black hole joke there!). This I can understand -

Information is the configuration of matter. So all matter will contain some information, and information describes states of matter.

That does give rise to questions about non-physical information as you say Greta -

My argument was that, even if all the physical aspect6s of you were reconstituted, this would surely not include all of your hard won accumulated knowledge. If you fell into a black hole, I can't see how the quantum states in your brain would be replicable.

Thus, it seems that some information would be destroyed, and I don't know how this works with physics's claim that information cannot be destroyed.

If information is defined as all the possible ways of describing configurations of matter in a physical system, that won't capture descriptions of your experiential mental states at the moment you enter the black hole, only the correlated brain matter configurations.

The brain's physical memory subsystem will likewise be destroyed, which has the ability to manifest accumulated knowledge in the form of conscious memory experience. So the potential to manifest that recallable memory conscious experience (accumulated knowledge) which can be described in different types of ways to configurations of brain matter, will be lost too. That also presumably happens whatever way you die.

But if your living body as a dynamic physical system was identically reconstituted out of different matter as you fell in the black hole, presumably it would be able to manifest the conscious experience you had as you fell in, and potentially recall the same experiential memories. Like a Star Trek transporter.
I think.

"But if your living body as a dynamic physical system was identically reconstituted out of different matter as you fell in the black hole, presumably it would be able to manifest the conscious experience you had as you fell in, and potentially recall the same experiential memories. Like a Star Trek transporter.
I think."

I don't think so. The only thing that gets out is the information of the momentary state you are in when you fall through the horizon. Your whole body state is encoded on the part of the horizon you fall through. All positions and momenta are encoded in this piece of event horizon. It takes very long before your complete last state is radiated away by photons. Seen from your perspective this takes the blink of an eye. This information is not that what the information is about, just as the visual image I see of you is not you yourself. So it's only the static information of your last state in phasespace (the space of positions and momenta of your constituting particles), and information of the kinds of particles you're made up of that gets out. From the moment you fall through the horizon till you are spaghettified... This information doesn't contain the consciousness you experience in your last moments in agony. This is only contained in your body falling in. And that's gone when the hole is gone.

So, from your perspective the falling in, spaghettification, and and evaporation of the hole takes a blink of an eye to you (well, after spaghettification you are no more conscious, but you get me), and billions of years for me on the outside. The photons carrying away the information of your last state are not conscious but maybe contain some information of your last static brain state. It can reveil some knowledge but a dynamical brain is needed for more.

Raymond wrote: ↑February 7th, 2022, 2:25 pm "But if your living body as a dynamic physical system was identically reconstituted out of different matter as you fell in the black hole, presumably it would be able to manifest the conscious experience you had as you fell in, and potentially recall the same experiential memories. Like a Star Trek transporter.
I think."

I don't think so. The only thing that gets out is the information of the momentary state you are in when you fall through the horizon. Your whole body state is encoded on the part of the horizon you fall through. All positions and momenta are encoded in this piece of event horizon. It takes very long before your complete last state is radiated away by photons. Seen from your perspective this takes the blink of an eye. This information is not that what the information is about, just as the visual image I see of you is not you yourself. So it's only the static information of your last state in phasespace (the space of positions and momenta of your constituting particles), and information of the kinds of particles you're made up of that gets out. From the moment you fall through the horizon till you are spaghettified... This information doesn't contain the consciousness you experience in your last moments in agony. This is only contained in your body falling in. And that's gone when the hole is gone.

So, from your perspective the falling in, spaghettification, and and evaporation of the hole takes a blink of an eye to you (well, after spaghettification you are no more conscious, but you get me), and billions of years for me on the outside. The photons carrying away the information of your last state are not conscious but maybe contain some information of your last static brain state. It can reveil some knowledge but a dynamical brain is needed for more.

A living, dynamic body/brain in motion on earth which perfectly replicated every physical description of the original should presumably also replicate the conscious experiential states of the original at the moment of replication - if neural correlation holds, which experiments suggest it does.

The concurrent non-conscious parts of the brain's physical memory system would be replicated too, available to be 'sparked' into conscious experience by the usual sorts of stimuli, I'd think. Because that person's specific memories have been 'encoded' in the form of that person's specific physical neural connections.

It's the same principle as if the person's eyes were shut at the moment of replication, and they weren't experiencing seeing anything. The replicated living body would start with their eyes shut, not seeing anything, but their brain's visual systems have been replicated so that when the replicant opens their eyes, the visual system is stimulated and works as it did before for that person. I'd assume.

Gertie wrote: ↑February 7th, 2022, 7:26 pm

Raymond wrote: ↑February 7th, 2022, 2:25 pm "But if your living body as a dynamic physical system was identically reconstituted out of different matter as you fell in the black hole, presumably it would be able to manifest the conscious experience you had as you fell in, and potentially recall the same experiential memories. Like a Star Trek transporter.
I think."

I don't think so. The only thing that gets out is the information of the momentary state you are in when you fall through the horizon. Your whole body state is encoded on the part of the horizon you fall through. All positions and momenta are encoded in this piece of event horizon. It takes very long before your complete last state is radiated away by photons. Seen from your perspective this takes the blink of an eye. This information is not that what the information is about, just as the visual image I see of you is not you yourself. So it's only the static information of your last state in phasespace (the space of positions and momenta of your constituting particles), and information of the kinds of particles you're made up of that gets out. From the moment you fall through the horizon till you are spaghettified... This information doesn't contain the consciousness you experience in your last moments in agony. This is only contained in your body falling in. And that's gone when the hole is gone.

So, from your perspective the falling in, spaghettification, and and evaporation of the hole takes a blink of an eye to you (well, after spaghettification you are no more conscious, but you get me), and billions of years for me on the outside. The photons carrying away the information of your last state are not conscious but maybe contain some information of your last static brain state. It can reveil some knowledge but a dynamical brain is needed for more.

A living, dynamic body/brain in motion on earth which perfectly replicated every physical description of the original should presumably also replicate the conscious experiential states of the original at the moment of replication - if neural correlation holds, which experiments suggest it does.

The concurrent non-conscious parts of the brain's physical memory system would be replicated too, available to be 'sparked' into conscious experience by the usual sorts of stimuli, I'd think. Because that person's specific memories have been 'encoded' in the form of that person's specific physical neural connections.

It's the same principle as if the person's eyes were shut at the moment of replication, and they weren't experiencing seeing anything. The replicated living body would start with their eyes shut, not seeing anything, but their brain's visual systems have been replicated so that when the replicant opens their eyes, the visual system is stimulated and works as it did before for that person. I'd assume.

I far from an expert, but I think Raymond's view relies on the "fuzzball" hypothesis, which posits that the boundary of black holes is not a perfectly smooth sphere, as once posited, but a "fuzzball", with the information of incoming objects encoded in the boundary.

If a BH's boundary is smooth, then the information is destroyed and/or stuck irretrievably inside, which grows a little larger when objects go in, but does not have other properties. So only mass would be recorded.

In a practical sense, it would be no more possible to recreate the quantum states of the brain than to travel at the speed of light; there is a natural barrier, in this case the fact that measurement of quantum objects alters them. So, if you were reconstituted from the information in the surface of a fuzzball black hole, then the result would be mostly Gertie, but not entirely. Would reconstituted Gertie even be alive and functional? That would seem a question so far beyond current capabilities that humanity will have to wait for their future AI overlords to work it out :)

Would reconstituted Gertie even be alive and functional? That would seem a question so far beyond current capabilities that humanity will have to wait for their future AI overlords to work it out

It puzzles all who know me