Ask A Genius 1104: Makes Sense
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/26
Rick Rosner: Informational cosmology has been a theme throughout our talks for ten years. Bit by bit, it’s becoming a complete theory. When we last discussed it, I want to mentioned information pressure—the idea that increasing information in a semi-closed, self-consistent system, like a universe, drives time. It embodies time.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Right; the idea is that time results from increasing information.
Rosner: Exactly. A blob of degenerate matter, which has had all its information squeezed out by gravitational pressure, can create its own space as it differentiates into specific states. If you go back to the 1948 Claude Shannon definition of information, the amount of information is proportional to the specificity of the state chosen from available states. For example, rolling a pair of dice has more information than flipping a coin because there are more potential outcomes.
So, a blob of matter in a nonspecific, degenerate state can make itself specific, and in doing that, it establishes time—a timeline, a history.
We can analyze this through the physics of gravitational collapse, but you also have to consider it from the outside perspective—what’s driving it from the “armature world”?
What’s driving it? There is intentionality. In the armature world, some entities have laid the groundwork to create the material circumstances that allow for creating an information space. For instance, when a baby is born, it develops its own information space—it’s not precisely intentional in the sense of someone specifically creating it. People may want to have a baby, but through evolution, this baby can generate an information space, a brain that contains a mind that forms that information space.
Jacobsen: Right, so it’s not intentional in the traditional sense, but the underlying structure still allows this information space to emerge.
Rosner: But I’m struggling with the word “intentionality” because, in a few years, we’ll be intentionally engineering entities with their own information spaces. So you can imagine entities in an amateur world doing that as well. But for now, all conscious beings on Earth were created through babies being born. So, whether the structure is engineered, evolved, or birthed, it still needs to exist in the armature world to allow a mind and information space to develop. And in the physics of it, degenerate matter moves into a state that contains more and more information.
So, for an information space to exist, you need a containing world with a structure capable of supporting it—a kind of hardware that holds the information. For an information space to emerge within that containing world, I was trying to find a better word than “intent” or “intentional” because, for example, a mind emerging in a newborn baby isn’t intentional—it is enabled. So, unless you have a better term, “enabled” seems like a decent word for now. You need a structure to allow the information space to form. Does that seem reasonable?
Rosner: Yeah, that makes sense.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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