Ask A Genius 1302: Informational Cosmology, Quantum Time, and Simulation Hypothesis
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/03
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does informational cosmology account for time?
Rick Rosner: There are various ways of framing time. We’ve talked about the set of all possible moments in all possible universes. Each moment implies a set of possible next moments, just as each moment implies a set of possible previous moments.
We always experience the present moment and perceive time as a sequence of events. What makes time feel real is that the present moment contains information about the past, giving us a sense of history. That history implies a structure that predicts future moments.
Think of it as a cone of possibilities. The present moment is tightly constrained—not totally rigid, but we know a lot about it. As we move into the past, those constraints loosen, because the further back you go, the more possible pasts could have led to this moment.
But we don’t care that much about the past. What we really focus on is modeling the future.
So that’s how we experience time—our memory of past moments and our anticipation of future ones. If you string moments together, time becomes a sequence of events, constrained by the smallest quantum interactions that determine the next possible state.
At the deepest level, everything is an event within quantum mechanics. There are both deterministic and indeterminate elements in the sequence of connected moments.
For example, if two cars are speeding toward each other, in a macro sense, they are macro objects that obey classical physics. In the most reasonable next moments, they will continue getting closer and closer to each other. That part is deterministic—it follows classical physics.
But at the quantum level, there are indeterminate events that get filled in along the way. That’s how time is experienced—a combination of deterministic macro events and indeterminate micro events that continuously unfold.
In an informational sense, time is manifested by sequences of moments, where each moment generates more information as the universe becomes more differentiated. The universe moves from a more general state to a more specific state, and that increase in specificity is what time is. It doesn’t just mark time—it is time.
You could think of this as informational pressure. A collapsed, low-information state differentiates into a higher-information state, and that process is what drives time forward. You can look at informational pressure as a force that drives time forward, and that’s fine—but it’s not entirely correct.
When you string moments together, you’re moving from general states to specific states. That stringing of moments is what time is. You can describe it as a force, but that’s not precise. It’s similar to how people talk about what evolution “wants.”
It’s not exactly the same mistake, but it’s close. It’s convenient to say that evolution wants organisms to fill all possible ecological niches, to move onto land, to become birds, to become flowers—but evolution doesn’t “want” anything.
Evolution isn’t even a process—it’s a statistical winnowing that favors certain ways of existing. Similarly, we can talk about informational pressure as if it were a force, and we can even do calculations about it, but it’s not exactly that.
And honestly? It’s not even a useful framing because we’re the only ones talking about informational cosmology. But if, in the future, it becomes a field, people will inevitably use that incorrect framing.
Jacobsen: Do quantum wave functions leak not only in space but also in time?
Rosner: Yes.
Quantum mechanics deals with incomplete information. Where information is incomplete, quantum systems can do things that aren’t strictly causal.
This means that quantum effects can violate the usual rules of space and time, as long as they don’t get caught in some other framework that forces them into a classical constraint. So, yes—anything can theoretically pop in and out of existence, but it’s extremely unlikely that it will.
The universe is so constrained by its own informational structure that the odds of random magical occurrences—like waving a stick and having a fully formed dragon materialize—are so low that it would take a quintillion quintillion quintillion quintillion lifetimes of the universe for something like that to randomly occur.
A well-defined universe essentially squeezes out non-causal, super-random action.
Anything can happen, theoretically.
But in reality, the odds of something truly insane happening—some spontaneous, reality-breaking anomaly—are so infinitesimal that it may as well be zero.
Theoretically, but highly unlikely.
Jacobsen: Does a photon or electron collapse its wave function at the apparent T=0?
Rosner: Yes. But this also ties into particle tunneling.
Let’s say you’ve trapped a particle—a proton or an electron—inside a lead beaker with walls an inch thick. You’ve sealed it completely—the lid is on, and there’s no classical way for the particle to escape.
But in quantum mechanics, a particle doesn’t have a fixed location in space. Instead, it exists as a probability wave. Its position is defined only by the probability function from the last time it was measured or detected.
The last time you measured the particle, it was inside the beaker. At that point, its probability function collapses, meaning the highest probability of its location is still inside the beaker.
However, that probability function doesn’t go to absolute zero at the inner wall of the beaker—it just drops drastically. And at the outer wall of the beaker, the probability is incredibly small—but not exactly zero.
This means that a tiny fraction of the particle’s probability cloud actually exists outside the beaker. Maybe one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion.
So, if you repeated this experiment a trillion trillion trillion trillion times, once, on average, the next time you detected the particle, it would be outside the beaker. Not because it broke through the walls, but because of pure quantum probability—it tunneled through.
But in reality, we’re never going to run that experiment a trillion trillion trillion trillion times. But it could theoretically happen.
Now, let’s say you actually ran the experiment 100 times—and instead of one in a trillion trillion trillion trillion, the particle tunneled out eight times. That would be strong evidence that something is deeply wrong with the universe.
Quantum mechanics is the most experimentally confirmed theory ever. If you observe a fundamental quantum event that happens way more frequently than the math predicts, that suggests one of two things:
- Our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed.
- Something external is interfering with the universe itself.
If the laws of physics were truly consistent, but you got eight outliers in 100 trials, then the most reasonable explanation would be we are living in a simulation—and someone is either glitching it or deliberately sending a signal.
Not necessarily God in the traditional religious sense—but whoever or whatever created the simulation. If they wanted to communicate, this would be a good way to do it—by breaking quantum mechanics in a way that scientists would notice.
A clear violation of quantum probabilities would tell us:
- We do not live in a natural universe.
- Something or someone is actively manipulating it.
Jacobsen: Sounds less likely than a more parsimonious explanation, though. A more parsimonious explanation is that we live in a natural universe.
Rosner: At some point, if we did find strong evidence that we were in a simulation, then that would be the more parsimonious explanation—but we’ve never seen anything like that. The most likely reason? Because we probably live in a natural universe.
And even if we were in a simulation, we would have no fucking idea what it was for. The idea that we would randomly stumble upon a glitch, conveniently detecting evidence of the simulation’s existence, is wildly unlikely.
So, physical violations of causality would be insanely rare in a natural universe—and almost just as unlikely in a simulated universe. Because if someone went through all the effort to build a simulated universe, they wouldn’t want to fuck it up by breaking causality and physics at random.
Jacobsen: We never see magic.
Rosner: I mean, you can go to the Magic Castle—it’s six miles from me—and watch great magic performed by magicians. But we never see real magic—like casting an incantation and breaking the fundamental rules of the universe.
There’s a trilogy by Lev Grossman called The Magicians—it’s basically an adult version of Harry Potter. It got turned into a SyFy series that ran for several seasons. It was a pretty fun show, though maybe it worked better as a book. It explores what life might actually be like if real adults had real magical abilities in a real-world setting.
Because Harry Potter characters live in an abridged world—it avoids addressing adult realities. Grossman’s world doesn’t.
Anyway, I’m reading a book called American Rapture, which is about sex zombies. It’s basically COVID, but instead of killing people outright, it makes them try to fuck each other to death.
Jacobsen: What?
Rosner: Yeah. It’s got a 17-year-old protagonist, and it’s trying to straddle the line between adult and young adult fiction. I’m 200 pages in, and so far, when people get infected, they tear off their clothes and try to have sex—but the book never actually says “sex.”
No one says “fuck.” No one says “penis.” No one says “vagina.” It’s interesting how the author has managed to imply so much while avoiding explicit language entirely.
Jacobsen: What’s the point?
Rosner: It’s your standard “run away from murderous zombies” plot, except with a lot more sex.
Jacobsen: Well, no—because the sex is fatal.
Rosner: Right. But it’s got a bunch of YA tropes mixed in.
Jacobsen: That’d actually be a great title for a book.
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: Fatal Sex.
Rosner: A James Bond novel?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: But yeah, it’s one of those books—kind of like Twilight, where sex is literally life-threatening.
In Twilight, sex almost kills the heroine, and it takes until the third book before the characters actually get to bang. It’s an interesting exercise in writing about murderous sex while never explicitly saying “fuck” or “penis.”
Anyway, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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