Ask A Genius 1306: Exploring Quantum Mechanics and Informational Cosmology
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/04
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does IC reconcile the view of the universe as an information-processing system with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, particularly the role of information in quantum states and the measurement process?
Rick Rosner: I can answer the first part of that. We’ve talked about it before—Einstein hated the idea that the outcome of open quantum processes, that is, an event, will happen, but we don’t know what the outcome will be. It’s not determinate. Previous conditions do not determine it.
Before quantum theory, the prevailing idea in physics was that the universe was entirely predetermined. If you could calculate the positions and velocities of everything in the universe at any given moment, you could predict every subsequent moment—like clockwork. And clockwork was the model. The universe was thought to tick along like a machine, where every moment was completely determined by the previous one.
Quantum physics changed that. It introduced the idea that the universe does not have predetermined outcomes. Einstein hated that, and many people did. He and others tried to come up with experiments and arguments to prove this couldn’t be the case.
But people came around to it over time—since the ’60s, maybe the ’80s. We’ve had quantum mechanics long enough now that most physicists just accept it: Yeah, that makes sense.
Even though you can’t predict the outcome of many quantum events if the universe is an information processor, you could argue— and I do—that the outcomes of quantum events generate information. That means these outcomes are not just random; they produce something relevant.
If quantum events produce information, then that information is relevant to something. My argument is that just as your brain models the outside world and constantly asks, “What’s going to happen next?,” the quantum world does the same thing. Your brain doesn’t contain the answers—it finds them in the external world.
Similarly, in a quantum system, open questions don’t have pre-existing answers hidden somewhere in the universe. The answers are revealed over time as information about the world that the quantum system is modelling.
That’s my answer. There’s no hidden rule determining outcomes. Bell’s inequality explicitly states that the universe secretly contains the answers to quantum events in advance.
There is nothing in the universe we live in that can tell you how indeterminate quantum events are going to turn out. But at the same time, nothing in the rules of quantum mechanics says the outcomes of these events couldn’t have been determined by events outside the universe—by something that the universe itself is modelling.
And that leads to a whole other set of questions: “How the fuck does that happen? What’s going on?”
By analogy, you could argue that there is probably some kind of hardware outside of the universe—beyond it, in another universe—that supports the information that becomes the matter and time we experience. The same way our brains, the physical hardware inside our skulls, support our minds. You don’t have a mind without a brain. So, in that analogy, you don’t have our physical reality without something external to support it.
And that’s the answer to at least the first part of your question.
Jacobsen: Does IC propose this one? You could knock it down quickly. You could call it woo. It’s not like we have hand-wavy explanations plus some actual physics—here, it’s all hand-wavy. Does IC propose a new interpretation involving a consciousness-driven wave function collapse or an information-based reformulation of quantum phenomena?
Rosner: First, you can dismiss the idea of consciousness-driven wave function collapse outright. That one’s not even worth considering.
Jacobsen: So, what about wave function collapse in general?
There are people who work in quantum mechanics who don’t think the wave collapses at all. The idea is this: a photon is emitted, and its probability distribution—its probability cloud—expands over time. The longer you wait, the bigger the cloud of possible positions where the photon could be.
Then, when that photon is captured by something, it becomes a point again. It was captured here.
But there’s never a moment where the cloud shrinks or deflates. It’s not like it expands, expands, expands, then collapses into a point. No—the cloud was there, and then it’s just a point.
There’s no deflation of the cloud. It’s cloud, then point.
That’s a discontinuity. Or, the way I look at it, it’s just the next moment. It’s the moment after the photon was emitted, where it has now been captured.
So, it’s not really about collapsing probability waves—it’s about subsequent moments in which an event has taken place.
So, in moment A, the photon is emitted. In a series of subsequent moments, you have an expanding probability cloud until, at some later moment, X, the photon is captured. You’re looking at a sequence of probabilistically connected moments—before a certain time, the event hasn’t happened, and after that time, the event has happened.
After moment A, the photon has been emitted. But before moment X, there is still only a probability cloud when the photon is captured. Then, at moment X and in all subsequent moments, the photon has been detected and captured, and whatever follows next unfolds.
But what you don’t get is any transitional phase. There is no gradual shift from probability cloud to captured photon—it’s always a sudden change. First, there is a cloud of uncertainty, and then an event occurs.
Wait, what was the original question?
Oh, right—the conscious collapse of the wave function.
No, I don’t think you need that. The universe is its observer. You don’t need conscious beings within the universe to do the noticing for you. As we discussed yesterday, a universe can exist without any conscious beings within it to act as detectors.
The universe detects itself.
Now, you can make all sorts of arguments about the tree falling in the forest. If an entire sterile universe comes into existence, undergoes a vast amount of activity, and then ceases to exist—all without any conscious beings present to note its existence—then yes, nobody inside that universe observed it.
But even if conscious beings were present, the same fundamental events would still happen. Whether a universe contains conscious beings or not, its existence remains unchanged at a fundamental level.
Both conscious-inhabited and sterile universes hold the same mathematical meta-existence. If we consider a set of all possible moments across all possible universes, then each moment—from a universe full of life or one devoid of it—belongs to that set without preference. They all equally belong to the structure of reality.
That is if that set even exists. As we’ve discussed before, defining a “set” or a “moment” in this context becomes complicated. Moments in a quantum system can be spread across 20 billion light-years of space and however many billion years, making it difficult to treat them as discrete units.
But still, we can talk about them, even if the framework for doing so isn’t perfect. I don’t know if anyone else is discussing moments of the universe in this way, but at some point, people could.
Rotten Tomatoes.
One more question—if you’ve got a quick one.
Jacobsen: How does IC integrate or reinterpret general relativity as an emergent property of information processing rather than space and time curvature alone?
Rosner: So, general relativity describes how mass determines the shape of space. IC essentially says the same thing—except that the fundamental element shaping reality isn’t mass but information.
That’s the short answer.
I haven’t thought about this in a while, so if you want a more detailed explanation, I’ll have to give you a better answer tomorrow.
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