Ask A Genius 1316: Rick Had a Dream Tonight!
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/25
Rick Rosner: So last night, I had—what was my fucking dream about? It’s usually that I’m back at fucking Jimmy Kimmel, and this time, I was at a Kimmel party. I always lose shit in my dreams, especially in Kimmel dreams. I forget where my car is. I couldn’t find my fucking car last night. At five in the morning, in the dream, I set my keys down.
Why didn’t I—why didn’t I fucking put them in my pocket? And somebody at the party took my keys and left their keys, and shit was all fucked up. I woke up, and I—I have fucking wasted my life. So I went to look up and see if anybody has done work—or how far the work on the geometry of information has gotten—because I haven’t looked at that shit in a while. There is some work on it, and it’s tied in with quantum mechanics.
But there are still things I’ve figured out that people haven’t. One thing—one fucking thing—is conservation laws. Entropy. Matter—can’t be created or destroyed. Information—can’t be created or destroyed. We have a ton of conservation laws, and they are all true locally. Conservation laws hold widely but only locally.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you say locally with regard to conservation laws, you’re talking about a radius of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of light-years—where, if you look around, you’re seeing consistency as far as you can reasonably see. But that’s different from saying that matter, energy, and information are conserved universally, all the way out to the edge of the universe in space and time.
Rosner: You have to be open to the possibility that matter, time, and information can be created, and entropy can be dumped in the borderlands—the regions near t = 0 or across the entire span of the universe—where information is implicitly generated when photons escape. Most photons do escape. The vast majority of photons that make it to the surface of the Sun and then radiate outward—99.9999% of them, at least—keep going.
They don’t hit anything in our solar system. They don’t hit anything in our galaxy. They may diffract around interstellar dust—yes, I should look up whether diffraction can occur without a photon being captured—but, ultimately, most of these photons keep traveling. The vast, vast majority of them continue outward toward the edge of the universe, losing most of their energy to the curvature of space itself.
The curvature of the universe isn’t an abstract concept; it is the tacit registration of the information created as the photon loses energy. A photon loses energy while traveling to the edge of the universe because the universe itself expands and stretches the wavelength of that photon. If a photon travels almost as far as the observable universe extends, then it has, in a way, been registered within the cosmic structure.
Contrast that with a photon inside the Sun. A photon inside the Sun might travel an incredible distance before it’s absorbed, but once it is absorbed, that’s the end of the line. No new information is generated because the emission and absorption occur within a closed system. There is no permanent record. But if a photon travels, say, 100 million light-years and loses only 1% of its energy to the curvature of the universe, that tiny fraction of its energy has been converted into something tacit, a change that registers within the overall structure of spacetime.
For local interactions—an experiment in a lab, or a laser beam reflecting off the Moon and back—all conservation laws hold. Everything is reversible. But on the largest scales? No. Information is created. Matter is created. Time itself is created. Most universes are lucky enough for information to emerge at all.
There’s a little bit of research in this direction. The math is heavy-duty—though it wouldn’t feel so heavy-duty if I had taken the time to fully learn the advanced mathematics of quantum mechanics. Understanding the geometry of information in formal mathematical terms requires that level of fluency. But I can already tell that current research hasn’t gone far enough, because it doesn’t yet consider information globally.
Jacobsen: Yes. The global aspect matters because, technically, every object in the universe leaks its informational content outward, all the way to the edge of existence.
Rosner: Yes. The universe has to keep tabs on itself.
Jacobsen: But why? Localization is a temporary condensation of a global manifold.
Rosner: We’ve been poking at this question for forever. A question I asked myself when I was feeling shitty last night at 5:30 in the morning was: Does an informational map of the universe even need to exist? Does a geometry of information need to exist?
We’re about to get machine consciousness. We’re, what, five years away at most? We’ve been talking to AI, which is not conscious—not even close. But the path to it is clear, and rapidly approaching. We’re going to have machine fucking consciousness in the 2030s, and we’ll have done it without a fully developed geometry of consciousness or a complete understanding of how information functions within consciousness.
Which prompts the question: If you can recreate consciousness, do you need a framework for consciousness?
We’re about to manufacture conscious entities, yet we still don’t have a fundamental model for how human consciousness works. Which begs the question—or rather, prompts the fucking question—is there even an underlying architecture to consciousness? Or can we keep treating consciousness as a purely experiential thing—where we, as conscious beings, experience the world and interact with it, without needing a structural model?
I’m going to say, cautiously: Fuck yes, we need one. It is a thing. I still think that.
Though, I now believe it’s a looser thing than I originally thought when I first started thinking about this back in 1981. The vast majority of interactions between particles in the universe are reversible and don’t leave a permanent record. Even large-scale irreversible interactions aren’t registered in any detailed way within the overall information structure of the universe. They exist in a detailed way—obviously, the Earth is incredibly detailed. Everything has crystalline structure, biological structure—every solid object has a definite atomic and molecular arrangement.But does that matter to the universe as a whole? To local conscious beings like ourselves, yes, it matters. But to the overall information structure of the universe? No. The universe doesn’t care. It isn’t going to register that detail.
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