Fumfer Physics 3: Informational Cosmology & Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/24
Rick Rosner: If we’re going to do Fumfer for Physics, let me quickly lay out the principles of informational cosmology.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What principles define informational cosmology? The guiding idea is that the universe processes information, and the patterns by which it does so show strong, useful parallels with how we encode, store, and transform information. Follow that line and the question of consciousness becomes unavoidable—what it is, how it relates to information, and whether an informational ontology can make sense of subjective experience.
Rosner: You don’t entirely agree with me on this.
Jacobsen: True.
Rosner: However, in an extensive, self-consistent information-processing system, high levels of multimodal real-time information processing resemble the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness is a characteristic of high-level information processing. It’s advantageous to the system. As conscious beings, we have feelings tied to our consciousness, and those feelings help us prioritize and navigate the world. The leading theory in brain science is that our brains evolved to help us decide what to do in every next moment, to choose the best way to situate ourselves. Consciousness and the feeling of being conscious play a role in making that system effective. Our emotions and judgments are tied to survival; they’re helpful. So even if it sounds abstract, consciousness is indeed a valuable part of an information-processing system. How we feel about ourselves, others, and the world helps us survive long enough to reproduce and raise the next generation. That’s how evolution works—we’re the latest generation in billions that perpetuated the species by reproducing. Current neuroscience suggests that your memories and everything you know are likely encoded in your connectome—the entire set of connections among your neurons via dendrites. We have around 10¹¹ neurons in the brain, each with roughly a thousand connections. Do I have my numbers right?
Jacobsen: Eighty-six billion neurons, each with one thousand to ten thousand connections.
Rosner: That’s closer to 10¹¹ neurons, each with about a thousand connections. Every connection has a tunable strength, and the entire set of connections is probably where our identity, awareness, and memories reside. So consciousness has a definite spatial structure in those connections, but also an informational structure. You could map the connections physically if you had the technology. However, the information they hold can also be represented abstractly in three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, with its own physics resembling that of the universe. That, in a nutshell, is informational cosmology: parallels between the physics and information processing of the universe and the physics and information processing of consciousness. They likely share characteristics. For example, the most efficient way to map the information in consciousness may be three spatial and one temporal dimension. Just as protons, electrons, and neutrons clump into structures and information travels via photons and neutrinos, you could imagine a similar structure for information in awareness. That’s informational cosmology in brief. The Big Bang theory postulates a spatially symmetric universe—every point in space looks roughly like every other—but temporally asymmetric, because each moment seems different from the last. The common analogy is that of a balloon being blown up: every point on the surface looks the same, but the balloon continues to expand. So in the Big Bang universe, you can’t easily know where you are in space, but you can always see where you are in time. That doesn’t work for a model of the brain as an information processor. Our brains handle roughly the same amount of information throughout our lives. You may know more at 60 than at 20, but the overall capacity is stable. That doesn’t match an ever-expanding Big Bang universe. A helpful model of consciousness as an information universe should be temporally symmetric. The information map of your consciousness at 30 shouldn’t look drastically different at 40; your brain’s structure at full capacity looks roughly the same year to year. That symmetry doesn’t align with a Big Bang model, where the universe appears different over time. So for most of my life, I’ve been trying—lazily, I admit—to sketch a temporally symmetric cosmology: galaxies flare, burn out, collapse, and others ignite in a rolling sequence of bangs. That rolling series of bangs seems like a better analogy.
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