Fumfer Physics 11: Is Information in the Universe Preserved or Lost Over Time?
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss whether information is ultimately preserved or lost in both human minds and the universe. Jacobsen suggests that minds accumulate information until cognitive decline, while Rosner emphasizes that contradictions do not erase prior knowledge but reframe it within context. Extending the analogy, Rosner argues that the universe may form “thoughts” over billions of years, similar to how the brain integrates sensory and memory inputs. However, because each universal “thought” takes about 15 billion years, humans cannot perceive its arc of knowledge or decay within our limited lifespans.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In IC, is information on net preserved and/or increased?
Rick Rosner: It depends on how you count it. It depends on whether it can be.
Jacobsen: I would reason from the information held in our minds, because I think there are strong analogies. Generally, the net amount of information in our minds increases throughout life until the brain begins to break down, at which point we lose information gradually—or eventually all at once, when we die. So I think you can reason similarly about information in the universe. You can also lose information when what you know is contradicted by new information.
Rosner: That’s slightly different, because the earlier information was valid within a particular context. If you get contradictory information in a different enough context, you’re not really erasing the first information—you’re reframing it. So whether information is net gained depends on what you’re learning and on the condition of the hardware that lets you maintain the information.
Jacobsen: Maybe that’s another way to frame the question. Over an individual’s life, there’s an arc in both the amount and the quality of information their mind contains. If you average it over the lifespan, you get a kind of line of best fit. Could you make the same argument for the universe—that there are fluctuations in the net amount of information?
Rosner: No, you can’t make the same argument, because extending it to the universe suggests different dynamics. I tend to think that 10 or 20 billion years is roughly the lifespan of the universe’s ability to share information about the current context across itself. That’s the equivalent of a thought. For you to have a thought, new information comes in from your senses, your memory, and your judgment, and all of it integrates to create a picture of the present moment. That information has to be shared across your entire brain. If you pay attention to your own thinking, you can notice subtle effects—different parts of the brain processing bits of the same moment slightly out of sync, sometimes a quarter of a second apart. If you pay attention closely, you can catch yourself saying, “I knew that was going to happen.” Like when you set a cup on the counter, miss, and it tips off. You tell yourself, “I could see that coming.”
One of the reasons you might feel like you saw it coming is because, in part of your experience, it already happened. Within a quarter of a second, maybe a fifth, you can second-guess what you’re about to do because you sense it will have a bad consequence. Except you’re not really stopping yourself, because the action has already occurred—part of your brain just hasn’t processed it yet. All of that unfolds within a fraction of a second. I believe the universe forms “thoughts” across its entire extent, on the timescale of light traveling across it—10 to 20 billion years. So if we say the universe has an arc of knowledge, like how people accumulate information and wisdom across a lifespan, then we have to consider the scale. If I do the math: say 10,000 thoughts an hour, 10 hours a day, that’s 100,000 thoughts daily. I’ve lived about 25,000 days, so that’s in the billions of thoughts—a staggering number. If the universe is analogous, it also has a staggering number of thoughts. But for us to see a curve of its growth or decay would take quintillions or sextillions of years, because each “thought” takes 15 billion years. So no, we can’t observe that arc. If the analogy holds, we simply don’t live long enough.
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