Fumfer Physics 33: Relational Information and the Leaky Quantum Universe

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/18

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore an “informational cosmology” where the universe is a relational information-processing system. Rosner defines information as selecting one outcome from many possible outcomes, which only counts when events leave durable, readable records. They contrast transient and stable traces, from stellar reactions to human memories, and ask whether awareness matters to cosmic information. Questioning simple “universe as computer” models, they propose emergent, fuzzy properties that sharpen with scale, tied to quantum entanglement and probabilistic “leakiness.” The universe continually defines its own frame through changing relations, not absolute size or static digital bits evolving over time.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve had several ideas come up in the Informational Cosmology. One of them has to do with the degrees of freedom in a system and how we frame the universe as a relational system. I was thinking about the degrees of freedom in a relational system vis-à-vis information. The idea of a physics of relational degrees of freedom of information would be distinct from digital information, where this digital information is by definition distinctive and singular. You then have a matrix, or matrices, of information networks. That is a different idea from the emergent components of the system becoming the information insofar as they relate to one another. And that relation happens through time. 

Rick Rosner: To preface what we’re talking about, we need the definition of information, which is: information is the choice of a specific outcome from a set of possible outcomes. The amount of information is related to how many possible outcomes there were and how unlikely the actual outcome was. For equally likely outcomes, more possible outcomes means more information when one outcome is selected.

If you throw a fair coin, you have two possible outcomes, and getting one of the two corresponds to one bit of information. If you roll a fair die that has a hundred sides, choosing one out of a hundred possibilities corresponds to more information than one out of two. That is the basic idea of information: the more possible outcomes you could have had, the more information is gained when you learn which outcome actually occurred. That would be a baseline definition. However, if you’re dealing with relationships among parts, it adds a different kind of layering to the definition of information.

The issue is that when you say “information within a system,” you then have to talk about what the system is. One system might be the entire universe, and every quantum event that leaves a stable, distinguishable record should, in principle, add information to the system’s history.

So we have to talk about what is required for information to count as information in this sense. The event has to leave a durable record—something that, at least in principle, could be read out later. For instance, in a star, an enormous number of quantum events occur every second—on the order of about 10³⁸ nuclear reactions per second in a star like the sun, plus vastly more particle interactions of other kinds. Most of those events don’t leave a separate, long-lived, macroscopically readable trace. One relatively durable event within a star might be nuclear fusion: a couple of deuterium nuclei come together to form a helium nucleus. That change in nuclei is very hard to undo and can be thought of as a kind of record of that interaction.

By contrast, exchanging heat-carrying photons in the center of the sun, where the temperature is extremely high, involves a huge number of interactions, but most of those photon scatterings don’t leave an independently accessible, persistent “record” that we can later identify as a specific individual event. You can infer that they are happening because the sun is extremely hot and photons are carrying the energy outward, but for a distant observer most of those individual interactions are not traceable as separate, durable events. Only a tiny fraction of photons eventually make it from the core to the surface and then escape into space, where their existence can, in principle, become part of the observable record. 

So for the system to have any information in this sense, the event has to leave a distinctive representation in the state of the system—something that, at least in principle, could distinguish “this happened” from “this did not happen.”

Jacobsen: Well, even things that are transient, that don’t have an indefinitely durable existence but persist for a sufficient amount of time to have an impact on the system and change its subsequent evolution, can therefore change the net informational content of that system.

And we have human information systems, where we get sensory information and we have thoughts, and somehow information is processed within our awareness. We live in a world where there are many events that are at least temporarily durable. What we experience leaves traces in our nervous systems, in our memory, and in the physical records we create, memories persist until we die, and our brains break down, and then all that information is lost because the structures that held the information can no longer hold it.

So then what you need, I think, is some kind of general or unified theory of information—one that ties all information in all relevant systems together and explains the whole ecosystem of information: how various information-containing systems impinge on each other informationally. Does it matter to the information-processing system that is the universe when we, as individual humans, experience events in our awareness that generate information for us?

Rosner: I would guess that in the overall information-processing system that is the universe, a lot of the information-generating events in our awareness have no relevance. At the same time, if there are gigantic civilizations that are millions of years old, that interact with the universe and engineer it for their own long-term survival over billion-year spans, then what those civilizations do might matter.

Can civilizations within the universe affect the information processing of the entire universe? I don’t know. But a unified theory of information—which would likely also be a unified theory of the universe—would clarify that. Does that sound reasonable?

Jacobsen: Yes. So what you’re suggesting is a program of inquiry: How do we… When we talk about the universe as a relational system, the universe “perceives” itself via quantum interactions, and those interactions are relational. Everything in the universe defines itself and everything else through a history of interaction. And then how does that relate to a digital system? 

Rosner: All the “it-from-bit” people—Wheeler, Wigner, von Neumann, and others—have been pushing “universe as computer” ideas since the 1960s, and Fredkin and others kept developing them. Naturally, early attempts took the form of: the universe is a computer, and quantum events correspond to zeros and ones.

And by poking at it, you and I think that maybe this isn’t quite right—and also because people have been talking about that for 60 or 70 years now. I don’t see a program that has delivered substantial results. But I’m not fully informed. What do you think?

Jacobsen: My general idea is that you have a framework of emergent properties, and information can be defined as those properties emerging with increasing distinctness. But that begins to replicate the digital infrastructure we see in modern computers, whether stacked processors or two-dimensional ones. The emergent property is still information—it’s just that the definition of that information is incomplete.

So there has to be a way in which you can define parts of the universe relationally as emergent, while including a variable for the fuzziness of that information as things become more distinct. The degree of fuzziness should decrease as the scale increases and as more properties become well-defined.

Rosner: That matches what we know from physics: the wavelengths associated with matter at macroscopic scales are incredibly small, because there is an enormous number of particles—on the order of 10⁸⁰ to around 10⁸⁵ particles in the observable universe, all interacting with each other.

So things are tightly defined, so the fuzziness is at a very microscopic scale. There is another thing, which is that the universe is entangled with itself. Everything in the universe is a quantum system. It is a quantum-entangled entity. Whether you can call it a quantum computer, I guess, though it does not look like our primitive quantum computers, because primitive quantum computers are still doing manipulations of bits. There are still zeros and ones; the processing is more powerful because it is massively parallel and entangled.

It is not to say that the universe does the same type of information processing. It is still hard to find the zeros and ones in what the universe is doing—if there are zeros and ones at all. There are distinct quantum events. When a quantum event happens, you can characterize it with exact numbers, even though the particles involved are fuzzy. You can say: this event occurred, and the universe at a later point in time reflects these distinct and precise quantum events having happened. Though again, the precision might be limited, you can arrange the universe by doing experiments so you can know with a high degree of certainty that a quantum event has happened.

You never get 100 percent certainty, but a quantum event that you think happened has an exact mathematical description—a mathematical “name.” This event happened, and this is precisely what happened if this event happened, and we can know that the event happened with a very high degree of certainty, but not 100 percent. Does all that make sense?

Jacobsen: So there is going to be an overarching property of how leaky a particular event is, whether it is an object, a world line, or a large section of the universe, depending on size. So it is a sliding scale of how defined things are. That would be one variable included in that. So the relational degrees of freedom—the variable—would probably be defined in a very simple way, a mathematical symbol representing the degrees of freedom for this particular event and world line of the universe.

Rosner: For people who do not know a lot of quantum mechanics, the first example you learn is the particle in a well, or a box. Here is a particle. It is fuzzy. It is in a box—a place it cannot get out of because there is a potential barrier. In that description, the particle is fuzzy, and there is a high probability it is here, and a lower probability it exists as a cloud, a probability cloud, that is generally located here. The center of that cloud is here, but the particle can be any place within the cloud with a probability at each point, and the cloud extends to infinity. So you get quantum tunneling.

Say you have a particle in a box—an electron. The probability that the electron is an inch away from the center of the cloud might be one in 10²⁰. But that is not zero. So if you had 10²⁰ electrons in boxes, one of them would appear outside the box because of probability. That is what leakiness is—quantum leakiness is that you cannot pin everything down precisely, including quantum events. In a technical sense, we are leaking out to the edge of the universe all the time.

But the universe, through its interactions, holds itself together. This is not the Big Bang expansion, but imagine the universe flying apart all the time—if all the particles were expanding. If everything is expanding at the same rate and the distances are all scaling uniformly, then the universe cannot perceive that, and it is meaningless. It is like the difference between a photograph and an enlargement of a photograph. If it is the same photograph, it does not matter how much you enlarge it, because the relations among the things in the photograph remain the same. It is only when you get differential changes—when the relationships change—that anything becomes perceptible.

So the universe manages, regardless of what overall frame you put on it, to define itself and provide its own frame. Even though mathematical frames might make it convenient to think of the universe as something flying apart, if everything is flying apart to the same extent and none of the relationships among the elements change, then it becomes meaningless—except as a mathematical convenience to talk about the size of the frame changing, as long as everything within the frame stays the same.

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