this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Information is destroyed all the time, conciousness is just information, and will cease to exist in a meaningful form when the structure of matter hosting it (your body, and in particular your brain) ceases to function in a way that supports that.
The energy that motivated your body and acted as signals in your brain will disipate. Your actual matter will stick around in one form or another. After all, we are all "star stuff", and given long enough, our "stuff" will return to the universe at large.
You just angered all quantum physicists everywhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't think information could be destroyed.
Black holes are a good example of information destruction. Matter and energy fall into the gravity well, and eventually are reemited as Hawking radiation, but as far as current theories go, there's no way to reconstruct the information that made up the original matter or energy from that radiation.
Information isn't a "thing" but the relationship between, and exact quantum state of, things. Once that state is disrupted, the information is gone.
That was actually debunked https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029/
Unless I still misunderstand.
I recall reading about that research some time ago, thanks for reminding me of it.
I was perhaps being a bit slapdash referring to information being destroyed, as in the quantum sense, yes, it can be recovered. However the recovery posited in the paper is a theoretical simulation of the information that entered the blackhole, which, I suppose could be used as a direct analogy for the actual information that entered the black hole, or maybe somehow used to create an actual copy of it, but, as far as I can see, it also requires that the black hole completely evaporates to release all of the information. Without all of the information, the information you do have does not describe the initial state, as they put it in the article it is 'encrypted'.
Our initial discussion was about whether conciousness can be destroyed. Given that there is a period of time between information entering the black hole and having sufficient information back to create a simulation of it, and that conciousness arises from the detailed structure and working of our brains, I would say that a consciousness that falls into a black hole has, indeed been destroyed. Whether the mooted simulation means that said conciousness can be reconstructed at a future point is a different question, and rather resembles the Ship of Theseus question.
There also seem to be significant questions about the exact conclusions of the paper as it is very theoretical and based on a number of simplifying assumptions. I've tried to find the original paper, but it looks like it may be spread over several, and I really don't know where to start with sentences like 'We reformulate recent insights into black hole information in a manner emphasizing operationally-defined notions of entropy, Lorentz-signature descriptions, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. With the help of replica wormholes, we find that experiments of asymptotic observers are consistent with black holes as unitary quantum systems, with density of states given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula.'
So, in summary, yes, information is not actually destroyed when if falls into a black hole, it's just mangled beyond recognition, entangled with all the other information that has, and will, enter the black hole, and can only be reconstructed by theoretically entangling all of the radiation the hole emits over it's entire lifetime with a suitable simulation!
No, you understand correctly. Notabot just doesn't know what they're talking about