3 Curious Connections Between Consciousness and Black Holes

Do with this what you will.

1. 2D, Holographic Principle, Berkeley

Black holes suck everything in, with their big gravitational pull which not even light can escape. Yet, where does all that sucked in stuff go? If we are obeying the laws of physics, how is the energy and information sucked in conserved? This is known as the black hole information paradox.

To solve this paradox physicists like Leonard Susskind argue that all of the information that is sucked into the black hole is encoded onto the 2D surface of the event horizon – the boundary of the black hole beyond which we cannot see any further into it. So, Susskind and others argue, all the information sucked into a black hole is conserved – only, the 3D information sucked in is conserved onto a 2D surface. This is known as the holographic principle – as of course holograms are 3D info on a 2D surface.

Nobel Prize winner, Gerard 't Hooft, along with Susskind, has claimed this 3D encoded stuff onto a 2D surface doesn’t just apply to black holes but to the whole universe. This they claim solves the problem of quantum gravity. So, the whole universe is actually 2D, they argue.

As Susskind writes, “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface.”

Now, here is where consciousness comes in. “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience”, writes Susskind… but is ordinary experience three-dimensional? It is not!

Firstly, neuroscientifically and ophthalmologically (the study of eyes) we only ever see in 2D. Each of our two eyes sees a 2D image, not a 3D one. Depth, three-dimensions, is only extrapolated from the combination and overlaying of the two sets of 2D images each eye provides. Depth is also guessed by things like curvature, shadows, and our knowledge of how big objects are depending on how close they are etc.

For example, we can guess at how far away a cow is through our knowledge of how big a cow is from close up, and by then extrapolating the distance the cow is from us based on how big or small the cow appears. The image of the cow though, on each eye, is always a 2D image – which is why you can’t see the back of the cow if it is facing you, for example. I have seen it argued that pre-historic early humans had not yet learned to extrapolate distance in this way. Maybe the first human who saw the first cow thought the cow was very close to them, and merely a tiny animal!

Now I hear imaginary objectors saying: “Well how come I can walk around? Forwards, backwards, left, right… this sure feels like a 3D universe.”

Well, anyone who has ever played a video game knows that apparently 3D movement can easily be encoded onto a 2D screen. If you’re playing Call of Duty, for example, you can see 3D on the game, you can move on the game… but it’s all encoded onto the 2D screen of the TV. All I am arguing is that it is the same with life.

And finally if you examine your experience right now, and look around you. Don’t you have something pretty much like a 2D confrontation with reality? The world hits you squarely – 2Dly – in the face. This is something the philosopher Berkeley argued in the 1800s. We do not see distance. And if you think about it, how could we? If we experience a 3D world, how would that work even? Would we somehow see around corners? Or see the back of our own heads – like if we’re playing a 3^rd person video game like Grand Theft Auto instead of a 1^st person one? When you think about it, a 2D world may be the only possible world. All this relates to Douglas Harding’s wonderful philosophy of headlessness – which I will write about in future works, so make sure you subscribe now, and ideally become a paid subscriber, as sadly, thought is not free.

So, black holes encode 3D information into 2D. Your consciousness does it too. Maybe the whole universe has been 2D all along. Weird.

And while some of this article, I admit, is very speculative and maybe even has an air of mild silliness, one point I do want to seriously make is that if phenomenology and scientific theory align on something – such as the 2Dness of the universe – this should give added weight to that theory. All too often phenomenology and science are considered to be two completely separate arenas. It is my expectation that in the future they will converge – possibly completely.

2. Acts like an observer by collapsing the quantum wave function

The next curious similarity between black holes and consciousness is that they both collapse the quantum wave function. I am sure everybody has heard of Schrödinger's cat. The cat is either alive or dead in the box. But before the box is opened, the cat is in a superposition – it is neither alive or dead, due to it’s mortality depending on a superposition, due to this weird cat killing quantum device it’s hooked up to. Only when an observer opens the box, who collapses the wave function linked to the cat’s mortality, actually kills or allows the cat to live based on that collapse. It is in this way that observers affect quantum mechanics.

Many argue that consciousness does not need to be present to collapse the wave function, any measurement or measuring device – whether conscious or not – collapses the wave function.

However, how could we know this? A conscious observer must be involed somewhere, even to look at the measuring device itself. It is possible that the measuring device only collapses the wave function once a conscious observer looks at the measuring device itself. And we could add measuring devices to measure the initial measuring device, but then you’d need a measuring device to measure that one… and so on… There simply must be a conscious observer somewhere for an empirical measurement to be made and substantiated, which is of course circular, but that simply gets at the unavoidability of consciousness in everything – every act of perception, and every possible known or experienced universe.

But how does this link to black holes? Well, black holes collapse the wave function too.

Physicists from the University of Chicago found that black holes collapse the wave function. As explained in a Quanta article on the topic I quote some of below:

In 2021, Wald, Satishchandran and Danielson were exploring a paradox brought about when hypothetical observers gather information in this way (opens a new tab). They imagined an experimenter called Alice who creates a particle in a superposition. At a later time, she looks for an interference pattern. The particle will only exhibit interference if it hasn’t become too entangled with any outside system while Alice observes it.

Then along comes Bob, who is attempting to measure the particle’s position from far away by measuring the particle’s long-range fields. According to the rules of causality, Bob shouldn’t be able to influence the outcome of Alice’s experiment, since the experiment should be over by the time the signals from Bob get to Alice. However, by the rules of quantum mechanics, if Bob does successfully measure the particle, it will become entangled with him, and Alice won’t see an interference pattern.

The trio rigorously calculated that the amount of decoherence due to Bob’s actions is always less than the decoherence that Alice would naturally cause by the radiation she emits (which also becomes entangled with the particle). So Bob could never decohere Alice’s experiment because she would already have decohered it herself. Although an earlier version of this paradox was resolved in 2018 (opens a new tab) with a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Wald and a different team of researchers, Danielson took it one step further.

He posed a thought experiment to his collaborators: “Why can’t I put [Bob’s] detector behind a black hole?” In such a setup, a particle in a superposition outside the event horizon will emanate fields that cross over the horizon and get detected by Bob on the other side, within the black hole. The detector gains information about the particle, but as the event horizon is a “one-way ticket,” no information can cross back over, Danielson said. “Bob cannot influence Alice from inside of the black hole, so the same decoherence must occur without Bob,” the team wrote in an email to Quanta. The black hole itself must decohere the superposition.

“In the more poetic language of the participatory universe, it is as if the horizon watches superpositions,” Danielson said.

Using a thought experiment, these physicists showed that black holes collapse the wave function, thus acting like conscious observers. If Schrödinger's cat was flying towards the event horizon of a black hole, the black hole would collapse the wave function, and either kill the cat or keep it living.

The Chicago physicists, Robert Wald, Gautam Satishchandran and Daine Danielson comment on this saying, “It evokes the idea that these black hole horizons are watching” and “space-time itself plays the role of the observer”.

Thus we have our second spooky connection between black holes and consciousness. Both collapse the quantum wave function.

3. Things go in, but not out

The final curious connection between black holes and consciousness is found in the notion that they each suck everything – including light itself – in, but give nothing out. We know this with black holes. Nothing can escape their gravitational pull. Nothing can escape them. This leads some physicists to say that a black hole has never actually been observed, because in order to be observed they must emit some signal, but all signals are sucked into the black hole, therefore we cannot see them. All we see is their effects.

How does this relate to consciousness?

Well, it is the same with consciousness. Consciousness sucks everything in. The whole universe appears to your consciousness. Right now, there is a whole universe ‘inside’ of you. There is a world, stars, and if you were able to space travel, a universe out there… all within your mind. Every person is a universe. And consciousness sucks it all in, so to speak.

Furthermore, light does not escape your consciousness. All the light surrounding you is sucked in through your eyes, with pupils which look very much like black holes by the way.

And, famously, consciousness, despite sucking everything in, gives nothing out! As we cannot empirically perceive black holes, we cannot empirically perceive consciousness. Consciousness is famously unobservable. You cannot peer inside someone’s brain and see their consciousness. There is no light emitted, or anything emitted, from consciousness.

Some might claim that the light and energy taken in by the eyes is converted into electric signals in the brain, and that this is where that energy goes and is conserved. And we can concede that that occurs. But this brain function tells us nothing about consciousness or the energy of consciousness. As I write about elsewhere, brain chemistry is not identical with and cannot be said to be a sufficient or necessary condition for, consciousness.

So, appeals to the brain do nothing to explain this final similarity between black holes and consciousness. Both suck everything in, and give nothing out.

Conclusion

There you have it. Three curious connections between consciousness and black holes. Maybe these are coincidences. Or maybe black holes are the vacuums out of which the energy sucked in by conscious observers escapes and is conserved, and each conscious observer has their own corresponding black hole energy vacuum. Maybe this explains why at the end of a Vipassana meditation retreat I could hear what sounded like a mystical hoover. Or maybe that was tinnitus I had become more aware of… Maybe there is some other connection between black holes and consciousness. Maybe not. Maybe this is silly speculative nonsense. Hard to say.

One thing is for sure, black holes and consciousness do share one similarity: They are both very weird, and neither understood.