The Fragility of Existence

Let us take a book that contains information. Let us put it into a powerful machine, break it down to its atoms, and scatter them into the environment.

The book no longer exists. But has the information it contained disappeared as well?

According to unitarity, one of the fundamental principles of quantum physics, the evolution of a closed quantum system does not destroy information. Breaking the book apart, then, is less like erasing its information and more like dispersing it until it becomes unrecognizable. The arrangement of the ink molecules on its pages is destroyed, but traces of the initial state are scattered into the motion of atoms, the photons that are emitted, the heat transferred by the machine to its surroundings, and the countless correlations among the components of the system.

At first glance, the idea that information is conserved can feel reassuring. As if the universe never truly forgets anything.

But when we look a little deeper, this idea stops being comforting and begins to feel strangely cold.

Because continuing to exist and continuing to exist as the same thing are not the same.

The atoms of the book are still in the universe. The physical traces of their past states may not have been completely erased either. And yet the book is no longer a book.

This brings us to a more fundamental question.

What makes something what it is?

Its matter?

The information it carries?

Or the fact that this information is organized into a particular whole at a particular moment?

A book is not a book merely because it consists of paper and ink. The ink must form certain shapes, those shapes must become letters, the letters must become words, and the words must become sentences. Beyond all of that, there must also be a mind capable of reading the language.

The atoms may remain the same, but when the order disappears, the story disappears with it.

That is why the preservation of physical information and the preservation of meaning are not the same thing.

Meaning is not some hidden substance residing inside the individual parts. It emerges from the relationships between those parts and from the way they are organized.

If we looked at such a system as software architects, our solution would probably be quite different. We would keep a record showing where each part came from. We would create an index, assign an identity to every piece, and reconstruct the system from that record whenever necessary.

Nature has no such separate metadata layer. There is no label attached to an atom saying that it belongs to a particular word in the third paragraph on page 127 of this book.

The information resides in the physical state of the system itself. It is distributed across the states of the particles and the correlations between them.

In the language of software, metadata is not stored separately from the data. The state of matter is already part of the information itself.

That is why bringing the same atoms back together would not be enough to reconstruct the book. We would also have to restore the same order, the same relationships, and the same structure.

This is where the real difficulty begins.

As a system interacts with its environment, traces of its original order spread across an ever larger domain. Atoms collide with air molecules. Heat disperses into the surroundings. Photons travel away. Every new interaction carries the initial state into an increasingly vast physical network.

The information may not have disappeared, but it is no longer located in one place. Its wholeness has dissolved.

What unsettles us is that the “preservation” of information is not really a consolation at all. It points instead to a much colder reality.

You continue to exist, but you are no longer you.

The human mind constructs both the concept of the “self” and the “meaning” of an object through boundaries and wholes.

A book remains a book as long as it is a story that emerges from letters arranged together. But when the machine reduces it to its atoms, that “meaning” evaporates.

When we descend to the most fundamental descriptive level of physics, there are no words, no philosophy, no memories, and no emotions. There are only quantum states, spins, heat, and momentum.

Now let us push this thought experiment to its extreme. What happens if, instead of breaking the book apart in a machine, we throw it into a black hole?

The strong theoretical expectation emerging from the black hole information paradox today is that information falling into a black hole is not destroyed at the fundamental level. As the black hole evaporates, the Hawking radiation it emits is expected to carry information about the initial state in extraordinarily complex quantum correlations.

In other words, the black hole does not destroy the book and turn it into nothingness.

But it does not give the book back to us either.

It disperses the physical history of the book in such a complex way that reconstructing the original whole becomes practically impossible for us.

At this point, the conservation of information takes on a strange meaning.

The universe may not have forgotten you.

But that does not mean it has preserved you.

When a person dies, the matter that made up that person remains in the universe. The atoms become part of other structures. Energy takes on other forms. Traces of past physical states spread into the surrounding world.

But the person was never merely the sum of those atoms.

Their memories, relationships, thoughts, body, and mind existed together for a certain period of time in a particular organization. Perhaps this is precisely what we call identity. Not matter itself, but the temporary way in which matter is organized.

From this perspective, entropy is not merely an increase in disorder. It is also the dissolution of wholes.

When a glass shatters, the glass material does not disappear, but the glass as an object does.

When a book is torn apart, the ink does not disappear, but the story becomes unreadable.

The parts that make up a human being may remain in the universe, but the organization that binds them into a single self does not last forever.

Perhaps this is why the conservation of information is not as comforting as we might think.

The universe preserves the parts, but it does not have to preserve the whole.

And yet there is another side to this.

In a universe where entropy disperses everything, it is remarkable that matter can come together for a brief period of time and become stars, living beings, minds, books, and thoughts.

Meaning may not be one of the elementary particles of the universe, but when certain parts come together in a particular order, it emerges.

The story of a book does not reside inside its ink atoms. A person’s memories do not reside inside their carbon atoms.

And yet, when the right organization emerges, there is a story. There is memory. There is a self.

Perhaps the real miracle is not that information is preserved forever. Perhaps the real miracle is that these parts, destined eventually to disperse, can come together for a while and form a whole.

The universe does not design a file system, as we would, to store information. It is almost as if the universe itself were one vast database.

While entropy tends to disperse everything, the fact that your information, your memories, or that book can exist as a whole in this universe right now is one of the extraordinary temporary forms of order that matter is capable of creating.

This brief moment before everything disperses again is existence and meaning’s one great victory over the cold mathematics of the universe.