Space & Information
Holography, locality, and the spatial encoding of knowledge
Overview
The holographic principle — one of the most striking results of modern theoretical physics — suggests that all the information contained within a volume of space can be encoded on its boundary surface. This implies that spatial reality may be fundamentally informational: what we experience as three-dimensional extension is a projection of a lower-dimensional information structure. Space, far from being a passive container, is itself a carrier and encoder of information at every scale, from quantum entanglement to the cosmic microwave background.
Central Tension
The deepest tension is between locality and holism. Classical physics treats information as localized in space: a book sits on a shelf, a signal propagates from point to point. But quantum entanglement shows that information can be non-locally correlated across vast spatial separations, with no signal traveling between the entangled systems. The holographic principle goes further, suggesting that spatial dimensionality itself is an informational construct — that the "inside" of a region of space is fully described by information on its boundary.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Is space a fundamental container for information, or is space itself an emergent property of underlying informational relationships?
- Does the holographic principle mean that spatial volume is an illusion — that reality is fundamentally lower-dimensional?
- How does quantum entanglement challenge the idea that information must be spatially localized?
- If all information about a region of space is encoded on its boundary, what does "inside" mean?
Schools of Thought
Quantum entanglement demonstrates that information transcends spatial locality; the quantum state encodes correlations that are irreducible to any spatial arrangement of local facts.
Space is the computational grid of the simulation, and information is its content. The holographic principle is a natural consequence of optimized data storage in a computed universe.
Information is the fundamental reality; space is one of its emergent organizational patterns. The spatial arrangement of things is itself a form of data structure.
Space is constituted by the relations between things — and those relations are informational. There is no space apart from the web of informational connections between entities.
Information is physically encoded in spatial configurations of matter and energy. The holographic principle is a physical fact about how nature organizes data, not evidence of a deeper non-physical layer.
God is omnipresent and omniscient: he knows all information at every point in space simultaneously. The spatial encoding of information reflects the orderly rationality of God's creative design, not the self-organization of an autonomous cosmos.
Synthesis
Space and information together raise the question of whether the spatial world is a stage on which information plays, or whether space is itself a manifestation of informational structure. The holographic principle, quantum entanglement, and the spatial encoding of data in physical systems all suggest that the relationship between space and information is far more intimate than classical intuition allows — that to understand either, we must understand both together.