Time & Information
Memory, entropy, and the arrow of knowledge
Overview
Time and information are bound together by the concept of entropy: the second law of thermodynamics gives time its arrow, and that same arrow governs the accumulation and degradation of information. Memory is information retained from the past; prediction is information projected into the future. The flow of time is, in a deep sense, the flow of information — from low-entropy initial conditions toward high-entropy final states, with complex structures of knowledge arising transiently between.
Central Tension
The central tension is between preservation and erasure. Does the past still exist informationally, or is information about the past genuinely lost as time advances? Unitarity in quantum mechanics suggests that information is never truly destroyed — it may be scrambled beyond practical recovery, but it persists in the quantum state of the universe. Yet the thermodynamic arrow of time tells us that useful, structured information degrades irreversibly into noise. Whether information is eternal or perishable turns on whether time is fundamentally reversible or fundamentally directed.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Is the arrow of time identical to the increase of entropy, or does time have a direction independent of information loss?
- Can information about the past ever be truly and permanently lost, or does unitarity guarantee its preservation?
- Does the accumulation of knowledge over time represent a genuine increase in information, or merely a redistribution of pre-existing information?
- If time were reversed, would information flow backward — and what would memory, knowledge, and causation mean in such a world?
Schools of Thought
All information exists timelessly in the block universe; nothing is truly lost or gained, only accessed from different temporal perspectives along the worldline.
Only present information is real; the past is genuinely gone and the future genuinely open. Memory is a present trace, not access to a still-existing past.
Time is the iteration cycle of the simulation, and information is its fundamental currency. Each tick processes, transforms, and potentially overwrites data from the previous state.
All compounded things — including information — are impermanent. Clinging to past knowledge or future expectation is a source of suffering; wisdom lies in seeing the arising and passing of information moment by moment.
Quantum unitarity preserves information absolutely; the apparent loss of information over time is a feature of decoherence and our limited observational access, not a fundamental fact about the universe.
God holds all information eternally — nothing is lost to him. Human knowledge is finite and time-bound, but divine omniscience ensures that no truth perishes with the passage of time. The "book of life" is the ultimate informational record.
Synthesis
Time and information define the epistemic arrow of reality: what can be known, what has been lost, and what is yet to be determined. Their intersection is the territory of memory, entropy, causation, and prediction — the fabric from which all temporal knowledge is woven. Whether information is ultimately conserved or genuinely perishable remains one of the deepest open questions in physics and philosophy alike.