The Infinite Information Paradox!

[ScrappyMarcus]

The Infinite Information Paradox!

Anyone searching YouTube for free will will quickly be blasted with videos declaring that science has “proven” free will doesn’t exist. The argument goes like this: you are nothing more than atoms and particles, and every atom obeys the fixed laws of the universe. Therefore, everything about you — your choices, your thoughts, your life — was determined from the very beginning.

And indeed, this is exactly what you would expect if there is no God and the universe is the product of blind, unguided processes. But are they right? And what laws are they talking about?

They are appealing to the Standard Model of physics — the mathematical framework that describes matter, energy, and their interactions. And here I will concede something important: the Standard Model mathematics does, in theory, determine the location, direction, and outcome of every particle in the universe. With what precision? With infinite precision.

And that is the hidden problem.

The Standard Model relies on real numbers — numbers with infinite decimal expansions. This means every particle in the universe must carry infinite information to define its position and trajectory. But infinite information in finite space is impossible. Worse, it’s a universe killer.

Enter the villain of the cosmos: the black hole.

When particles fall into a black hole, their information is stored on the event horizon. The size of that horizon is directly proportional to the amount of information it holds — and it is finite. If even a single particle carried infinite information, black holes could not exist. The laws of physics themselves would collapse.

And so the “infinite determinism” of the Standard Model is not just unlikely — it is impossible.

Some scientists, like Giuseppe Longo and others, have proposed alternatives that use computational numbers instead of raw real numbers. These models still describe the universe with astonishing accuracy, but without requiring infinite precision. The result is profound: if the universe runs on computational numbers, then outcomes are not absolutely fixed. There is always a gap, always room for uncertainty. And that gap means determinism is false — and freedom is real.

But it gets even deeper.

Physics runs on mathematics. But it does not run on all mathematics. There are entire regions of math that the raw universe cannot use, because they are too heavy, too infinite, or simply irrelevant to dead matter.

Take real numbers. On paper, they seem natural, but every real number contains an infinite expansion of information. Physics cannot use them in full. It works instead with finite approximations.

And yet real numbers exist. More than that: they are indispensable to us.

Humans discovered that reals, which the cosmos itself cannot wield, are the very tools by which we heal, build, and understand. Calculus — built on reals — lets us predict the growth of tumors and design precise treatments. It enables MRI and CT scans, life-saving images of the body’s interior. It tells us how drugs diffuse through tissues, how viruses spread, how bridges bend, how planes fly, how spacecraft land on alien worlds. Real numbers power the equations of relativity, the wavefunctions of quantum mechanics, the global models that warn us of storms and climate change. They are also the foundation of machine learning: backpropagation, gradient descent, and the high-dimensional optimization of neural networks all depend on reals.

In short: real numbers are deadly for the universe itself but life-saving for the beings who inhabit it. They are useless to physics but indispensable to minds.

This is the paradox: the universe itself cannot run on real numbers, yet conscious beings can — and must. They are useless to physics, but indispensable to minds. Why should such mathematics exist at all if reality were nothing more than blind matter? The most natural conclusion is that the universe was not meant only for matter. It was meant for mind because it was created by a mind.

was not designed only for particles. It was designed for persons. Not just for matter, but for mind.

And it gets even deeper then that … but then we a lot deeper into physics and so I will save that for a later time.