In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.
Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (via bobschofield)
Unitarity, phase incompressibility, and time reversal invariance of microscopic physical laws are not direct statements about the information held by any mind or machine, or about the ability of any mind or machine to profitably locally reverse such dynamics given state information. Whatever it might mean that information is never lost generally, still macroscopic irreversible phenomenology persuades the reasonable person, with great and reliable force, that information can be lost to us - and that things can become dead to us - and that they do so with great and tragic frequency.
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