8.4 Spacetime as Emergent from Information Structure
Spacetime geometry may be constituted by quantum entanglement, sever the entanglement and the spacetime tears, which means asking where consciousness is in spacetime may be malformed, because both may be emergent from something more fundamental that has physical and experiential aspects simultaneously.
Proto
Physicists have been circling this for thirty years without quite landing. The holographic principle, that the information content of a region is proportional to its boundary area, not its volume, suggests that three-dimensional space is not fundamental. It is a projection of a two-dimensional information structure.
Building on Susskind’s earlier holographic argument[susskind], Van Raamsdonk pushed further: spacetime geometry may be constituted by quantum entanglement[vanraamsdonk]. Sever the entanglement between two regions and the spacetime connecting them literally tears. Maldacena and Susskind formalized this intuition as the ER = EPR conjecture: the Einstein-Rosen bridge (a wormhole) and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement are the same phenomenon described two ways. Geometry is not the container of physics. It is a consequence of the information relationships between parts of a quantum system.
If this is right, then the question “where is consciousness in spacetime” is malformed, like asking where the stock market is in the periodic table. Consciousness and spacetime may both be emergent from something more fundamental, something that has both physical and experiential aspects simultaneously.
The holographic boundary is the more fundamental thing. The three-dimensional interior, including all the spacetime we navigate, is what the boundary looks like from inside.
