Black Hole Omniscience

I’m going to let my mind wander into uncharted territory in a thought experiment kicked off by a discussion with Braja. Feel free to shoot me down.

I’m starting with an extract from The Black Swan:

QUOTE

This multiplicative difficulty leading to the need for greater and greater precision in assumptions can be illustrated with the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry.

If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry's computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome. Now, consider the additional burden of having to incorporate predictions about where these variables will be in the future. Forecasting the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table requires knowledge of the dynamics of the entire universe, down to every single atom! We can easily predict the movements of large objects like planets (though not too far into the future), but the smaller entities can be difficult to figure out—and there are so many more of them.

UNQUOTE

So much for any celestial being having omniscience. To have knowledge of the location and velocity every particle in the universe first of all contravenes the Uncertainty Principle (the act of observing itself affects the velocity and/or location of the particles being observed, or to put it another way, the particle's momentum is left uncertain by an amount inversely proportional to the accuracy of the position measurement – at least in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics), and secondly, to store those parameters for processing (and all information is stored in matter) would require something many orders of magnitude greater than the entire mass of the universe – albeit potentially within a very small space. That entity itself would need to self-realise and know about all the ‘particles’ comprising itself too – leading to an infinite mass, or black hole.

If God sits in a black hole, he’s unable to communicate with us, let alone interact with us, as all information is lost in a black hole and no information can escape. The same goes for us communicating with him. The mere act of trying to be omniscient (assuming it’s possible – and it should be for a God) results in God being bottled up incommunicado in a black hole.

The only way God could interact is if he were part of the universe – not only part of it, but the universe in its entirety, including us.

That’s really an argument for pantheism (with a not necessarily sentient God) and a deterministic universe devoid of free will. I can’t say I’m a big fan of the free will concept, preferring instead to believe we have the illusion of free will. Human brains are especially well adapted to making us see patterns where there are none and rationalising the irrational.