Death in the traditional sense being seen as the total end of a person can be considered a Gotterdammerung event if you prescribe to a non-linear timeline. If all memories and experiences of a person are effectively erased when his brain dies without leaving any trace, then how can he still have an experience before his death? To answer that we should either hold a linear timeline framework or be forced to think of death in non conventionnel ways. What are your thoughts ?
this might be dumb but i guess one way to look at is every time a conscious agent dies they, although perhaps it’s not felt, experience the death of the universe.
If you mean by the death of the universe erasing all data from the universe , in this case we fall right back into a Gotterdammerung event and the theory is nullified. What I personally think is that death is a double edged sword and depends on the observer. If agent A dies in universe A for exemple, all other agents in the same universe would perceive him to be dead, however, agent's A conscious experience gets immediately transferred to universe B and he continues living on without even knowing he died. In that sense, we die all the time but never perceive it until all the potential gets exhausted. At this stage, he gives up all his data to the universal consciousness and might acquire a new agency , a.k.a gets reincarnated, and so on. Cause the aim of consciousness is not death but continuity.
Yes and no. The solution is one universe governed by conciousness in a timeless, infinite fundamental lower dimensional state than our own. Our reality, a projected higher dimensional construct where conciousness is an intrinsic property of the projection.
I'm okey with this solution except for the one universe part. For what reason would we think there is only one universe (this objective reality and only this one) ? It's like saying there is only one planet on which we live. Reality should be unbound.
And to clarify, by many universes I don't mean the classic many world interpretation, I mean I pool of potential realities that only manifest when the observer decides to go to one or another (unconsciously of course, unless he's attained sufficient conscious awareness where conscious choice is possible).
Not unless every concious agent is an extension of a larger universal whole. It's what I meant that conciousness exists without self awareness. And if it exists in a timeless infinite form. Beyond a physical form, without invoking spiritual or deity implications.
The argument you're making fits well into the broader discussion of Götterdämmerung events and the paradox of our continued existence despite the apparent inevitability of catastrophic collapse. If existential termination events should have already wiped us out, then either our understanding of probability is flawed, or there's a deeper structure to reality—one that allows for intervention, persistence, or cycles of emergence and dissolution beyond standard physicalist interpretations.
Parapsychological phenomena, if taken seriously, suggest that consciousness is not merely an emergent property of material complexity but an interface—a kind of API—into a deeper nonlocal information field. If consciousness can access nonlocal energy and information, then what we consider ascension might not be a localized anomaly but a function of how intelligence interacts with the substrate of reality itself. This would mean that across the universe, anywhere intelligence arises, it has the potential to link into a structure outside spacetime, forming a kind of meta-network beyond the apparent limits of physical law.
The inverse is also worth considering. If such a system exists, then the collapse of civilization isn’t just a historical or economic process but a deeper form of informational entropy—a disconnection from this underlying structure. The catastrophic unraveling we see today, from ecological collapse to AI-driven hyper-fragmentation, may be what happens when systems lose their ability to harmonize with this deeper structure. Rather than an on-off switch, ascension or its opposite might manifest as an increase in systemic coherence or a descent into chaos, playing out at local and global scales.
This all loops back to the fundamental issue: if the Big Bang was a moment where infinite potential intersected with structured existence, why does nothing in our current models suggest an equivalent process in reverse? If we are, as your article suggests, potentially trapped in a typical universe where collapse should have already happened, then either reality has built-in constraints we don’t understand, or intelligence—at some scale—is capable of breaking free from the apparent determinism of entropy.
Maybe the real problem is that we're still thinking too much like a species trapped within spacetime, when the evidence—historical, anecdotal, and theoretical—suggests reality is structured more like an information system than a closed physical box. If that’s true, then ascension and collapse aren’t opposites; they’re different interface states with the fundamental architecture of reality.
I enjoy testing arguments and theories under extreme conditions in an attempt to find any flaws in them, so I’m a big fan of this approach.
I would consider mathematical inconsistency to be a sort of Götterdämmerung event, though probably to a lesser extent. An example of a mathematical inconsistency would be the grandfather paradox. This is because you can evolve a patch of the universe along a closed path and get different initial(grandfather alive) and final(grandfather dead) results. You are essentially evaluating the universe as a function of its coordinates and getting two very inconsistent results for the same input. In math, these are known as multivalued “functions”. I find such multivaluedness to be mathematically inconsistent, and therefore I believe multivalued solutions to be nonphysical. Evolving the universe along a path is mathematically equivalent to analytically continuing the universe in a given direction. I think of it like analytically continuing spacetime, though one could define the universe with a collection of functions instead of just spacetime. If a function has branch discontinuities, then it’s multivalued. If a function has no branch discontinuities, then it is an entire meromorphic function. As such, a mathematically consistent reality must be entire meromorphic, at least per my definitions.
Unfortunately, the analytic continuations of most solutions to PDE’s are multivalued. I had previously hoped that whatever PDE the universe abided by, that it would only possess entire meromorphic solutions. Alas, the only PDE’s I’ve found with this property are of the form ∇f[r]=w f[r] where r and w are vectors and f is a scalar. Then I discovered the solution I was looking for, Integrable Systems!
According to my current understanding of Integrable Systems, there are nonlinear integrable PDE’s which can be written as the result of plugging a specific Lax connection into the Zero-Curvature Equation. Solutions to said integrable PDE can then be generated using Scattering Data and the Inverse Scattering Transform. The solution is generated using the Scattering Data at that coordinate, and the Scattering Data is evolved using that ∇f[r]=w f[r] PDE, whose solutions are of the form f[r]=f[0]Exp[m.v]. Since the Scattering Data can only be single-valued, the solutions created by the Inverse Scattering Transform must also be single-valued! So, any physical system must be an Integrable System at its most fundamental level as only Integrable Systems are mathematically consistent enough to exist. This eliminates all mathematically inconsistent solutions, leaving only the consistent solutions and eliminating the meltdown scenarios entirely.
Funnily enough, this does absolutely nothing to prevent coordinate singularities, CTCs, or bootstrap paradoxes, it just ensures that when they do arise, it’s in a mathematically consistent manner.
Hi Curt, 'Love the podcast! Just a small correction-Götterdämmerung (1876) is the final opera in Wagner's four part series of operas known as The Ring Cycle. His last opera, however, was Parsifal (1882). Thank you for your great work!
There can be no true Götterdämmerung event because consciousness, if it is a quantum field, is fundamental and eternal. It doesn’t begin or end; it simply transitions between different states. Birth and death aren’t the creation or destruction of consciousness, just shifts in how it expresses itself.
If consciousness is not an emergent property but a foundational aspect of reality, then it cannot be erased. Even if the universe itself changed, collapsed, or restructured, consciousness would persist in another form. There is no absolute nothingness, only different configurations of conscious existence.
A Götterdämmerung event assumes an ultimate destruction, a final collapse where nothing remains. But if consciousness is woven into the very structure of existence, such an event is impossible. The system may change, but it will never end. Reality isn’t fragile—it’s self-sustaining, deterministic, and continuous. No matter what happens, the field remains, and awareness moves forward.
Why fixate on the “End” ? Surely the “Start” is equally problematical. How did the first Universe start ? What came before that ? Sadly this also implies that human logic is simply insufficient or invalid. Enjoy!
You may be forgetting about information and its permanence. In physics we believe that information is conserved. If a reality is destroyed, what happens to all the information that was embedded in it? When you have eg a simulated reality it has to be represented on the sub structure as information states and information is always conserved otherwise there would be no reversibility of the physics and convergent states would exist. But because the information in the simulation would have to be kept somewhere there must be information in the simulator's universe and there must be structures that support the units of simulation and a process of computability that merely by being something that has to have structure that could be communicated as to eg their geometry, you force information to be dominant in every stack of simulations and in the base reality. What they are made of can differ but they all have to support generic information storage and dynamics. In info physics we know that bits that are erased in a computer memory actually become information that is thermalized into the environment and additionally it takes E = kB log2 T to flip any bit, so energy has to be a thing across these stacked simulations. So simulating a universe would take work energy and pulling the plug on a simulated universe would thermalize all that information into the supporting universe possibly as entangled qbits and so it's arguable as to what is actually destroyed. This argument goes to non-simulated realities too as when we talk about a Thanos being we are appealing to a real structured being that must itself be ultimately made up of information units to actually have any form, or handle things in any universe that it tries to destroy. And to the extent that timelines update in any universe we are talking about changes in space or time-like directions which immediately means we are talking about information. A sudden instantaneous destruction of a thing that was a complex space-time object probably couldn't really happen because at least to me it would take a sequence of meta-time steps to wipe it out. I think focusing on the information and energetics is key to discussions of reality. Ultimately we cannot even think about a meta-physical reality without appealing to time-like steps and appealing to content that has to be described and that forces energy and information constructs into our discussion every time.
Any number can be said to be not "real" (or a "mental construct"). Where is the divide between "real" and "not real"? What makes a "mental construct" not "real"? What does it matter, for what purpose?
Curt, we do not get Boltzmann Brains. They are a gedanken-phenomenon. There is no proof nor evidence the cosmos is actually just random. Any time you have missing information events depending on that info can seem random. We have that in spades regarding time evolution. So conventional physics is fine. No Götterdämmerung events here. (The vacuum tunnelling collapse scenario probably is ruled out by the CPT-Symmetric cosmology, no?)
I agree the "Götterdämmerung events" are just scifi garbage, but a little fantasy garbage keeps the nerds excited.
Typicality arguments have a purpose, but if used beyond these purposes yield no useful insight. The fair usage is for purpose like explaining the flatness and horizon problems, since there we have a well-defined measure.
I skim read tbh. Did one of your fantasy Götterdämmerung events include the pimply demigod-coder running our universe turns off the switch, or trips over the electric cord running our simulation? Or Wolfram's Hypergraph machine runs out of memory?
Isn't the assumed and currently still employed future "Big Freeze" of our universe equivalent to such a Götterdämmerung event? Per my understanding the Big Freeze simply purports that galaxies have moved so far out of each other that no light can ever arrive anywhere, no energy transformations can take place anymore and our universe becomes a dank, dark and cold nothingness of sorts that "has no clocks" as Penrose argues (which he takes as one pillar for his CCC theory, conformal cyclic cosmology).
Ironically, the probability is rather near one and safely non zero and doesn't contradict nor constrain existing models of our universe. No?
Zero and infinity are not real. They are mental constructs for finite minds, an implicit boundary created for embedded systems. That's how i would address these problems in my "toe".
You could have a component of a coordinate vector that's 0. You could also have a meromorphic function (z-1)/(z+1) which evaluates to 0 when z=1 or ComplexInfinity when z=-1. So I feel that 0 and ∞ should actually exist.
Mathematically but not something real. You can't say here is 1-bit of “something” surrounded by nothing, because that nothing is then defined by relation the of that 1-bit. There has to a boundary between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ very much like the ‘shore’ between water and land. The shore is an implicit boundary that only exists when you try to make a distinction between the water and land. Nothing and infinity are illusions for finite minds, mental contructs to make sense of a self in an ever changing world.
As I stated in a previous comment, I believe our mathematical reality to be an entire meromorphic function, so as far as I'm concerned, this mathematical example does exist in some capacity. This seems to be a difference in our axioms. From my perspective, boundaries between structures in the same mathematical reality are a bit artificial as you can analytically continue spacetime from one structure to the other with no issue.
Death in the traditional sense being seen as the total end of a person can be considered a Gotterdammerung event if you prescribe to a non-linear timeline. If all memories and experiences of a person are effectively erased when his brain dies without leaving any trace, then how can he still have an experience before his death? To answer that we should either hold a linear timeline framework or be forced to think of death in non conventionnel ways. What are your thoughts ?
this might be dumb but i guess one way to look at is every time a conscious agent dies they, although perhaps it’s not felt, experience the death of the universe.
If you mean by the death of the universe erasing all data from the universe , in this case we fall right back into a Gotterdammerung event and the theory is nullified. What I personally think is that death is a double edged sword and depends on the observer. If agent A dies in universe A for exemple, all other agents in the same universe would perceive him to be dead, however, agent's A conscious experience gets immediately transferred to universe B and he continues living on without even knowing he died. In that sense, we die all the time but never perceive it until all the potential gets exhausted. At this stage, he gives up all his data to the universal consciousness and might acquire a new agency , a.k.a gets reincarnated, and so on. Cause the aim of consciousness is not death but continuity.
Yes and no. The solution is one universe governed by conciousness in a timeless, infinite fundamental lower dimensional state than our own. Our reality, a projected higher dimensional construct where conciousness is an intrinsic property of the projection.
I'm okey with this solution except for the one universe part. For what reason would we think there is only one universe (this objective reality and only this one) ? It's like saying there is only one planet on which we live. Reality should be unbound.
And to clarify, by many universes I don't mean the classic many world interpretation, I mean I pool of potential realities that only manifest when the observer decides to go to one or another (unconsciously of course, unless he's attained sufficient conscious awareness where conscious choice is possible).
Not unless every concious agent is an extension of a larger universal whole. It's what I meant that conciousness exists without self awareness. And if it exists in a timeless infinite form. Beyond a physical form, without invoking spiritual or deity implications.
The argument you're making fits well into the broader discussion of Götterdämmerung events and the paradox of our continued existence despite the apparent inevitability of catastrophic collapse. If existential termination events should have already wiped us out, then either our understanding of probability is flawed, or there's a deeper structure to reality—one that allows for intervention, persistence, or cycles of emergence and dissolution beyond standard physicalist interpretations.
Parapsychological phenomena, if taken seriously, suggest that consciousness is not merely an emergent property of material complexity but an interface—a kind of API—into a deeper nonlocal information field. If consciousness can access nonlocal energy and information, then what we consider ascension might not be a localized anomaly but a function of how intelligence interacts with the substrate of reality itself. This would mean that across the universe, anywhere intelligence arises, it has the potential to link into a structure outside spacetime, forming a kind of meta-network beyond the apparent limits of physical law.
The inverse is also worth considering. If such a system exists, then the collapse of civilization isn’t just a historical or economic process but a deeper form of informational entropy—a disconnection from this underlying structure. The catastrophic unraveling we see today, from ecological collapse to AI-driven hyper-fragmentation, may be what happens when systems lose their ability to harmonize with this deeper structure. Rather than an on-off switch, ascension or its opposite might manifest as an increase in systemic coherence or a descent into chaos, playing out at local and global scales.
This all loops back to the fundamental issue: if the Big Bang was a moment where infinite potential intersected with structured existence, why does nothing in our current models suggest an equivalent process in reverse? If we are, as your article suggests, potentially trapped in a typical universe where collapse should have already happened, then either reality has built-in constraints we don’t understand, or intelligence—at some scale—is capable of breaking free from the apparent determinism of entropy.
Maybe the real problem is that we're still thinking too much like a species trapped within spacetime, when the evidence—historical, anecdotal, and theoretical—suggests reality is structured more like an information system than a closed physical box. If that’s true, then ascension and collapse aren’t opposites; they’re different interface states with the fundamental architecture of reality.
I enjoy testing arguments and theories under extreme conditions in an attempt to find any flaws in them, so I’m a big fan of this approach.
I would consider mathematical inconsistency to be a sort of Götterdämmerung event, though probably to a lesser extent. An example of a mathematical inconsistency would be the grandfather paradox. This is because you can evolve a patch of the universe along a closed path and get different initial(grandfather alive) and final(grandfather dead) results. You are essentially evaluating the universe as a function of its coordinates and getting two very inconsistent results for the same input. In math, these are known as multivalued “functions”. I find such multivaluedness to be mathematically inconsistent, and therefore I believe multivalued solutions to be nonphysical. Evolving the universe along a path is mathematically equivalent to analytically continuing the universe in a given direction. I think of it like analytically continuing spacetime, though one could define the universe with a collection of functions instead of just spacetime. If a function has branch discontinuities, then it’s multivalued. If a function has no branch discontinuities, then it is an entire meromorphic function. As such, a mathematically consistent reality must be entire meromorphic, at least per my definitions.
Unfortunately, the analytic continuations of most solutions to PDE’s are multivalued. I had previously hoped that whatever PDE the universe abided by, that it would only possess entire meromorphic solutions. Alas, the only PDE’s I’ve found with this property are of the form ∇f[r]=w f[r] where r and w are vectors and f is a scalar. Then I discovered the solution I was looking for, Integrable Systems!
According to my current understanding of Integrable Systems, there are nonlinear integrable PDE’s which can be written as the result of plugging a specific Lax connection into the Zero-Curvature Equation. Solutions to said integrable PDE can then be generated using Scattering Data and the Inverse Scattering Transform. The solution is generated using the Scattering Data at that coordinate, and the Scattering Data is evolved using that ∇f[r]=w f[r] PDE, whose solutions are of the form f[r]=f[0]Exp[m.v]. Since the Scattering Data can only be single-valued, the solutions created by the Inverse Scattering Transform must also be single-valued! So, any physical system must be an Integrable System at its most fundamental level as only Integrable Systems are mathematically consistent enough to exist. This eliminates all mathematically inconsistent solutions, leaving only the consistent solutions and eliminating the meltdown scenarios entirely.
Funnily enough, this does absolutely nothing to prevent coordinate singularities, CTCs, or bootstrap paradoxes, it just ensures that when they do arise, it’s in a mathematically consistent manner.
This is basically an inversion of the ontological argument for God. I like it!
What is the probability of an equally powerful deity opposing the Götterdämmerung, capable of preventing or limit its impact?
Hi Curt, 'Love the podcast! Just a small correction-Götterdämmerung (1876) is the final opera in Wagner's four part series of operas known as The Ring Cycle. His last opera, however, was Parsifal (1882). Thank you for your great work!
Whops. Edited to reflect this. Thank you Dennis.
There can be no true Götterdämmerung event because consciousness, if it is a quantum field, is fundamental and eternal. It doesn’t begin or end; it simply transitions between different states. Birth and death aren’t the creation or destruction of consciousness, just shifts in how it expresses itself.
If consciousness is not an emergent property but a foundational aspect of reality, then it cannot be erased. Even if the universe itself changed, collapsed, or restructured, consciousness would persist in another form. There is no absolute nothingness, only different configurations of conscious existence.
A Götterdämmerung event assumes an ultimate destruction, a final collapse where nothing remains. But if consciousness is woven into the very structure of existence, such an event is impossible. The system may change, but it will never end. Reality isn’t fragile—it’s self-sustaining, deterministic, and continuous. No matter what happens, the field remains, and awareness moves forward.
Why fixate on the “End” ? Surely the “Start” is equally problematical. How did the first Universe start ? What came before that ? Sadly this also implies that human logic is simply insufficient or invalid. Enjoy!
You may be forgetting about information and its permanence. In physics we believe that information is conserved. If a reality is destroyed, what happens to all the information that was embedded in it? When you have eg a simulated reality it has to be represented on the sub structure as information states and information is always conserved otherwise there would be no reversibility of the physics and convergent states would exist. But because the information in the simulation would have to be kept somewhere there must be information in the simulator's universe and there must be structures that support the units of simulation and a process of computability that merely by being something that has to have structure that could be communicated as to eg their geometry, you force information to be dominant in every stack of simulations and in the base reality. What they are made of can differ but they all have to support generic information storage and dynamics. In info physics we know that bits that are erased in a computer memory actually become information that is thermalized into the environment and additionally it takes E = kB log2 T to flip any bit, so energy has to be a thing across these stacked simulations. So simulating a universe would take work energy and pulling the plug on a simulated universe would thermalize all that information into the supporting universe possibly as entangled qbits and so it's arguable as to what is actually destroyed. This argument goes to non-simulated realities too as when we talk about a Thanos being we are appealing to a real structured being that must itself be ultimately made up of information units to actually have any form, or handle things in any universe that it tries to destroy. And to the extent that timelines update in any universe we are talking about changes in space or time-like directions which immediately means we are talking about information. A sudden instantaneous destruction of a thing that was a complex space-time object probably couldn't really happen because at least to me it would take a sequence of meta-time steps to wipe it out. I think focusing on the information and energetics is key to discussions of reality. Ultimately we cannot even think about a meta-physical reality without appealing to time-like steps and appealing to content that has to be described and that forces energy and information constructs into our discussion every time.
does this have the same power given any theory of time?
Brilliant, but what does it matter, for what purpose?
Any number can be said to be not "real" (or a "mental construct"). Where is the divide between "real" and "not real"? What makes a "mental construct" not "real"? What does it matter, for what purpose?
Curt, we do not get Boltzmann Brains. They are a gedanken-phenomenon. There is no proof nor evidence the cosmos is actually just random. Any time you have missing information events depending on that info can seem random. We have that in spades regarding time evolution. So conventional physics is fine. No Götterdämmerung events here. (The vacuum tunnelling collapse scenario probably is ruled out by the CPT-Symmetric cosmology, no?)
I agree the "Götterdämmerung events" are just scifi garbage, but a little fantasy garbage keeps the nerds excited.
Typicality arguments have a purpose, but if used beyond these purposes yield no useful insight. The fair usage is for purpose like explaining the flatness and horizon problems, since there we have a well-defined measure.
I skim read tbh. Did one of your fantasy Götterdämmerung events include the pimply demigod-coder running our universe turns off the switch, or trips over the electric cord running our simulation? Or Wolfram's Hypergraph machine runs out of memory?
Isn't the assumed and currently still employed future "Big Freeze" of our universe equivalent to such a Götterdämmerung event? Per my understanding the Big Freeze simply purports that galaxies have moved so far out of each other that no light can ever arrive anywhere, no energy transformations can take place anymore and our universe becomes a dank, dark and cold nothingness of sorts that "has no clocks" as Penrose argues (which he takes as one pillar for his CCC theory, conformal cyclic cosmology).
Ironically, the probability is rather near one and safely non zero and doesn't contradict nor constrain existing models of our universe. No?
Zero and infinity are not real. They are mental constructs for finite minds, an implicit boundary created for embedded systems. That's how i would address these problems in my "toe".
You could have a component of a coordinate vector that's 0. You could also have a meromorphic function (z-1)/(z+1) which evaluates to 0 when z=1 or ComplexInfinity when z=-1. So I feel that 0 and ∞ should actually exist.
Mathematically but not something real. You can't say here is 1-bit of “something” surrounded by nothing, because that nothing is then defined by relation the of that 1-bit. There has to a boundary between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ very much like the ‘shore’ between water and land. The shore is an implicit boundary that only exists when you try to make a distinction between the water and land. Nothing and infinity are illusions for finite minds, mental contructs to make sense of a self in an ever changing world.
As I stated in a previous comment, I believe our mathematical reality to be an entire meromorphic function, so as far as I'm concerned, this mathematical example does exist in some capacity. This seems to be a difference in our axioms. From my perspective, boundaries between structures in the same mathematical reality are a bit artificial as you can analytically continue spacetime from one structure to the other with no issue.