任何极端占有，都会制造存在债务。

Any extreme possession creates existential debt.

I have been thinking about this idea for a while. It started with a simple question about black holes — if they swallow everything, including light, how can they radiate? How can they eventually die? The answer turned out to be far more than physics. It became a thread that pulled me through quantum mechanics, information theory, the nature of meaning, and ultimately, the question of whether the universe itself is rational.

This post is my attempt to trace that thread from beginning to end.

Black holes: the ultimate possessors

A black hole is not a “hole.” It is mass compressed to such an extreme density that it warps spacetime itself. Past the event horizon — the point of no return — nothing escapes. Not light, not information, not causality. In classical general relativity, a black hole only does one thing: consume. It grows larger, never gives anything back, and never disappears.

This is what “extreme possession” looks like at a cosmic scale.

The crack in the fortress: Hawking radiation

In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that the fortress is not absolute. Quantum mechanics introduces a subtle twist.

In quantum field theory, the vacuum is never truly empty. Particle-antiparticle pairs constantly flicker in and out of existence — quantum fluctuations. Near the event horizon, something remarkable happens: one particle falls in, the other escapes. The escaping particle is what we observe as Hawking radiation. The particle that falls in carries negative energy, and the black hole loses a tiny amount of mass.

The key insight: the radiation does not come from inside the black hole. It emerges from the boundary, from the edge, from the liminal space where two regimes of physics collide.

Over unimaginably long timescales — around 10^67 years for a solar-mass black hole, compared to the universe’s current age of about 10^10 years — the black hole evaporates completely. The ultimate possessor is slowly, inevitably, dismantled.

This is existential debt being collected.

The philosophical turn: six ways to see it

When I sat with this idea, I realized that the black hole’s cycle of consumption and radiation maps onto some of the deepest questions in philosophy.

Being vs. nothingness

A black hole looks like the ultimate symbol of nothingness — it devours everything. But Hawking radiation reveals that even “nothingness” is unstable. The black hole is not pure void; it is extreme existence, extreme density, extreme structure. And extreme existence leaks.

Philosophical implication: true nothingness may not exist. Every extreme will betray its own existence in some form.

The boundary is where truth lives

The event horizon is not a wall. It is a boundary of information, knowledge, and causality. The radiation does not come from inside (the unknowable) or from far away (the ordinary). It comes from the edge.

This resonates with Kant’s distinction between the thing-in- itself and the phenomenal world. We cannot know the interior directly. But the boundary — the critical threshold — is where observable reality emerges. Truth lives not inside things, but at their limits.

Existential debt: the metaphysical reading

In physics, Hawking radiation works because negative energy falls in while positive energy escapes. The black hole’s mass decreases. It is paying a debt.

Philosophically, this suggests a structural principle:

Any system that takes without limit will eventually be forced to give back.

This is not a moral claim. There is no cosmic judge. It is a structural inevitability — a balance mechanism built into the fabric of reality. The black hole “borrows” existence from the universe, and the universe collects, slowly, particle by particle.

The Dao De Jing captured this millennia ago: “反者，道之动” — reversal is the movement of the Dao. What reaches an extreme must return.

The information question: what is really at stake

This brings us to what I think is the deepest layer.

When physicists talk about the “black hole information paradox,” they are not talking about knowledge, language, or memory. They mean something precise and cold: information is the complete description of a system’s distinguishable states. The position, momentum, spin, charge, quantum phase of every particle — the full set of parameters that makes one configuration different from another.

The paradox is this: if a black hole evaporates completely and the radiation it emits is pure thermal noise — random, with no structure — then the information about everything that fell in is truly destroyed. Not encrypted. Not scrambled. Gone.

Why this matters beyond physics

If information can be truly destroyed, the consequences cascade far beyond physics:

  • Causality breaks. The present can no longer be traced back to the past. “What happened” becomes fundamentally ambiguous.
  • Explanation loses its authority. Any explanation could be undermined by the possibility that the relevant information simply no longer exists.
  • History has no foundation. “It happened” is no longer equivalent to “it left a trace.”

Existence becomes a draft that can be erased clean.

The emerging consensus

Most physicists now lean toward information conservation — not out of romanticism, but because the alternative is too destructive. If information is destroyed, quantum mechanics’ unitarity breaks, and the entire theoretical framework needs to be rewritten.

The current thinking is that information is never destroyed, only re-encoded in forms that are extraordinarily difficult to access: on the event horizon’s surface, in the correlational structure of Hawking radiation, through the holographic principle.

The universe, it seems, refuses to forget.

Information conservation and the rationality of the world

Here is where the thread reaches its deepest point.

“The world is rational” does not mean the world is moral, or that it favors intelligent life, or that everything can be calculated. It means something far more minimal and far more profound:

The world’s changes are, in principle, traceable.

Today’s state comes from yesterday’s state. There are no causeless gaps. This is the bare minimum required for the concept of “understanding” to be coherent.

Information conservation guarantees exactly this. It says: the world does not perform deletions without reason. Complexity is allowed. Disorder is allowed. Encryption is allowed. Delay is allowed. But the complete erasure of “why things became this way” is not.

If you remove this guarantee, reasoning itself collapses. Every explanation becomes a temporary narrative. Every theory becomes local storytelling. Science is no longer discovery but improvisation.

Information conservation is not a fact about data. It is the condition under which “understanding” is possible at all.

Does meaning depend on all of this?

This is the question that stayed with me the longest.

Meaning is not information. Information is the distinguishability of states; meaning is the interpretive relationship we build on top of those states. But meaning depends on information the way a building depends on its foundation.

Consider: if all information about an event can be completely erased — not just made difficult to recover, but erased in principle — then “it happened” becomes indistinguishable from “it never happened.” The event has no objective status. Its meaning cannot be a property of the world; it can only be a momentary psychological flicker, a bubble of subjective experience that leaves no trace.

In a universe where information is conserved:

  • Meaning can be forgotten, misunderstood, lost.
  • But it was never denied at the structural level.
  • The difference it made is still encoded somewhere.

In a universe where information can be destroyed:

  • Meaning is, at best, a temporary projection onto void.
  • “It mattered” has no more weight than “it didn’t.”

Meaning does not require being preserved, understood, or rewarded. It only requires that the world does not deny that it once existed. And that is precisely what information conservation provides.

Heat death: the final test

The universe’s projected end state — heat death — pushes this to its limit. Heat death is not the universe going cold or dark. It is the universe reaching maximum entropy: all temperatures equalize, all gradients vanish, all energy distributes uniformly. No processes can occur. No work can be done. No computation can run.

Existence continues. Events stop.

The critical question: in a heat-dead universe, does information still “count” as existing? The particles are still there. Their states still encode the history. But no physical process can ever decode them.

This forces a choice:

  • If meaning requires ongoing interpretation, then heat death is the end of meaning.
  • If meaning only requires that distinguishable traces were never erased, then heat death is not an ending but a freezing — meaning in suspended animation, not meaning denied.

I find myself drawn to the second view. Meaning does not need an audience. It only needs the universe to not have pressed delete.

Reasoning: the thread that holds it all together

What is reasoning, from a philosophical perspective? It is not logic, not calculation, not arriving at correct answers. At its deepest, reasoning is this:

The ability to maintain traceability in the face of uncertainty.

Reasoning is our insistence that change is not arbitrary. That “why” is a question the world permits. That differences can be connected, not just observed.

Without information, reasoning has nothing to work with. Without reasoning, information cannot become meaning. Without meaning, existence is noise.

The chain is:

Information conservation (differences persist) -> Reasoning is possible (differences can be connected) -> Meaning is not illusion (connections matter)

Each link is fragile. None is guaranteed to be emotionally satisfying. But together, they form the only bridge we have between raw existence and the sense that existence is about something.

The universe’s self-correction mechanism

I keep coming back to the sentence I started with:

任何极端占有，都会制造存在债务。

Black holes are not a flaw in the universe. They are the universe’s response to extremes. When mass accumulates beyond all limits, spacetime bends until it breaks. When possession becomes absolute, the boundary itself begins to leak. When a system claims to be perfectly closed, a higher-order process forces it open.

This is not justice. It is not karma. It is structure.

And it suggests something I find quietly remarkable: the universe does not tolerate absolutes. Not absolute possession, not absolute closure, not absolute forgetting. Every extreme generates its own counter-movement. Every fortress, given enough time, returns what it took.

反者，道之动。

Reversal is the movement of the way.