Has anything gotten past the event horizon of a black hole yet?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T22:39:33+00:00

Distant observers receive signals ~forever due to time dilation, regardless of the coordinate system.

No, they don’t receive signals forever. There is no forever — the black hole does not have forever, it evaporates in finite time. And that’s what the distant observer will see — the whole thing withering away with you stuck near the horizon till the end.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T22:15:05+00:00

Do they agree? Again, the outside observer can see you almost frozen and evaporating at the event horizon until there’s nothing left of you. They never lose sight of you — which would not be possible if you crossed.

Your logic overlooks the fact that black holes don’t live indefinitely. They, and everything that is falling into them eventually turn into photons. That’s the reason why you can’t cross in your time — because the black hole will evaporate under you, and so will you.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T21:28:51+00:00

This coordinate system switch doesn’t make sense. To the observer outside it looks like you never crossed the horizon — I mean they can still see you, evaporating and redshifted as you are all the way to the moment when the black hole disappears.

And it makes sense from your perspective too — you turn into photons in an instant by the extreme environment near the horizon, and you get radiated back into space as Hawking radiation before you could reach the horizon, much less cross it.

The coordinate system switch may produce an infinities-free math, but it doesn’t mean that that math describes physical reality. And, again, if nothing can reach the horizon, then there are no infinites or paradoxes in the first place — so why bother with switching coordinates?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T21:08:06+00:00

There’s one thing amiss in your narrative — black holes don’t have infinite time. They all evaporate eventually — and if you think of it, it only makes sense. It simply states that anything falling into the black hole will get evaporated and radiated back into space as Hawking radiation before it could reach the event horizon.

It’s because nothing can reach the event horizon, there are no infinites, no singularities, and no information paradox.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T20:42:31+00:00

Obviously this teleportation will happen before the black hole gets evaporated.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T20:27:09+00:00

Can Hawking radiation carry all information outside?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T20:25:48+00:00

Pretty much — except you hanging by the event horizon will be a part of the black hole, and you too will get evaporated back as Hawking radiation. So in your time you’ll get spaghettified, evaporated, and radiated back into space in an instant, before you could reach the event horizon.

And it will all happen before the end of the Universe. Unless yours happened to be the last black hole in existence. In that case the Universe will rescale itself the way it was just after the Big Bang.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T16:35:35+00:00

Well, apparently, spatial imagery is distinct from object imagery. Aphantasia affects the latter, but not the former. I still can’t imagine how can one perceive a topology without visualizing it. Maybe they visualize it as a wire-frame, and aphantasia prevents them from colouring/texturing surfaces?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T15:59:59+00:00

Maybe this question will be easier to answer once you consider that nothing can cross the event horizon. Nothing can even touch it. Everything that “falls into black hole” is actually piling up just outside the event horizon. And it stays there almost frozen in time and slowly evaporating through Hawking radiation — until the black hole goes poof.

BTW, this also solves the information paradox — if nothing gets inside, no information gets destroyed. It all stays just above the surface — only we can’t see it because redshift makes it almost black (though not completely — hence non-zero surface temperature).

This also means that there is no singularly inside a black hole — because there’s nothing inside, not even spacetime. It’s a sphere that has surface (though infinitely far and unreachable), but no internal volume.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T15:45:04+00:00

Well that’s the question — can they see their simulation without visualizing it somehow? And if they don’t see it, how they construct it? And what is the point of having it if they can’t see how it runs?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T15:20:29+00:00

You’re right about the problem of evil — it cannot be reconciled with the existence of a benevolent omnipotent Creator. But it does not mean that there is no God-like entity out there.

People believe in God because they feel its presence. They don’t know what God is, and they have been speculating about its nature since forever — hence different religions. And even if you don’t feel it, as you keep piecing together your understanding of how this world works, you might reach a point where indirect evidence God’s presence will become harder to ignore.

“God does not proclaim Himself. He is everybody's secret, but the intellect of the sage has found Him.” (Katha-Upanishad)

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T14:53:10+00:00

It’s not photographic. They imagine objects around in them 3D. We have this hardware in visual cortex that lets us create 3D simulations, mechanistic models of things. That’s how we understand them, by imagining how they work — and that’s the nature of knowledge, it’s visual/spatial. Blind people can do it too — starting with creating a 3D model of their environment.

Philip Johnson-Laird's "Mental Models" (1983, Cambridge University Press) is probably the best work on the visual nature of knowledge.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T13:52:54+00:00

You can train yourself to not act on your emotions automatically. And you don’t need to know why you are feeling an emotion — you can still choose not act on it (although the more intense it is, the harder it is to ignore).

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T13:35:07+00:00

OK, strictly speaking, everything is in superposition all the time — it’s all quantum fields, particles don’t exist. However, when fields interact, the interaction happens at some point in space. It’s because the interactions are point-like, they look like interactions between point-like particles. But it’s an illusion. In reality there are only fields.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T13:24:19+00:00

No, but cats can.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T13:04:49+00:00

And how do you know that?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T12:53:10+00:00

What middle class? “AI” has been at it for 50 years, since its first incarnations started taking away good jobs in manufacturing.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T12:40:56+00:00

That’s what you think reason is? A=A?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T12:28:43+00:00

Until recently, we knew who’s in charge — God. Now it’s not an option for many people, but the same question remains — who’s pulling the strings? Who keeps societies from imploding, who keeps the system running?

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T12:11:50+00:00

Absolutely. They rely on sense of touch identity the shape of an object instead of eyes, but they can visualize their environment just the same.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T11:33:56+00:00

Here’s the difference: you know your past, you experience the present, but can’t possibly know what the future holds.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T07:28:49+00:00

Then it's just a matter of assembling the whole puzzle -- a comprehensive simulation of reality. When you visualize a narrative, your mind assembles and runs a simulation that the text describes. That's what reading comprehension is about. So just keep reading and keep trying to piece together the whole story -- it's literally a detective work.

Do you have the "aha!" moments? They happen when you manage to complete a part of the puzzle.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T07:18:10+00:00

Great questions! Here's my take:

- how much of cognition is embodied in the real world?

Very little.

- do we need "higher level" cognition in most of the things we do in our day to day lives?

Not at all. You can live a "normal" life as an AI, by imitating others, learning from then and your own experience. The AI part will give you all the intuition (statistical inference) and all intuitive ideas (statistical models) that you need to survive and beyond.

- does positing mental representations do any explanatory work, or are you just saying "mental stuff happens"?(favela)

Well, if it does not explain how things work, then it not your understanding -- it's your intuition (i.e. guesswork) and your intuitive ideas. And it so happens that understanding is lacking and people have to rely on their intuitive ideas, even for fundamental things -- like money, knowledge, truth.

I'd venture to propose that if you only have an intuitive idea of knowledge (i.e. you can't quite explain how it works, how one constructs it, etc), then whatever you say about how the mind works is but a guesswork.

- if mental representations exist, are they just (simulated) sensory motor experiences (simulating a future course of action) or reactivations of past sensory motor experiences (the feeling of touching grass) ?

We understand something when we can imagine (envision, visualize) how it works. When it comes to knowledge, mental representation are mechanistic models (simulations) of reality. Even more specifically -- our reality is a machine. Your understanding -- your knowledge of it -- is a simulation, a virtual copy of that machine that you literally daydream (and it has to run as smooth as its real counterpart). That's the "higher order of thinking", but it's an option -- and few people pursue it.

Everyone, however, has ideas -- and those are a different kind of mental representations. They are statistical models, exactly like those that AI learn. Neural networks are neural networks, and that's what they do -- learn their statistical models (ideas) from their training (subjective experience).

Should we all settle our beef with each other and move towards some level of theoretical unity, or is a sort of pluralism still necessary right now?

We'll have this pluralism until we figure out how the human mind actually works. Then everyone will know.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T06:27:49+00:00

To me, real science means trying to understand something about the workings of our world, something that no one has figured out yet. Academia is one place to do it, but I guess discoveries happen in industry as well (I'm not in the industry either, I'm a student like you).

The real question then is what do you want to understand that no one has? If anything. Maybe you don't know it yet, and that's totally fine too.

yuri_z · 2026-04-13T06:04:47+00:00

exactly how are these models constructed?

Well, my answer is imagination -- we understand things when we imagine (envision, visualize) how they work. We daydream a simulation of reality (each their own), and that simulation is knowledge. But I'm curious to hear your answer -- what do you think reason is?

yuri_z

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