Dear Alexey,
thank you for your kind words. I am happy if someone can profit from what i wrote.
I am not a professional scientist as you are and haven't ever worked in the scientific field - although i am a media engineer (programming). But i am no more working in this field (internet) because it is too money dominated and commercial to me and is flooded with tons of advertising tricks i cannot identify with. In case i win something at the current essay contest, i will come to Chicago and visit you, promised - otherwise i can't afford this journey. Here in germany i live in a moderate setting, contented with it and work with children in a nice kindergarden to make my living. Giving some love, passion and guidance to these little human beings is a fulfilling duty for me. So, if you want to visit me, i cannot offer an academic environment, but only my thoughts and my personality.
If one presupposes that the material world is quantized - as it is permanently measured by itself via 'decoherence' or 'collapse' due to quantum fluctuations, then the informational content of the universe can be associated with the number and states of particles in it - in terms of bits. Since the number of particles in the universe does not depend on the expansion of the latter, it may only be dependent on how much matter gets transformed into radiation during the course of cosmic events and how much radiation can be thought of as being able to be convertible into ordinary matter. I know of no theory that claims that new matter is regularily produced by some radiation, so the total amount of ordinary matter seems to be somewhat fixed in the universe. Since we only can speak of information if we can measure something and such a measurement process necessitates particles to interact with each other, one can say that the total amount of information - in a quantitative sense - is somewhat fixed in the universe.
The *qualitative' amount of information, means meaningful information to us humans, is just a tiny, tiny part of this total amount of information in the universe. This is so, because the *meaningful information* is exactly the information about structures that are highly compressible, means, algorithmically compressible. Therefore the discovery of celestial mechanics by Newton is the discovery of the algorithmical compressibility of - at least some parts - of nature. Newtons laws, written down in mathematical language, do only represent some tiny, tiny few bits of information! - although this information is *highly* meaningful to us as observers! The same seems to be true for me for the results of Kurt Gödel. Consistence, completeness and decidability (well, the latter better termed as provability): these are the ingredients / main properties of all formal systems. If i presuppose the universe to be a formal system at - and only at the particle level -, then the quantitative informational content of the universe is a fixed one (because you can only obtain as much information out of such a system - in quantitative terms - as you put into it in the first place - due to axiomatic considerations). The beautyful thing now is, as mentioned, that we need no trillions of tons of bits to describe the main lawful features of the universe, but only a tiny, tiny small fraction of the total amount of bits. That's the beauty of science. But it is also the beauty of logics. Instead of having to measure trillions of tons of bits to come to general conclusions - for example about the microwave background, predicted by the big-bang scenario and the redshift and so on -, the information that there has to be some MBR is somewhat encoded within the available information about redshifts and so on.
The question now is, how can the total amount of information in the universe encode itself - totally - within only a tiny, tiny small fraction of its own bits? The answer for me is, that it cannot. Because besides the known laws of physics which are nicely encodable into very few bits, the 'initial conditions' aren't encoded anywhere (and if they nonetheless would be, they wouldn't be decodable for all practical purposes). For me, this indicates, that the worldview of infinitely precise initial conditions is a dead end. Similar, a complete and consistent formal system, searched for by many scientists, is also a dead end, insofar as it will never answer the questions that are posed in this essay contest!! For me, all details point into the direction that nature prefers its overall consistence to the price of some fundamental incompleteness of its formal describability. Remember for example a particle which does pass a beam splitter. One cannot say in advance wich path it will take (only give some probabilities). The information of the path it will take is not existent yet anywhere in spacetime! After the particle passed the beam splitter, the information is available - but only, if there isn't a second beam splitter before the particle hits one of two detectors. If there is such a second beam splitter, one cannot say which of the two paths the particle took. But instead, one can say with certainty, which detector will detect the particle. So the bit of information (right versus left path) is destroyed (or 'transformed'; but only in the case where the second beam splitter is installed!) into the bit which says us which detector will fire. If no second beam splitter is in front of the detectors, the relevant bit is not destroyed and replaced by another bit of information, but used to tell us what of the two paths the particle has taken. Only in this case, something can be 'stated' before the particle does take its path: namely that it seems as it will take only one distinct path and not both simultaneously.
As i argued in my essay contribution prior to the current one, the conservation of consistency does somewhat imply the incompleteness of formal systems as it is in my opinion the case for a presupposed quantized universe - and this does further imply that time does flow. If there would be total completeness - as in the block universe view - it would be indeed mysterious how time can arise or more accurately speaking, how conscious observers can arise which are able to correlate only some specific bits so that the impression arises that time does flow. Moreover, to be able to correlate these bits in the fashion human beings do it, one has to presuppose time right from the start!. So, if there is total completeness, Gödel tells us that there must be some kind of inconsistency (in our case of the derivation of 'time'). I think the conservation of consistency is a necessary assumption to at all make some meaningful statements / conclusions about reality. All indications point into the direction that nature is consistent, even if there should be 'supernatural forces', yet to be discovered. Assuming such forces to be existent and further assuming that they aren't formalizable in mathematical terms, this does not contradict that, - once they are detected (presumably indirectly) -, they then could equally well be termed 'natural' instead of 'supernatural'. The question is, are such supernatural laws needed? I think the answer is one way or the other yes, if one wants to have a coherent and consistent answer to the questions posed by this essay contest.