[defrex]

This is a reasonable conceptualization, IMO. However, the problem isn't that we can't access the information in a black hole (there are other places in the universe where information becomes inaccessible).

The problem is that black holes evaporate. If the particles released via evaporation don't contain the information about the particles that entered, information is lost when the black hole is completely gone.

The proposed solution is that the information is encoded onto the surface of the black hole and thus into the hawking radiation being released from that surface.

[eloff]

This idea in physics that information is conserved, neither created nor destroyed, just transformed seems awfully similar to a computer to me. A classical computer is not the right metaphor really when you think of the universe as a possible computational process, but the parallels are striking to me.

[simonh]

I suspect it may be just necessarily true that information is preserved in a consistent universe. I don't know though, maybe someone could come up with a model for a consistent universe with information loss, but it seems to me that would lead to physically possible states that are not derivable from consistent laws of physics.

[causasui]

Physics layman, but I agree as a computer scientist. It also sometimes feels like there are "optimizations", e.g., delayed-choice quantum erasure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser)

I'm open to the idea that it's just me projecting what I understand onto what I don't.

[macrolocal]

Nb. wave function collapse messes with this, and a computer would use something like lazy evaluation to avoid generating the Everettian multiverse.

[pygy_]

I'm tying loose ends in my head that probably have long been tied in other ones...

Reading this next to the comment making a parallel between the black hole event horizon and the cosmological horizon...

Wouldn't this give credence to holographic model of the universe?

Could the so-called heat death of the universe and black hole evaporation be identical phenomena seen from either the inside or the outside of the boundary?