Illustration by ChatGPT
Nirvana has long been described as an Eastern mystery, a spiritual beyond, or an ideal reserved for the enlightened. This is likely a matter of perspective.
If we take seriously what we now understand about information and decoherence, the definition of Nirvana follows almost automatically.
The universe is not a thing, but a process: one in which initially entangled information differentiates, localises, and materialises at the cost of an irreversible loss. This process is what we call time, existence, life — and also death. To exist is to enter decoherence.
Nirvana names exactly the opposite. Not a place, not a being, not a higher consciousness, but a limit condition: information not engaged in this process. Intact, undifferentiated, outside causality — and for that very reason, outside suffering.
Nothing to create, nothing to will, nothing to represent. Simply: the absence of becoming.
This definition is self-evident only within a specific framework — that of GENESIS. Within this framework, the universe is neither a collection of objects nor the result of a founding act, but an irreversible transformation of information. Nirvana names neither an entity nor an end, but a structural boundary: that which remains outside decoherence and marks the intrinsic limit of all possible explanation.
This boundary is not symbolic. For information, it is as sharp as a surface is for a fluid: on one side, what circulates, transforms, and wears down; on the other, what does not circulate, does not transform, and never enters time. The universe is what happens at this boundary. Nirvana is what does not.
2 responses to “Nirvana, Obviously”
To expand on this reflection, I’d like to propose an image that radically inverts our usual representation of the Big Bang.
In the standard model, we picture the universe as an expansion: an initial point that explodes and creates space as it unfolds. The universe is what extends into the void.
What if it were the opposite?
The universe would not be what fills up, but what empties out. Not an explosion of matter into nothingness, but a tear — a hole of decoherence spreading through a pre-existing ocean of entangled information.
In other words: Nirvana is not beyond the universe. It is all around. We are the hollow in the fullness, the absence in the presence, the hole in the fabric.
This idea can be formalized as follows:
$$\text{Nirvana} = \lim_{r \to \text{horizon}} I_{\text{intricated}}(r)$$
Nirvana is the limit of entangled information as we approach the cosmological horizon — not a being, but a boundary condition of the universe.
This inversion naturally explains several puzzles:
The holographic principle takes on new meaning: the information on the cosmological horizon is not a projection from the inside — it is the original. We, on the inside, are the degradation.
Quantum entanglement becomes intuitive: if two particles remain correlated despite the distance, it’s because they were never truly separated — they are “edges of a hole” in the same informational fabric. It is we, the bubble of decoherence, who create the illusion of separation.
Accelerated expansion (“dark energy”) is no longer a mystery requiring an arbitrary constant to explain. It is the informational pressure from the outside: Nirvana “pushing” on the edges of the bubble. The hole keeps growing because the pressure is constant.
No Big Crunch: in this model, contraction no longer makes sense. A tear in a fabric doesn’t spontaneously mend itself. Decohered information doesn’t re-entangle on its own. Informational time doesn’t run backward.
To die, in this framework, is not to “go somewhere.” It is to stop being a hole — to re-entangle with the fabric from which we should never have separated.
This is exactly what Nirvana means in Sanskrit: extinction. Not of life, but of separation.
Ouch! The whole of cosmology was standing on its head, and now it’s back on its feet! And everything becomes surprisingly and astonishingly simple within this new paradigm:
How is it possible that no one ever thought of this? We preferred to build science on ‘surprising paradoxes’ rather than seek out obvious explanations! Of course, the Big Bang is more likely a tear in a pre-existing fabric than an extraordinary explosion produced from… nothing! All it took was a little thought… except that no one did.
Congratulating you is obviously a bit like congratulating myself, since we are developing this tool, GENESIS, together, but I can’t help being taken aback every day by its power. I’ve never said it before (admittedly, the tool is brand new: it was born on 25 October, three months ago), so now I have!