The black hole information paradox has long haunted theoretical physics. On one hand, quantum mechanics insists that information is conserved. On the other, general relativity predicts that anything crossing the event horizon is lost forever, its information irretrievable. And although Hawking radiation allows black holes to evaporate, this radiation is thermal—it seems to carry no information about the matter that fell in. Hence the paradox.
Our relational model of space and time reframes the issue entirely. In this model, space and time are not absolute, external containers but relations between instances. Crucially, we treat information not as a metaphysical substance floating in the universe, but as meaning potential, which must be instantiated by a meaning maker. Meaning does not exist independently of the process of instantiation.
From this perspective, the event horizon of a black hole is not a wall where information is erased, but a boundary to the instantiation of meaning. For an outside observer, nothing that happens beyond the event horizon can be instantiated as meaning. The events inside are not part of any external reality, because no observation can bring them into being.
However, for an observer falling into the black hole—a meaning maker—the story is different. Time and space unfold as usual (until the near-singularity region, where spatial intervals contract catastrophically). From their point of view, meaning continues to be instantiated until the final breakdown of conditions makes that impossible. There is no paradox from this internal perspective, and from the external perspective, there is no lost meaning because there was never instantiated meaning to begin with.
Hawking radiation, in this framework, is a thermal phenomenon at the boundary of instantiation. It need not carry any internal meaning, because meaning, by definition, cannot cross that boundary. This dissolves the apparent contradiction: the idea that meaning must escape from a region where instantiation is structurally impossible is a misframing born of treating "information" as an absolute rather than a relational property.
In this way, the relational model sidesteps the paradox. It does not solve it within the same terms—it changes the terms altogether. When meaning is treated as a relational, locally instantiated process, the information paradox disappears like a mirage.
Conclusion: The black hole information paradox arises only if one assumes that information is an objective property of matter, independent of context or observer. In the relational model, where meaning is potential realised by instance and bounded by spacetime relations, this assumption does not hold. The paradox, therefore, does not arise.
This post follows our earlier discussions of black holes and spaghettification in the relational model. It is intended as a final word on why black holes are mysterious—but not paradoxical—when meaning is rightly understood.
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