“I am thy God, and there shall be no other Gods before me.”
And then all of the other gods died of laughter.
[size=150][ * Cries * ][/size]
OH GOD THAT FELT GOOD! SAY IT AGAIN!
WEEEE! 
You – you know that there are reproducing multiverses!
Here’s some words by Steven.A.
Quantities of information are a bit difficult to quantize because there are various measures that could be used but it would seem that new information present in the universe would be seen as unpredictable states that had no prior cause.
Some operations can occur losslessly with regard to information. For example, balls on a perfect pool table could bounce around, never losing energy and in theory the entire evolution of the system in the past and future could be determined by simply knowing where they started. If instead the balls were made of putty and stuck together, then you couldn’t look at the end result and determine what the starting state was (that could be viewed as having more complexity and information present). For real putty balls, the collisions would create heat and I assume theoretically, if you ignore quantum phenomenon, you could reconstruct things by analyzing this internal heat generated and backtrack the source, so nature seems to retain information in various ways.
One thing to look at is that there might be some processes in nature that did not retain information, as well as some universes that might have allowed information to increase. It’s interesting to consider what the effects of these possibilities would be. A universe that allowed processes to lose information would find a drop in information content over time, though ultimately it could remain stable as the remaining processes would be required to act in such ways as not to create a scenario under which information is lost. It would be a one way scenario though and a piece of information could only be lost once, though not all information would necessarily be lost over time as some could remain cycling within lossless processes. For example, during the Big Bang, there might have been lossy modes of interaction to energy available, but these died off quickly and things cooled down (that’s just a thought) and it would be effectively evolution requiring anything that remained to followed limited modes of interaction, with “mistakes” being allowed only once. Just like atomic decay, after a period of time you’d be left with primarily stable particles.
On the other hand, a universe that allowed information to be created would first seem to require a source of that information to be available - if new information is to be added, then it could be viewed as entering into this universe from outside it. This might be similar to the typical view of a black hole as having a one way flow of information into it (though it appears that this likely isn’t very true of real black holes and probably it’s more like storage and delay of information).
To give an analogy of what I’ve been thinking is likely the case for our universe, with regard to information is retained over time, there may be a continuous source of new energy/information into our universe not unlike white noise being transmitted into an object. The duration of time that each “frequency” is retained depends upon the “quality factor” or mathematically, Q of the circuit. If you imagined the universe as a tuning fork being stimulated by white noise, overall the primary frequencies present would be centered around the resonant note or harmonics of this, but new information could be entering the system all the time and creating both novel frequencies at a low level as well as gradually influencing the amplitude and phase of the primary and harmonics. The most obvious resonant modes would appear lossless, but this would be just a macroscopic approximation and if any gradual shift occured in the structure of this tuning fork, eventually those frequencies would decay and new resonances would grow and appear as a gradual shift over time (though it might be possible to instead have these initial energies stretched out over time and not decay but instead be frequency shifted … just a thought).
I posted mostly because I don’t think the Big Bang was a one shot deal but reflects the “channel characteristics” that we see the universe through. For example, if you tried to speak through a very long pipe, you’d hear artifacts of the resonances and filter characteristics of this pipe, but in theory if you determined what the channel characteristic was, you could remove these artifacts and hear the person speaking clearly (I’ve actually done some audio processing along these lines before and it works rather well), this is very similar to the idea of sending the sound through a tuning fork or other structure. Comparing this with the Big Bang, we currently see things as how they’ve evolved over time, but the creative source of this would likely be pure incoherent energy or information like white noise. We couldn’t see this directly except as chaos but we can see the repeatitive structures created by the “channel”/physical laws that this energy passes through. I believe when we look out (or inward, depending on the perspective) to the Big Bang, we’re seeing the source of this information or the original signal that was unfiltered by “spacetime”.
Something interesting to consider is that pure information would likely not have spacial properties to it. The space we understand is constructed of non-random, repeative and predictable structures. We can only understand orbits because they recur and are predictable. Pure information, though it might be witnessable as affecting something at a location in the space we intuitively understand, would seem necessarily unpredictable, or it would be redundant and not truly new information and instead part of predictable space. It makes sense from this perspective that the Big Bang is seen as both all encompassing, yet dimensionless, as a pure source of information would be independent of this universe and not be tied to spacial structures within ours (though if it acts as a creative force, then it would be molding the universe but in necessarily unpredictable ways or instead we’d view it as a law of nature and not a novel/creative source of information).
I better stop there and wait for that information to seep in.
^^
Which ever true-god could make a universe, obviously had enough smarts to give Onan a heart-attack for slapping his own penis.
iman, enough.
Please don’t tell me about what you think monotheism is.