Event horizon

Black holes present us with riddles. I am not a cosmologist, and my engagement with black holes is through popular science with a philosophical interest. They mark a boundary of our imagination. Gravity influences space and time, science says. Concentrated at a point, it compresses matter to its pure substance, squeezing atomic nuclei and electrons together into a mass (atoms, after all, essentially consist of emptiness). This mass, with its incredible gravitational force, attracts everything and bends and distorts space and time.

The black hole is surrounded by a threshold, an event horizon. Once this is crossed, there is no going back, meaning light is no longer reflected but absorbed. Therefore, we cannot see what happens inside. Something similar seems to apply to time and space. Although black holes can move through our spacetime, they themselves are, so to speak, outside of it – which truly surpasses our imagination. There seem to be very many of them in our universe. Most galaxies appear to have a supermassive black hole at their center.

The limits of imagination

The physics of black holes poses countless puzzles and paradoxes. Above all, however, they reveal a limit. Our thinking is linear, i.e. our sense of time is in the now, which extends over a moment. It is situated within a temporal sequence, namely a past that preceded it and a future that is anticipated and will occur. The same applies to space: our imagination tells us that we can, in principle, move infinitely far in all directions within (3-dimensional) space.

These assumptions are false. They are nullified by black holes. For Kant, space and time were therefore a priori categories. That is, they determine our perception and are not themselves objects of our perception; we cannot say anything about their real nature. We move within space and time, but do not perceive them ourselves. Space and time shape our thinking; we cannot overcome them within our thinking. This makes it difficult to think about black holes.

Black holes are simply there and, for our thinking, fall into the ontological category with things we don't understand. Other things in this category include death, consciousness, and spirituality. Black holes are similar to these things in that they mark the limits of our imagination. However, they also differ significantly. We only know about black holes through science; outside of science, we have no access to them. We only know about death, consciousness, and spirituality from our experience, and science has little access to their essential qualities. Scientific statements about death, consciousness, and spirituality are unsatisfying and reductionist.

Perhaps all 4, i.e. black holes, death, consciousness and spirituality, mark event horizons in different ways.

Speculation about other dimensions

I'd like to speculate a bit. If black holes are not part of our spacetime but exist within it, perhaps they are part of another dimension. Maybe in another dimension, there's an arrangement of black holes that has event-like characteristics there. Perhaps our spacetime is just a property of another dimension.

In quantum mechanics, every atom 'knows' about the other atoms in the universe. The so-called interaction describes the phenomenon. If I change something in one place in the universe, the constellation of the universe as a whole is changed. This means that the information that something has changed is present at the other end of the universe, otherwise the laws of physics would be suspended. This complex information density is also annulled by black holes. What happens inside a black hole has no interaction with our space-time. Only the gravitational force of the black hole itself has an effect. Here, too, we quickly reach the limits of our imagination. Black holes also appear to be information holes.

But if our world is not primarily physical, but spiritual, how do black holes in the universe fit in? Do black holes also form spiritual holes?