Rick Rosner is a personal and professional friend. I interviewed Rick in an extensive interview on In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, which came to about 100,000 words. Rick claims to have the world’s second highest IQ. He is a member of the Mega Society and was the journal editor, as well Errol Morris interviewed him for the TV series First Person. Here we talk about his background as an exceptionally gifted kid, this is part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have a long history with forging identities beginning with entering high school another time, and many more. What motivated this behavior? How long did you pursue this ‘calling’ of entering high school? In particular, how did each experience turn out? How many times did you do this?
Rick Rosner: Though I had started trying to de-nerdify myself as early as ninth grade, it wasn’t effective. In my small town, my classmates were well aware of my nerdiness – there was no erasing that. After years of trying to be cool and failing, I was very frustrated and had something like a freak-out. I decided that I would not leave high school a virgin. So after graduating high school with the class of 1978, using forged transcripts, I went back to high school for a second senior year (class of ’79) with my other family in Albuquerque. I only lasted ten weeks and didn’t come close to even making out with a girl.
A note on inappropriateness: I think standards have changed since I did this. The creepiness factor has increased. But since I was just 18 – still roughly high school age – and barely talked to any girls much less date them when I returned to high school, it was pretty harmless.
1980: Went on a double-date to a high school prom because my girlfriend (who, like me, was in college) had a best friend who was still in high school and thought we should all go to her prom.
Also 1980: I went to L.A. to try to sell my back-to-high-school story to a Hollywood producer. Thought it would help sell the story if I were back in high school at the time. Tried to talk my way into a couple of L.A. schools without any transcripts, just a class of ’81 letterman’s jacket.
I eventually spent several more semesters in high school, but rather than tell about them here, I’ll just tease my forthcoming book, Dumbass Genius, which will detail my more than ten years as a sometime high school student.
Jacobsen: In terms of your ideas related to cosmology and physics, at 10, you began thinking about the universe. The reason for existence.
At 21, you came to a realization. You note, “All the big theories are built around big equivalences.” Namely, your realization of an equivalence between the operation of information in an individual consciousness and the operation of space & matter in the universe. Both have self-consistency.
In addition to this, and later in response to a similar topic in Noesis 58, you state, “I believe in matter and space as information held in some vast awareness…” What do you mean by these? In particular, the idea of a great equivalence. How have you developed the idea from the original equivalence to the present day?
Rosner: I’ve continued to think about this stuff and think I have a pretty good theoretical framework, though it needs more math.
I believe that it’s almost impossible to have a large, self-consistent system of information without that system has some degree of consciousness – probably a high degree. Consciousness can be characterized as every part of a system knowing what’s going on, more or less, with every other part of the system, within a framework that assigns (emotional) values to events perceived by the system.
(Of course, there are processes which are peripheral to consciousness – most of the time, we’re not aware of the finer points of breathing or walking or why we like looking at cat videos and butts.)
Plenty of people think that the universe is a massive processor of information. Quantum mechanics mathematicizes the limitations of the universe’s information-processing ability. Being finite, the universe cannot observe itself with infinite precision.
Jacobsen: Provided the nature of these particular equivalences, especially related to the universe, do you have a mathematical model to represent this equivalence? Furthermore, do you have a layman analogy for this equivalence?
Rosner: I think the most efficient model of the information contained in a complex, self-contained and self-consistent system of information looks like the universe – locally three-dimensional (spatially) with linear time and particles and forces that transact business more or less the way they do in the universe itself.
I don’t believe in the big bang – instead, I believe that what looks like a big bang is kind of a trick of perspective, based on the universe being made of information. Parts of the universe which have less information in common with us are more distant and red-shifted. The apparent age of the universe is a measure of the amount of information it contains (or has in play). Somewhat similarly, train tracks don’t really touch at the horizon.
Kind of picture the universe as being at a slow boil. Some parts are energy-rich and expanding, while other parts are burned out and pushed to the outskirts by the expanding regions, waiting for their chance to expand again.
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Original publication on www.in-sightjournal.com.
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