Have you ever perceived or inferred something about a mystery humanity has never documented or considered, and been asked about it for the first time?

Unveiling the Hidden Depths of Human and Systemic Mysteries

Have you ever pondered whether there’s an enigma—the kind that humankind has never formally explored or documented—that you’ve intuitively perceived or drawn conclusions about, yet have never been prompted to articulate?

While the question may seem complex, an alternative framing could be: Is there a profound mystery, an aspect of reality or human understanding that remains uncharted, but which you’ve quietly sensed or inferred, never explicitly asked about?

Exploring an Intriguing Paradigm: The Information Sink Phenomenon

Recently, I contemplated this concept and sought insights via tools like ChatGPT, which led to an illuminating idea I’d like to share: the notion of an “Information Sink Problem.”

In essence, this idea suggests that humans and various systems tend to treat certain data as if it were simply lost to entropy—that, over time, valuable information becomes inaccessible, untraceable, or effectively erased. However, the reality is subtler: the information isn’t necessarily destroyed but becomes trapped in a state that’s difficult or impossible to extract or interpret.

Identifying the Domains of Information Persistence:

• Bureaucratic Systems: Official records and decisions accumulate over time, yet the rationale, intent, and causative factors often fade from view, leaving only the outcomes. The original logic vanishes into obscurity, creating a historical black box.

• Biological Records: Our DNA embodies immense evolutionary history—responses to environmental pressures encoded over epochs. Still, the original triggers and pressures that shaped these genetic patterns remain unknowable, locked within complex biological archives.

• Artificial Intelligence Training Data: Machine learning models encode vast networks of patterns and correlations. While they produce insightful outputs, tracing these back to initial data sources or understanding their logical foundations often proves impossible—insights are stored, but the exact pathways are hidden.

• Human Memory and Societal Norms: Individuals remember what happened but rarely recall why. Societal customs may persist long after their origins fade, continuously enforced despite the vanished motivations that spawned them.

The Core Insight

At the heart of this concept lies a subtle yet profound principle: Certain systems tend to amass meaningful information at a rate faster than they can effectively decode, retrieve, or interpret it. Over time, these systems become resembling “informational black holes”—not intentionally destructive but inherently limited by their complexity and design. This isn’t merely entropy or data