In my opinion, black holes are real universes budding off of this one.
Do you think maybe they learn something from what falls into them?
Do you think future humans, or aliens, will be able to tweak the formation of black holes, or the rules that the universes inside operate?
We know that evolution can work by pure randomness and natural selection. But we also know that artificial selection, breeding, is possible, and further than that, we know that synthetic evolution, downright genetic engineering by conscious design, is technically possible.
So why not with universes? If universes form using the simplest learning algorithm we know, evolution, why wouldn't they, also, be able to benefit from the results of more complex learning?
What is the single biggest thing a universe would "want" to know before creating new universes?
It would want to know what this one is like, how it's doing. If you run an experiment, the experiment is pointless unless you can measure or draw something with it. Maybe our consciousness is a gauge on how good this universe is and what could be improved.
That's basically my philosophy on the "religious" level of things I can't possibly know myself, but that might be extrapolated from what I'm seeing around me.
In my opinion, there's a difference between the virtual reality in my mind and the physical reality around it, and there's a difference between the informational reality in a simulation and the physical reality around it. Maybe we can bring the two closer and closer together, but I just have this feeling you need a black hole to power a new physical reality. Black holes have more energy than anything else we can observe (other than the Big Bang), and the length of time they exist is comparable to the lifespan of this universe as we understand it. They have informational properties that continue to perplex physicists, but from the outside it looks as if they should have the highest quantity of information possible for the physical space they occupy. To me that sounds like an incredibly energetic superconducting supercomputer implosion. It looks like exactly the kind of thing a new universe would need. What probably happens inside is that spacetime stretches and rips and so much energy is released that basically everything goes beyond melting and new space, time, matter, energy, etc are formed. The energy that falls into a black hole has nowhere to go, so instead of just releasing new matter and light when all those particles smash together in the center, like in a particle accelerator, it creates new space and time as well. But we can't see that from out here because of the event horizon. To put it another way, if a Big Bang happened inside a black hole's event horizon, we wouldn't hear about it, because the news would never reach us.
To put it more familiarly, a black hole is a natural particle accelerator big enough to create not just Higgs bosons and other particles, but also new spacetime fabric. Spacetime fabric has informational and computational properties, laws of physics, as we see in our own universe, and so that might explain "where all the information goes." It goes into building a new computer-universe.
I'm not the first person to say this by any means. Physicists have been writing papers on this "black holes are universes" idea every now and then for decades, though the particular version of the story I've written above is my own. I'm not a physicist and don't need anyone to take me seriously, so I can free-associate.
It's a world view with a lot of guessing, but it makes sense to me.