The Amazing Holographic Universe

[Lunar4]

source: http://www.redicecreations.com/speci...lographic.html

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

...

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Its pretty long, but a very good read! this sure is amazing!

[Mangalore]

Love that part:

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

Since a friend of mine who worked in a mental institution told me about a case of a guy who got hung up on a LSD trip believed he was a full glass of orange juice. The "full" part was important because it meant in any other position than than standing upright he believed he would pour the juice out and die...

why are only LSD guys having this widened vision of the universe?


Overall the article is a nice read but not very good at the explanation of facts and delivering sources for its story.

[Drexxus Maximus]

Wow, this sounds interesting indeed. I'll give it a read later on when I have more time.

[Simetrical]

Feh, interpretations. "The world doesn't exist" isn't science, since it's non-empirical. Furthermore, I happen to think that it's nonsense, but that's a philosophical assertion, not a scientific one. Science has nothing to do with this article, except that it supposedly bases the same tired philosophical doggerel on science. Which it doesn't.

[Lunar4]

Prove to me that it doesnt base the article on science.

[Simetrical]

I reiterate that "objective reality does not exist" is inherently a non-empirical statement. It's not well-defined or falsifiable. Science cannot demonstrate the truth of something non-empirical, because the scientific method is inherently empirical. Basing philosophy off science is a dubious venture at best, and has been tried by proponents of every philosophy under the sun, from the most accepted to the most despicable.

Let me point out some flaws in the actual science content of the article. First, we have

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

As far as I (not a physics major) can determine from what people knowledgeable in physics have said, this is not really true. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light even with "spooky action at a distance". That's what Wikipedia says, and it's fairly reliable on science. This, written by a professor of physics, agrees. Communication cannot occur faster than light.

Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This is of course not really true. Every sufficiently large part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. As a consequence, the conclusion doesn't even work for the example given: examining holograms on a molecular level would surely permit better understanding of them.

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

Okay, sure. You can construct a distance function such that the distance between two entangled particles is zero, or whatever. But where's the science? What predictions is this making? What parts are falsifiable? It appears to be a mathematical convenience, but the article is too vague and popular to be of any use to me.

And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

Okay, but keep in mind that we're using holograms as an analogy because their parts are similar to their whole, not because they're fake or ephemeral. You could equally use fractals or something here. "Phantomlike nature" in the next paragraph is unjustified.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

Either this is trivial or garbage, depending on how you look at it. We classify for our own convenience, sure, but that doesn't mean the classifications are nonsense. There are infinite possible classifications, and we pick one that's relatively useful to us.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

Note that this is gibberish, because simultaneously means "at the same time" and so this statement is saying that different times exist at the same time, which is self-contradictory. What it means to say, perhaps, is that the state at any given time is not necessarily determined by any one preceding state (plus possibly some random factor), but may be determined jointly by an infinite number of states which may or may not precede the state in question (plus possibly some random factor).

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

Not really related, it seems to me, except by the idea of the part being similar to the whole. That applies to many things. I don't believe people who use RAID on their computers to ensure that they don't lose their data rhapsodize about similarity to holograms. Redundancy is an obvious step to take in storing any kind of data.

(It should be noted that this part appears to make clearly empirical predictions, namely that the mechanism of information storage and retrieval in the human brain involves an overarching pattern of some kind that's repeated at smaller levels. It would be straightforward to devise an experiment that could falsify this. This has nothing to do with the earlier physics part, which despite being a layman I'm inclined to be skeptical of. Both parts are rather spoiled by the sensationalistic and vapid presentation.)

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

It's not very little space at all. 10 billion bits is under 2 GB. That can fit on something the size of your fingernail these days, and will undoubtedly be someday possible to store in an invisible speck.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

That's just false. Associations like that take an appreciable amount of time to appear in your mind. A very small amount of Googling got me this, for instance, which says that it took 135 ms (over a tenth of a second) for facial recognition to be noticeable neurologically, for instance. Nothing in the brain that we know of is instantaneous. It's all rather slow.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram.

Again, I hardly see that as amazing. It's necessary in any general semantic database to connect many things to many (not all) other things.

Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best.

Is there some mathematical reason for this based on the whole-in-parts duplication? I'm wondering if this is another red herring made from stretching the analogy too far (like the "phantasmal" nonsense above), or if it's actually meaningful. Could be the latter.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

The point of the entire article, apparently, was to lead up to here. The answer is: nothing. Objective reality goes on as it always did. These hypotheses are, if they're scientific, going to be tested against it. Experiments will be performed, results will be derived. From where, something the experimenters made up? No, objective reality.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

Or in other words, our perceptions don't constitute the entirety of reality. No freaking kidding. Nobody ever said anything to the contrary. The point of science is to go beyond our perceptions.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

Yes, I could also say that telepathy is caused by little invisible monkeys that fly around everywhere. Let's see some experiments. Notwithstanding the fact that telepathy and similar phenomena have repeatedly been shown to be bogus.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Were these controlled? Were the accurate vs. inaccurate observations tallied up? No and no. Anecdotal evidence. Worthless. Tons of things like this have been observed, they all fall apart under controlled conditions.

Okay, I've gone through most of the article. I conclude that the author is a credulous ignoramus who believes in paranormal quackery. The expert opinions he cites may have reasonable ideas, but he covers them with trash. Lo and behold, after Googling (which I only just did now), I find that I'm entirely correct: Michael Talbot wrote a bunch of books about his bizarre pseudoscientific beliefs. He's big on drawing connections between physics and spirituality. Unsurprisingly, as I predicted, no mention of any kind of credentials in the sciences is made. I can't find anything on Google about that, but I'm betting that if he had a college education (probable) it was in the humanities or possibly the social sciences. Basically, he's a screwball, and has nothing to contribute to science.

[chris_uk_83]

Simetrical deserves rep for that post.

It's entirely possible that our entire world exists inside some computer program and isn't 'real' as we think. But this is philosophy rather than science, as it's untestable as yet. This would put a whole new slant on the notion of "who is God?"

As for 'Spooky action at a distance', allow me to elaborate further for those of you who can't be bothered following Simetrical's link (which is pretty good). There's a phenomenon called 'quantum entanglement' where two particles (usually electrons) become 'entangled'. This means that they effectively share the same energy state in an atom, even when you remove them from the atom (which is strange in itself). The Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no two spin half particles (electrons to you) can share the same quantum mechanical state (energy state). This means that one electron of the pair must always be different to the other (what differs is a property called 'spin' but don't worry about that. Electrons can either be spin up or spin down, so if one of the pair is spin up, the other is spin down).

Let's call the two entangled electrons 'electron 1' and 'electron 2' for simplicity.

Due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, if you measure the spin of electron 1 and you know that the spin of electron 2 be opposite, you've effectively measured electron 2's spin be inference. In this way you can take your entangled electrons a billion miles apart and measure the spin on electron 1, thereby instantly measuring the spin on electron 2.

Einstein said that no information can travel faster than light, this seems to contravene that principle. Because if you can measure electron 1's spin, electron 2's spin fixes itself instantly, no matter how far apart the two are. You can then construct a communication device to send information in this way.

Theoretically yes, but how will the person who owns electron 2 know that you've measured its spin? You have to ring them up and tell them (or communicate it in some other, slower than light, way). Therefore even though spin is instantly fixed when one is measured, there is no way to communicate this fact faster than light.