Thread: The Holographic universe

Is the Universe a Holographic Reality? - Global One TV

I found this article and it put the topic in a good light for me.

One thing this article includes is how thinking of reality as a hologram may have practical implications. It's all well and good to say 'yeah, this could be the way reality is but it it doesn't really matter'. A lot of it is speculative, but I found it to be very interesting and well-reasoned. It actually sounds a lot like Sloth's "one atom" example... that every aspect of the universe is inherent in every particle:

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 some 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. 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. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

This part is cool:

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

Could you imagine if we could watch the past without affecting it? Here's a question. If we could interact with the "superholographic level", would trifles such as, oh let's say perfecting the historical record, be as trivial as finding out what really happened between your wife and the milkman? I tend to think that perfecting the pre-historical record would make fixing the historical record seem trivial. But god-like powers would make fixing the pre-historical record seem trivial, huh?

One more area that the article gets into is experience under LSD. I've always found it interesting how accounts of hallucinogenic drug users line up about their perception that all life is interconnected. This plays right into the holographic model, albeit very speculatively. There is also a suggestion of "reality by consensus" that I thought was amusing.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

I suspect the OP is talking about the "holographic universe" put forward by Michael Talbot based on his interpretation of Bohm and Pribram (I'm mainly familiar with it from Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum, recommended for anyone with an interest in the subject), and popularized in the '70s Transcendental Meditation movement. It's really an extended metaphor borrowing language and imagery from science, a (useful, I think) way of thinking about time and space, not a description of physical properties of time and space. It probably should have been placed in the main ED forum and the OP probably should have been more specific.

I'd say go ahead and explore it if it resonates with you, but don't get too hung up on it.

Originally Posted by IndieAnthias

This part is cool:

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

Could you imagine if we could watch the past without affecting it? Here's a question. If we could interact with the "superholographic level", would trifles such as, oh let's say perfecting the historical record, be as trivial as finding out what really happened between your wife and the milkman? I tend to think that perfecting the pre-historical record would make fixing the historical record seem trivial. But god-like powers would make fixing the pre-historical record seem trivial, huh?

You might enjoy Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch (easily his best work, IMO).

My own take on this notion of drawing specific, historical information out of the a-temporal (aka eternal) 'level' or 'side' of our existence is that it's an attempt to get a dissected frog to catch flies. To consider the holographic universe in any depth, one must set aside the notion that happening (undergoing the formality of actually occurring in our linear experience of the universe) has some privileged status. The unchanging, a-temporal totality of being includes not only all happenings, but all possibilities. The appearance of specific events taking place in an ordered chain of causality is strictly a manifestation of consciousness. So, even if we could mine eternity for detailed information, even first-hand vision of a past, it wouldn't necessarily be our past (what most of us ordinarily consider the past).

Bentov represents holographic time graphically as a torus (donut, for the geometrically challenged) centered on a singularity:

The events of our history (and future) trace a single line emerging up and out from the singularity, falling back, and eventually returning into the singularity. The whole torus is always there, and in some sense the totality is accessible from any point or area of the surface, but the illusion of the present, of separate forms and unfolding events, is just the reflection from one small facet of the always present, unchanging totality.

Yeah, not exactly Sci/Math material Still, I wouldn't say it's quite Inner Sanctum fodder, either, until you bring in the stuff about achieving a resonant frequency with the interference pattern of the universe through Transcendental Meditation

Originally Posted by Taosaur

My own take on this notion of drawing specific, historical information out of the a-temporal (aka eternal) 'level' or 'side' of our existence is that it's an attempt to get a dissected frog to catch flies. To consider the holographic universe in any depth, one must set aside the notion that happening (undergoing the formality of actually occurring in our linear experience of the universe) has some privileged status. The unchanging, a-temporal totality of being includes not only all happenings, but all possibilities. The appearance of specific events taking place in an ordered chain of causality is strictly a manifestation of consciousness. So, even if we could mine eternity for detailed information, even first-hand vision of a past, it wouldn't necessarily be our past (what most of us ordinarily consider the past).

This stuff is pure gold. Of course it's forced on us by even special relativity (specifically, the relativity of simultaneity) and strongly hinted at by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

This "big bang" isn't a "was but an "is" that is happening right "now".