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Existence: Am I a hologram?

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Xylo

Xylo

Paranormal Adept
If you had asked me 2, 5, or 10 years ago I would have said that the database hypothesis is crap. But as time goes on and I take a serious step back from belief, I think it's more and more likely, from both a philosophical angle and a scientific angle.


Am I a hologram?
(in part)


[h=1]Existence: Am I a hologram?[/h]

TAKE a look around you. The walls, the chair you're sitting in, your own body - they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe - including you and me - may be nothing more than a hologram.
It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.
The idea has a long history, stemming from an apparent paradox posed by Stephen Hawking's work in the 1970s. He discovered that black holes slowly radiate their mass away. This Hawking radiation appears to carry no information, however, raising the question of what happens to the information that described the original star once the black hole evaporates. It is a cornerstone of physics that information cannot be destroyed.
In 1972 Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, showed that the information content of a black hole is proportional to the two-dimensional surface area of its event horizon - the point-of-no-return for in-falling light or matter. Later, string theorists managed to show how the original star's information could be encoded in tiny lumps and bumps on the event horizon, which would then imprint it on the Hawking radiation departing the black hole.
This solved the paradox, but theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft decided to take the idea a step further: if a three-dimensional star could be encoded on a black hole's 2D event horizon, maybe the same could be true of the whole universe. The universe does, after all, have a horizon 42 billion light years away, beyond which point light would not have had time to reach us since the big bang. Susskind and 't Hooft suggested that this 2D "surface" may encode the entire 3D universe that we experience - much like the 3D hologram that is projected from your credit card.
It sounds crazy, but we have already seen a sign that it may be true. Theoretical physicists have long suspected that space-time is pixelated, or grainy. Since a 2D surface cannot store sufficient information to render a 3D object perfectly, these pixels would be bigger in a hologram. "Being in the [holographic] universe is like being in a 3D movie," says Craig Hogan of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "On a large scale, it looks smooth and three-dimensional, but if you get close to the screen, you can tell that it is flat and pixelated."
Click to expand...

 
if you're into fiction, the book coincidence by david ambrose touches on this subject. i had picked the book up because it started out heavily interweaving themes of coincidence and synchronicity,a favorite subject of mine, and was not afraid of dropping in healthy doses of jung and the I-ching, but then the plot develed toward the hologram thingee. do not take this mention as a recommendation. truth be told I thought the hologram part was set up sort of weekly and on top of that made the final chapters a bit of a cop-out. it goes by fast though, you could probably knock it off in one day
 
Or The Matrix, or if you are into anime, The Ghost in the Shell...

We are all about our perceptions -- even more so now that there is the internet to connect us. You don't know that I am real; I don't know that I am real -- We can only deduce as much from the things that we perceive.

Honestly, I have wondered about the reality of my existence ever since I was maybe four or five years old (or possibly younger, I don't know...) Of course I didn't have the vocab to say this at the time, but it ran along the lines of, "Why do I perceive as me? If another person looks at a colour -- Blue, say -- How do either of us know that we are seeing the same? Are we?" ...I was a very esoteric four year old, lol.

But it's funny that you should mention, because it touches on an early memory of mine. In fact, the earliest. It is from just before what I say is my earliest memory (At age two, my mum threw out all my bottles.) You may not believe me, but it was almost like a lucid dream. I surrounded by faceless people, all circling around some undefined point -- but saying nothing, and giving no sign that they had any sentience to them. Meanwhile, a voice intoned "Your mother. Your father. Your brother." And then my own sentience began, and that is how they all turned out to be.

In later years, I wondered if this was not a little like a computer programme booting up.
 
Philosophical speculations are usually limited by the technology on hand at the time they are made. The broad question is: Are the world and ourselves not what we commonly perceive them to be? The answer, even from the most materialistic and reductionist individuals, is yes, OF COURSE! To the materialist, what we perceive around us is billions of atoms and molecules, particles and waves and wave-icles, reacting with organs in our bodies (made up of billions of particles), giving us what we perceive as the world around us and inside of us. To say that you and I are holograms is a very limited view of the illusory quality of our experience. You could also say that "all" we are is a computer program. But a hundred years ago, scientists as psychologists pictured us as a system of pipes with valves and drains -- like a steam engine. Metaphors from those days are still with us. Getting "steamed". Needing a release from the "pressures" of life. Later there were electrical models. We could "fry" our brains. Short-circuit our nervous systems. So basically, our understanding of existence is limited by the technology of our times.

I do think, however, that our existence, our experience of life, is something of an illusion. As St. Paul says, now it's like we see through a dim mirror -- later we may see things "face to face". Plato's great metaphor was of men in a cave, able to only see a dim view of the fire. Both of these are, of course, grand metaphors -- and concerning these vast questions that lie beyond our capacioty to truly understand, metaphors are the best we can do.
 
i like to keep an open mind about everything but i do have some problems about entertaing the possibility of us being a hologram/program. it would suggest that the reason we exist is to provide entertainment for someone or something.. More to the point It would proabbly negate the very thought of free will. I would think that (and i could be wrong heer) that free will and quantum computing are incompatable.It would mean that every act of every person that has ever been or ever will be is predetermined. when you do it, where you do it and who you do it with. it's hard for me to put my thoughts into words, but i use a similar argument when somone suggests that our llife is determined from the time we are born which i find ridiculous. think about the logisitcs involved and protocols that would have to be put up in place in one's lifetime.the simple act of marrying the women you love, think about how you got to that point. it means that your birth was predermined, your parents meeting and subsequent marraige was predetermined, their respective parents went through the whole thing, birth, grow up, move, meet have a family and on and on, and that's just for you, you have to take you future wife's life progression and her parents and their parents into consideration as well. where did you meet? at work? well than you have to take into consideration the people who made THAT possible from the person who started that business, to the person who built the building that you guys met in to the previous tenant aho moved out, allowing your boss to move his business there, and let's not forget the human resources person that hired you to the persons that either got promoted, quit , retired or died to make it possible for you two to meet cute and don't forget the forefathers and foremothers of all those people had to have similar experiences to get to that particular point. every program has to have arameters in place and every possibility taken into consideration and implemented to allow for the illusion of free will, which to me seems highly unlikely and definately illogical (but possible i suppose) OR you just accept that there is free will from the lowest invertabrate to the more higher evolved (man i guess) we all have choices thrusted upon us...determined by others who used their free will to act upon something...on a day to day basis and how we act upon them and what others do in response to them define our existence i don't know if i'm expressing myself in a way that makes sense but my whole point here is that i think this whole scenario would negate the concept of free will, which i think is universal no matter how we came to be , God or a computer program (my money's on God) they would handle things in a logical way and i don't see anything logical about the way life is, unless one accepts that everyone has free will, to act upon things as they see fit
 
Xylo said:
If you had asked me 2, 5, or 10 years ago I would have said that the database hypothesis is crap. But as time goes on and I take a serious step back from belief, I think it's more and more likely, from both a philosophical angle and a scientific angle.


Am I a hologram?
(in part)



[/B]
Click to expand...

Hogan is still pursuing his hologram experiments but the book The Holographic Universe has been confirmed as accurate by qigong master Chunyi Lin. I highly recommend reading Michael Talbot's book. He left an interview online as well.

Talbot's lecture:


Karl Pribram is still kicking out his holographic model of the brain and there's been a new embrace of de Broglie, the basis for Bohm's holographic model.

Here's a great interview with Pribram:
 
Something that irks me on this forum is when people post youtube videos without a summary of what they contain. I'm not going to spend nearly an hour watching these videos to find out what is being talked about. I will, however, read a paragraph summarizing each video. If a poster has a point of view, a line of reasoning, or simply wants to show something curious, then he needs to put forth a little effort. I'm not going to do their work for them. This is not just directed at Drew Hempel, but at many others on this forum.
 
jimp said:
Something that irks me on this forum is when people post youtube videos without a summary of what they contain. I'm not going to spend nearly an hour watching these videos to find out what is being talked about. I will, however, read a paragraph summarizing each video. If a poster has a point of view, a line of reasoning, or simply wants to show something curious, then he needs to put forth a little effort. I'm not going to do their work for them. This is not just directed at Drew Hempel, but at many others on this forum.
Click to expand...

The Holographic Universe

That's a good explanation for the above vids.

They're about the Holographic Universe, as in the title of the thread.
[SIZE=-1]The main architects of this astonishing idea are two of the world's most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein's and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists; and Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University and author of the classic neuropsychological textbook Languages of the Brain. Intriguingly, Bohm and Pribram arrived at their conclusions independently and while working from two very different directions. Bohm became convinced of the universe's holographic nature only after years of dissatisfaction with standard theories' inability to explain all of the phenomena encountered in quantum physics. Pribram became convinced because of the failure of standard theories of the brain to explain various neurophysiological puzzles.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]However, after arriving at their views, Bohm and Pribram quickly realized the holographic model explained a number of other mysteries as well, including the apparent inability of any theory, no matter how comprehensive, ever to account for all the phenomena encountered in nature; the ability of individuals with- hearing in only one ear to determine the direction from which a sound originates; and our ability to recognize the face of someone we have not seen for many years even if that person has changed considerably in the interim.[/SIZE]
Click to expand...
 
jimp said:
Something that irks me on this forum is when people post youtube videos without a summary of what they contain. I'm not going to spend nearly an hour watching these videos to find out what is being talked about. I will, however, read a paragraph summarizing each video. If a poster has a point of view, a line of reasoning, or simply wants to show something curious, then he needs to put forth a little effort. I'm not going to do their work for them. This is not just directed at Drew Hempel, but at many others on this forum.
Click to expand...
I find similar, but not because I don't want to watch the youtube vids. Rather it is because my Internet connection is slow, and with a 2G monthly limit. I don't find it irksome, or that I would be "doing [someone else's] work for them" by watching, but a small description of what is in the vids is not a bad idea. Cheers.
 
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