Re: Good read -- Our world may be a giant hologram -- scientifically inclined friends. I give up. What's goin' on here? Not much.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: January 18, 2009 5:35:20 PM EST
To: <dave () farber net>, "'ip'" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Cc: "Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
Subject: RE: [IP] Good read --  Our world may be a giant hologram --  
scientifically inclined friends. I give up. What's goin' on here? Not  
much.

I’ve only skimmed the article so I can only react to top level points  
and I won’t attempt to comment on the particulars of the physics  
beyond noting a talk I heard by Gell-Mann a few years back providing  
simpler explanations for phenomena of the type cited.

There seems to be a bias to find mysticism which is common in dealing  
with counter-intuitive ideas. The problem is that it makes one stop at  
the first plausible explanation with a low hurdle for plausible. We  
saw this with Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and his belief  
in fairies. Houdini would try to debunk him.

The seeming naïve theories about how information is spread out in the  
brain and the comparison with holograms is, perhaps, this in action.  
In a hologram the elements do not contain the entire picture – they  
contribute to it. The less points you have the less resolution. One  
doesn’t need fancy theories about electrical impulses do recognize  
that information doesn’t exist in the brain as if it were a VCR (for  
those who remember VCRs). The actual memories are constructed or  
emerge out of many elements. In one sense they don’t exist at all and  
in another they are everywhere and timeless – at least if one wants to  
make it sound more mysterious.

One needn’t go to holograms – we see a similar example when one does  
signal processing on a blurry photo to reprocess it at a different  
distance. The information is latent but we can add some more  
knowledge. In this case either a new focal point or go through a range  
till it looks like something a human would recognize. But this can go  
awry because of tendency to see patterns and interpret them as with  
the face on Mars that were really just a few arbitrary shadows. The  
face is there in a sense but not in the sense that it’s a humanoid  
Martian staring back.

I’m tempted to go to the particular false analogies and false awe (as  
in wondering how a tiny brain can store so many photographs) but will  
resist.


-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 02:11
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Good read -- Our world may be a giant hologram --  
scientifically inclined friends. I give up. What's goin' on here?



Begin forwarded message:

From: "the terminal of geoff goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
Date: January 17, 2009 11:51:58 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: re: Our world may be a giant hologram -- scientifically
inclined friends. I give up. What's goin' on here?
Reply-To: geoff () iconia com

cannot more highly recommend reading The Holographic Universe by
Michael Talbot (1953-1992) for the details on this:
http://www.amazon.com/Holographic-Universe-Michael-Talbot/dp/0060922583

here's a good article with a synopsis on it (
http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html ):

Michael Talbot (1953-1992), was the author of a number of books
highlighting parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum
mechanics, and espousing a theoretical model of reality that suggests
the physical universe is akin to a giant hologram.

In The Holographic Universe, Talbot made many references to the work
of David Bohm  -- an American-born quantum physicist who made
significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics,
philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm ) --  and Karl Pribram -- a
professor at Georgetown University and George Mason University, and an
emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University
and Radford University. He is also a Board-certified as a neurosurgeon
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram ).  It is quite
apparent that the combined work of Bohm and Karl Pribram is largely
the cornerstone upon which Talbot built his ideas.

The Holographic Universe

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a
research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn
out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century.
You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are
in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never
even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his
discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect's experiment is related to the EPR Experiment, a consicousness
experiment which had been devised by Albert Einstein, and his
colleagues, Poldlsky and Rosen, in order to disprove Quantum Mechanics
on the basis of the Pauli Exclusion Principle contradicting Special
Relativity.

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.
Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to
breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some
physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away
Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more
radical explanations.

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.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first
understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-
dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in
the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the
reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern
(the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light
and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by
another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object
appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable
characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half
and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to
contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film
will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the
original image. 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 insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's
discovery. 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.

      This fundamental connectedness would correlate with The Fifth
Element, and its mathematical proof of all aspects of the universe
being energetically connected - Hal Puthoff's assertion in his work on
Zero-Point Energy of all charges in the universe being connected and
that further mass is in all likelihood an illusion as well -- and both
of these modern day theories of physics being in accordance with
ancient traditions and philosophies, which claim the same
connectedness of the diverse parts of the universe.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the
following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine
also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your
knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television
cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed
at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the
fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because
the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be
slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you
will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship
between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but
corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces
toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the
situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly
not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic
particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between
subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level
of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our
own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects
such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we
are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and
more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and
indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in
physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is
itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess
other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of
subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of
reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the
subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart
that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

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.

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.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question.
Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the
matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very
least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be --
every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from
snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen
as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might
lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have
no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it,
perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond
which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the
universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain
research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become
persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

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.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl
Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed
he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks
it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was
able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious
"whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and
realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been
looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or
small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that
crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser
light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film
containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the
brain is itself a hologram.

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).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information
storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a
piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different
images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic
centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

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.

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 ever other portion, it is perhaps
nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that
becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the
brain. 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. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating
device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies
into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a
lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the
frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our
perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses
holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in
fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the
fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their
heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli
discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a
recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an
almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard"
reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received
a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much
broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are
sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part
dependent on what are now called "cosmic frequencies", and that even
the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies.
Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of
consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into
conventional perceptions.

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. 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. It is obviously much easier to understand how
information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of
individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a
number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Stansilov
Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding
many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during
altered states of consciousness.

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
encapsulated in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of
the species 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 woman¹s 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.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling
psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who
appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious.
Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed
descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu
mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave
persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses
of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested
in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because
the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending
of an individual¹s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego
and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations
transpersonal experiences, and in the late '60s he helped found a
branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology devoted entirely
to their study. Although Grof¹s newly founded Association of
Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of
like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of
psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able
to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological
phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent
of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a
labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists
or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the
vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to
occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal
experiences no longer seems so strange.

      Perhaps, in Creating Reality, we have already become - as in
Star Trek, The Next Generation - a Q of the Continuum or we are part
of a consciousness virtual reality experiment.

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard
sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia
Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality
is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the
brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is Consciousness that creates
the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else
around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused
researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the
healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm.
If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic
projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much
more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows.
What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be
due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the
hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques
such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic
domain of thought images are ultimately as real as reality. Even
visions and experiences involving non-ordinary reality become
explainable under the holographic paradigm.

In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, biologist Lyall Watson describes
his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a
ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly
vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished
onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to
reappear, then click off again and on again several times in
succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of
explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if
hard reality is only a holographic projection.

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. If
this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic
paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are
not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the
beliefs that would make them so.

In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which
we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw
upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons
with the power of the mind to events experienced by Carlos Castaneda
during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for Magic is our
birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the
reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become
suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out,
even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic
principles and therefore determined.

Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and
everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor. Even the
most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in
science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to
say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many
scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does
not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications
that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at
the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck
College in London, Aspect's findings indicate that we must be prepared
to consider radically new views of reality.

[...snip...]




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