Gadfly
1000+ posts
11/18/11 06:25 PM
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Very trippy stuff. It’s the Matrix man!
The Link Youtube (beginning of a multipart)
The Link Wiki
Anybody got a handle on this theory yet? It’s so far out, I’m not sure anybody would even want to talk about this. If my understanding of the theory is correct, the universe is like a 2-D bubble. The 3D that we experience is simply a projection from that 2D bubble. The things we see (even time) is just the effect of how our consciousness is trained to view reality. It makes you wonder… What exactly is consciousness then?
It suggests the reality we experience is a holographic projection of a 2D reality. The scientists claim the mathematics emanating from String Theory suggest this 2-D version of the universe and they are working on providing experimental evidence which would support this conclusion. However, I’m not aware the Large Hardon Collider has yet been able to offer evidence of String Theory.
Is mathematics getting so complex it stops being reality? Is mathematics becoming a creation out of human imagination? Aristotle was pretty smart when he came up with his concentric spheres theory of the universe, and we know now what a ridiculous theory that was.
It truly motivates me to start with a high school physics book and begin a 30 year journey to figure all this craziness out. Background: I started looking into this based on a conversation with Coelacanth about the nature of God and if God was evil. I suggested to Coel that we could only assume God is not evil if our reality is a recreation (like a television show).
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A. BETTIK
500+ posts
11/22/11 05:46 PM
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Mathematics provides us multiple models that seem to describe Reality. Nobody truly knows what Reality is except that it just is. There are times when I am falling asleep and I seem to comprehend more clearly the tremendous magnitude that Something Is Going On Here. Usually that meditative state split second apprehension scares the crap out of me and I wake up fully to an elevated heart rate.
"If I want humans, I start the Universe so. If I don't want humans, I start the Universe not so." -God
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OldHippie
1000+ posts
11/23/11 11:02 PM
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Our mathematics is a creation of the human brain and as such is limited in every way that the human brain is limited and creative in every way that the human brain is creative. And just as 3-D or 4-D may not be reality, except as seen by our brains, multiverses or 2-D string theory are not reality either, only a creation of the human brain in an attempt to explain what the human brain perceives the universe to be. All of it, all of human knowledge and theory is merely and completely the essence of the brains attempt to explain the universe, a reflection of the brain itself. Maybe.
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general35
10,000+ posts
11/29/11 12:48 PM
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just stick me back in the matrix man and make me someone important...like an actor or something....
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Perham1
5000+ posts
11/29/11 02:19 PM
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I heard that in segment one of "Fabric of the Cosmos" (or something close to that) on PBS recently. The dude (guy from Stanford, Susskind iirc) said that it's all a hologram originating from the surface of a black hole.
Ok, cool. But then how do we feel anything? Holograms don't have an sensory qualities, do they?
Or maybe god is nothing more than a black hole.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. Oscar Wilde
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general35
10,000+ posts
11/29/11 03:26 PM
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so does this mean we dont have to worry about global warming?
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Gadfly
1000+ posts
12/05/11 10:39 PM
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In reply to:
Ok, cool. But then how do we feel anything? Holograms don't have an sensory qualities, do they?
I'm not saying I believe this, but I'll tell you my understanding of how they may explain it.
What you "feel" with touch is simply an electrical signal being processed in your brain. It does not exist outside of your brain. Your brain is programmed to react to something that is hot or sharp, so the reaction of pain is also an electrical signal. Hot is just the reaction to active matter. You are programmed to protect your biological vessel, so you protect it.
If you've ever heard the statement "matter is mostly open space" because the atom is mostly open space, then you could see that the electrical signal made by the electrons is the only thing causing you to touch anything. The emotions (if you meant that “feeling”) is a part of our conscious reality which does not exist entirely in this reality. If you took all the matter in the Empire State Building and removed the empty space, it would be an extremely heavy grain of rice.
It’s a real far-out theory which opens itself to some really unscientific conclusions.
For example.... I wonder if this would explain why we have so much problems understanding Quantum Mechanics and how it seems to be so different than the world we live in. Could it be the quantum world illustrates how "not real" our world is?
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Dionysus
5000+ posts
12/15/11 03:01 PM
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Great thread. I love this stuff.
In reply to:
OldHippie said: Our mathematics is a creation of the human brain
Is it a creation, or a discovery of something fundamental to ‘reality’ — whatever that might mean ...?
The forces of nature have been shown to reliably conform to mathematical descriptions. Moreover, I think some equations developed in physics have actually pointed to other discoveries (or theories) that have led to new insights that were never anticipated when the equation was originally developed. That seems freaky.
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OldHippie
1000+ posts
12/15/11 04:55 PM
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Dionysis
I completely agree. I was just carrying the OP's link to the logical extreme which, if I remember my Philosophy 101 correctly, is related to Bishop Berkeley who said that nothing can be proven to exist outside of the human mind (brain). We just have to assume there is an actual "real world" out there if we want to eat today.
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Third Coast
10,000+ posts
12/18/11 07:20 PM
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I am intrigued by the premise that this reality is holographic in nature - an explicit construct of consciousness from an implicate order beyond this physical reality. "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot is a very compelling book on the subject.
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Coelacanth
2500+ posts
12/18/11 09:33 PM
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And suddenly I remember my Shakespeare:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
As for the idea itself...
In reply to:
The things we see (even time) is just the effect of how our consciousness is trained to view reality. It makes you wonder… What exactly is consciousness then?
Trained by what? Trained by whom? By experience, maybe?
It seems to me that if we were really living in a hologram, and if—as the video suggests—we were to disconnect our senses from the external world, then the external world would somehow fade into that "insubstantial pageant" that Macbeth refers to.
But then Macbeth was a character, conjured by a playwright whose habit was to blur the lines between audience and stage by having his characters become "aware" of their own theatrical reality. Globe and rack were both obvious references to the immediate physical reality of the theater (the Globe Theater) and the stage itself. Hamlet, in particular, seems to realize, at some point during Act 3, that he's a character in a play, and he spends most of the rest of the play looking for a way out of it. Fittingly for our discussion, in Act 1 of that play, Horatio warns Hamlet not to chase after the ghost:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness?
What if, indeed. Perhaps Macbeth's "reality" is not too substantial beyond the stage, and we may suppose, too, that if the character Hamlet did decide to go off-script and wander over the edge of the cliff, we could at least know that the actor survived.
But we're not characters like Macbeth or Hamlet. Experience teaches us that there are severe, negative consequences for disconnecting our rational faculties from our senses—for going off script. It would be a dramatic tragedy if Hamlet were to step right over the "summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base" and plummet out of the play, but it would be an actual tragedy if we were to step over a cliff. In that case, we can assume that the force of impact between the body and the ground would crush the skull (along with various bones connected through various sinewy parts to the brain that resides in the skull). That impact, and the general smushing of the brain that would ensue, would no doubt snuff out the little projection of electric impulses being transmitted to the brain, and along with it, the notion that there is no real connection between the external world and internal projected world.
This particular example, along with the example of the world at large, teaches us that, if anything, the external world is far too substantial for humans to cope with, and that whatever divergence from that world we harbor in our internal, electronic projection is in fact the insubstantial pageant that fades into oblivion.
The hologram theory is expressive of a general skepticism in the world these days, and according to me at least, the "ghost" has had exactly the effect that Horatio warned us about. It has deprived our sovereignty of reason and apparently drawn us into the sort of madness that can find no rational justification for stepping back from the ledge. It is also very characteristic of the sort of constructivism that enjoys such wide approval in the world today—a constructivism which claims to be permissive of every view, but which in fact works to dismiss the meaningfulness of all views and all possible views.
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Third Coast
10,000+ posts
12/18/11 11:07 PM
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People generally place far too great a significance on this phenomenal world with it's ego driven sensory tunnel vision and in turn, miss the point of physical existence entirely.
I am most certainly not downplaying it's significance, because THE path to a" higher" state of being invariably leads through this dense soup of space and time. The key is coming to realize it for what it is - essentially a place for choices to be made, experiences to unfold and resultant lessons to be learned, individually and collectively.
I have deluged myself with countless questions in this life and received few tangible answers, other that those of an intuitive nature. One day I realized the only question that truly matters is the self inquiry "Who am I?".
If I had one bit of advice to humbly offer anyone that cared to listen, it would be to keep an open mind. Awareness of the journey is rekindled once you remember that there is more to this than meets the eye.
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Dionysus
5000+ posts
12/19/11 09:52 AM
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Isn’t there an aspect of quantum theory that suggests that the observable world only exists when we measure or observe it? I remember something about a conversation between Neils Bohr and Einstein, where AE asked Bohr “you mean to tell me that the moon isn’t there when we’re not looking at it?” So I think the idea is that nothing takes form until observed, which causes the wave function to collapse into a definite position.
In reply to:
One day I realized the only question that truly matters is the self inquiry "Who am I?".
How would one go about answering this question? What I mean is, how do we assign meaning to the ‘who’ question — is it what we do? what we think?
I read a story somewhere about a Buddhist teacher who had a student come sit in front of him, and the teacher asked him: who are you? The student began by saying his name and the teacher started laughing. So the student then talked about what he did, more laughter from the teacher. I don’t know if he was looking for some zen koan kind of non-answer or maybe a realization that there isn’t one.
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Gadfly
1000+ posts
12/19/11 05:35 PM
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I love reading your guy’s posts.
Well - many of these crazy theories are from String theory. People who really enjoy math are adamant String theory has to be true, but I could give two shits how pretty the math looks if you can't prove it with evidence.
As a butt sniffing amateur, I am just trying to figure this stuff out. It will be interesting to see how the findings of the Higgs boson and its support of the Standard Model will fair in String Theory interpretation over the next few years. I must admit, if evidence proves conclusively that String Theory was completely based on mathematical imaginations, Einstein will RIP, and we’ll see how even science has become too prone to faithful conclusion.
The earlier mentioned observer principle is described by “Schrödinger’s Cat” (look up if interested). There is also the principle of quantum entanglement which, at this point, blows the mind. When something looks so fantastically complex that it seems beyond our rational capabilities, I tend to side with Occam’s razor.
The Link Did the LHC Just Debunk Superstring Theory?
The Link Higgs boson
The Link Star Trek stuff – However, Einstein proposed that photons are not really “entangled”. It would be like having a pair of gloves. You shoot the two gloves to opposite ends of a city, you view one as “Left” (or UP in quantum speak) and magically find that the other glove is made “Right” by your observation. We can see how that is a ridiculous set of reasoning. However, I think there has been experimental evidence which proved Einstein wrong.
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