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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
