Freethought & Rationalism Archive

fokket · 07-21-2003, 06:33 AM

http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

contracycle · 07-21-2003, 06:36 AM

Cool. So can I have all your illusionary money, then?

Marduk · 07-21-2003, 09:35 AM

This months Scientific American has something on it as well:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...AE80A84189EEDF

Jesse · 07-21-2003, 10:23 AM

The scientific idea of the "Holographic Universe" doesn't really have anything to do with the new-agey version, though...it's basically saying that the amount of information a space can contain is bounded by the area of a sphere that encloses it, and that physics in an N-dimensional spacetime may be equivalent to physics on some other N-1-dimensional spacetime...on the other hand, new agers are taking inspiration from Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, which involves a quantum potential that can pass information between particles faster-than-light, and which Bohm believed supported a sort of semiphilosophical notion he called the implicate order (Bohm's interpretation of QM has nothing whatsoever to do with the 'Holographic principle' mentioned in the Scientific American article, by the way). New Agers then combine this with other ideas like Pribram's holographic theory of how the brain encodes memories (which I believe has been pretty much superceded by neural-network-type explanations for distributed memories, although it's possible that there are useful mathematical similarities between how you'd model a hologram and how you'd model a neural net) to justify statements like these, from the article fokket posted:

Quote:

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.

and

Quote:

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.

and

Quote:

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, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

js_africanus · 07-23-2003, 12:51 PM

Quote:

The holographic prardigm 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.

Could somebody explain this logical leap to me? First we have the brain, as we perceive it, as an "illusion" in our consciousness, presumably in the same sense that when we see the blue sky we are perceiving electromagnetic waves and not some sort of intrinsic, universal blueness. From there we go to the conclusion that what we perceive is created or fundamentally affected by our consciousness. In the first statement, we crunch the data of a set of stable fundamental relationships that are processed and presented to our conciousness as the world we see. In the second statement, the fundamental stuff of the universe is no longer a set of stable relationships, but rather a malleable matrix of interactions that is subject to the whim of our consciousness.

Am I completely misreading this article, or at least this section of it? Is there something I'm missing? Or is the author really making the leap I described?

07-21-2003, 06:33 AM	#1
fokket Junior Member Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Seoul Posts: 12	This world is illusion http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

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07-21-2003, 06:36 AM	#2
contracycle Banned Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: London Posts: 1,425	Cool. So can I have all your illusionary money, then?

07-21-2003, 09:35 AM	#3
Marduk Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: the 10th planet Posts: 5,065	This months Scientific American has something on it as well: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...AE80A84189EEDF

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