Are We Living In A Hologram? Scientists Prove Theory

I don't think evolution is at odds with any of these quantum theories, it's a different process really. For one evolution is dealing specifically with life and in regards to observable changes in species. I think it's fairly well understood that the quantum world behaves very differently than the macroscopic world in which evolution is taking place.

Perhaps being informed about subatomic particles may provide some new perspective to evolution but I don't see findings on one inherently affecting the other. If perhaps somehow that the holographic theory or something of the ilk showed that necessarily empirical evidence was unreliable into understanding anything about fundamental reality, then it may put evolution into question but I think most scientists accept that evolution is a process which can be well understood past the point of quantum decoherence and wave function collapse. Also such an attack on empiricism would seemingly call into a lot of physics which led to the discovery I think, it'd be like a snake eating its own tail.

There are also proposed multiverse theories where potentially there could be xenxan's or guerillabedlam's on alternate Hipforums too, I mean I find the implications fascinating but most of this is highly speculative at this point.

 

The use of the word hologram / holographic is deceptive.

Thats not what they mean. Entropy only works in 2D and seems might be the same with gravity sort of

More like the volume we occupy doesnt mean anything. We are all blow up dolls that never knew we where once inflated is probably a little more accurate. Yeah I see why they went with holographic

 

If this happens again simply press CTRL-Z and everything will be back

 

The double slit experiment, and all its variations, and failed attempts to get different results demonstrates to us that sub-atomic particles exist as probability waves until they are observed as particles. As probability waves they do not have a single point in space-time. However as a physical particle they do occupy a single point in space-time (and we now believe that in addition to observation, they can also manifest as physical parrticles through decoherence.)

The question then becomes, how long does a single point in space-time last? After all, the only thing we can perceive in a truly physical and non-abstract sense is the present (and even then our perception is delayed). Consider that time moves at the speed of light. But at the speed of light itself, all time passes by in a single infinitely small flash---because all time is reduced to zero. Therefore we could say that this single point in space time, where a quantum probability wave exists as a physicle particle lasts for an infinitely small moment.

Reality as we experience it, is the experience of phenomena. It is impossible to experience physical matter in its exact moment of the physical now----for example, as I said, our perception of the now is already delayed. In other words, physical reality, as we understand it, is nothing but the phenomena produced by quantum wave particles manifesting as physical particles for a point of time that is equivalent to zero. As conscious selves, obviously, we are not trapped to manifesting in single points of present, because we experience entropy---the coninuation of time. It is also our perception of the phenomena of the physical world that creates that physical world.

Therefore physical reality is an illusion created out of the reality of mind and quantum probability waves.

 

That's quite fascinating MVW thanks for explaining all that in an easy to understand fashion.

 

I feel like even if we are living in a hologram, this still doesn't answer the fundamental question of if it is strange or not.

 

But we need to see the double slit experiment performed to test the validity of particle-wave duality theory. This exemplifies the conundrum I'm raising, the way we seem to ascertain knowledge about things involves seeing them, so it makes no sense to say 'everything you see is an illusion' if you are to maintain that physics is accurate when it performs and provides evidence for hypothesis such as in regards to the double-slit experiment.

 

Thank you Backchat.

You make a good point Guerillabedlam in your previous post. I will address that in a bit, but first I wanted to respond to this:

The fact is that Quantum Mechanics is proving to be surprisingly predictive when applied to the real world. This is providing strong validation and turning skeptics into believers.

One example concerns the distribution of galaxies and stars and other matter across the universe. The universe is incredibly symmetrical---no matter where you are located, science tells us, the universe will look exactly the same. The temperature of the universe, for example, is extremely uniform no matter where you are located----granted stars and galaxies will be in different positions and different concentrations---but this is the 'lumpiness' of the universe. So the question comes up---why is the universe lumpy in this manner, despite its symmetrical nature.

The answer is based on the combination of several different theories--- for simplicity we will stick to: the Big Bang, inflation, and quantum uncertainty. In short, at a certain point of time after the Big Bang, when the universe was still very small, it suddenly began expanding at an incredibly rapid pace---the numbers are actually mind boggling. But this model has turned out to be very predictive in itself. (BTW, the universe is no longer expanding at that pace).

However it did not answer why the universe is so lumpy as opposed to having matter spread out evenly across it. Quantum Uncertainty however provided an explanation, by allowing for wrinkles in the universe as it expanded so rapidly. One way of quantifying this lumpiness or distribution of matter would be to measure the variation of the temperature of the microwave radiation that spreads across the universe. This is because theoretically it is the same quantum fluctuations spread out over vast areas of space that makes one area of space hotter than another that would also result in matter being situated in one area of the universe and not another.

Now you might recall that a few paragraphs earlier I said that the temperature is uniform across the universe. This is still true. What we are talking about is very small differences at the scale of 10,000th of a degree.

SO scientists have used quantum uncertainty to predict very small temperature changes across the universe as a means of explaining quantum uncertainty as the reason for the distribution of matter throughout the universe. What is amazing is that in recent years satellites have measured the temperature of microwave radiation across the sky----and, at a mind-blowing level of amazement----the results fit the predictions to a tee! (Even though it is a very small temperature change, it is significant and it is not just random. It truly is very amazing that quantum uncertainty was able to predict the actual results.)
Now to your last post:

Remember, what I said was that the physicality of things is an illusion. I also said that we perceive reality, not through the physical things themselves, but through the perception of the phenomena of those physical things. The existential experience of those phenomena is real, which is to say that our existential experience of physical reality is real. Whether the real world around us is illusion or reality, we experience it as real. As Immanuel Kant pointed out many years ago, we cannot know the thing-in-itself. We cannot truly know reality as it truly is. Even if we hold an object in our hands, we experience the phenomena of that object, and from a phenomenalist standpoint, we cannot truly know if that object actually exists. All we can know is that we feel it, see it, and understand it through the phenomena as it affects any of our five senses. We can know that the ‘experience’ of that object is real. (It is in this manner that while I am an essentialist, I am also existentialist.) Granted, I think that modern science, including Quantum Mechanics, allows us to understand the thing-in-itself in a way that Kant would have never known.

But---if we experienced life in any other way, there would be no reason for us to be here. What use would there be to living if we continuously saw completely through the illusion or even understood that we could simply create the reality we wanted.

To see how we live our lives trapped within the illusion, consider light for example. We experience it as a physical thing. In fact, it is light that is the primary phenomena through which we experience physical reality. Light gives us sight of all the physical objects, near and far, within our line of sight. But even as a physical particle—as a photon—it is still a zero-mass zero-time particle. That is as close to physical existence as it becomes, even in the double slit experiment—not much more than a ghost. It really has no physical mass. You can’t, for example, see light as it moves away from you.

A key element of my own philosophy of phenomenalism is that, if only the present exists, then only that single photon (or, more exactly, that single layer of photons) that you are experiencing in any given moment of Now, exists in a physical sense. For example, if you were to look up at the sun, you are seeing light that has taken about 8 minutes to get to you. Existentially you know the sun is there, but the sun is not touching your eyes----it is 8 light minutes away. But between you and the sun there are hundreds (maybe more) photons (…I’m joking----there is a countless number of photons). But if only the present ‘Now’ exists in a physical sense, then the only photon to truly exist in the infinitely small moment of the physical now is that single photon, or photons, that you are currently simultaneously experiencing. All those countless photons that are between you and the sun, do not exist in your present, they are still in your future, therefore they do not currently exist in a physical sense. In fact, there is no way for you to detect them. To do so would require you bouncing a signal off of them, which would have to return to you and be measurable faster than the speed of light----i.e. faster than time. Those photons simply do not exist in your present—not even the one that is right behind the one you currently perceive. Likewise, those photons moving away from you, which are equally difficult to detect, now only exist in your past—they too are no longer physical existents.

In fact, because all of those photons heading towards you (and those moving away from you) are as of yet, unperceived, quantum mechanics (and the double slit experiment) tells us that they are not even photons, but rather probability waves, superpositioned (everywhere yet without a particular position) throughout the universe. Likewise, Einstein’s theories of Relativity tell us that these waves of light are simultaneously positioned clear across space-time, from the beginning till the end of time, and all points in between.

Existentially, however, we understand that there is light moving to us from the sun, and that it travels for about 8 minutes before we perceive it. This is our experience of reality. In this sense it does not matter that the only photon that we can truly say to physically exist is the one that we currently perceive, and that it exists physically only for an infinitely small moment of Now. In fact, it is not even a physical mass---and as a zero-time zero-mass entity it is more of a ghost in our physical reality than a ‘thing.’ But this too does not matter because our existential experience is not the perception of the photon, but the sun which we think we are looking at, or any other object, no matter how close or how far, that we are looking at. And if we think about it, we experience this light, so we automatically operate on the assumption that it is a physical thing, and cannot see it otherwise.

(And it is each layer of light, as particle, and all other simultaneous phenomena within a single moment of now that is the hologram this thread is about, according to my own philosophy.)

But then you have experiments like the double slit experiment, and mathematical models and theories, that point out that reality is not like the way we experience it, but rather the way quantum mechanics indicates it is. In fact, we get the same results with the Double Slit Experiment, not only with light, but even other physical particles, molecules, and even bucky balls. The problem with the experiment is------what other explanation is there for such results?

Experiment after experiment—it is our conscious observation that changes the interference pattern to double slit, indicating a quantum wave collapse---a wave becoming a particle.

Finally, because we are so trapped into experiencing the world from the physical (from illusion), there is no other way we could come across such empirical evidence, except through those very things that are physical (illusion). It was just a matter of finding how to manipulate the phenomena. …even if it creates a conundrum.

 

Difficult for me to reply to all that, however I appreciate you taking the time to write out that comprehensive response.

I think our disagreement lies within this part of the response. It seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that you are suggesting that past the point of quantum wave collapse and where, I guess, material nature starts properly manifesting, as we think of it or maybe even slightly beyond that in the case of bucky balls, that there is some sort of dividing line where the quantum 'reality' gives way to our 'illusory' physical reality. I am saying and have been implicitly suggesting that our physical reality is an extension of the quantum reality, so it makes no sense to me to suggest something such as physical reality as we know it is illusion, while simultaneously maintaining that the subatomic world is real.

 

If scientists proved we live in a hologram those scientists would also be part of said hologram... and just who is it that they proved it to?

 

Fair enough.

But let's consider that physical reality is an extension of quantum reality. If quantum reality is a non-physical reality, then perhaps our physical world really is a non-physical reality-----it is only the phenomena that we perceive that creates the illusion of physicality.

Or it could be that there is a fundamental difference between quantum reality and physical reality. But that physical reality only manifests, like the physical perception of light itself, in such a short time, that it is gone, even before it is perceived...

 

That is a very good question. In one version of the double slit experiment, for example, a device was rigged up to randomly measure the photons going through either slit, the idea being that every time there is a measurement, there should be a probability wave collapse and a double slit pattern should be registered. However the results were not recorded in a manner that could be known, or observed, by a human. This would prove that it was the measurement not the conscious observation that changed how the light went through the slits. However there was no change in the pattern produced by the beam of light indicating that it was not the physical measurement that created the probability wave collapse.

So the problem now becomes, what constitutes a conscious observation? The Wheeler Delayed Observation version of the experiment demonstrates that time is not an issue. The other problem is that it is not the measured photon itself that is observed, but rather the, measurement of the photon’s position that is measured----in other words the problem is not the observation (or the phenomena produced by the measurement itself) but rather the actual awareness of the position---even as abstract as it is. I say that it is abstract because such awareness does not include the exact point in space-time of that photon, just the awareness that it ‘has’ a point in space-time. In other words, it is the awareness or knowledge of a ‘reality.’

A mechanical Newtonian explanation falls short. If we consider the phenomena—the photons released from the measuring device each one that we perceive is absorbed by an atom within the vision cell of the eye, which then releases an electron which moves up the nerve cell to the brain—or to be more exact, is absorbed by another atom, which produces yet another electron, to be absorbed by the next atom, and so on and so forth all the way up into the brain at which point the final electron is absorbed into the atom of a neuron, which in turn starts a new process within the brain of electrons being released and absorbed. Is this mechanical process any different from what happens in the measuring device when a photon is absorbed by an atom within the detector or receiver side of the measuring device?

This is the point that most scientists fail to think through, are afraid to touch, or just completely ignore. At what point does the observer actually observe? At what point does the awareness of a reality that apparently then manifests as reality take place? This strange problem of observation suggests that the interaction with the phenomena, whether photon or electron (all particles are fundamentally photons anyway—e.g. before the Big Bang, there were only photons), occurs on another level in addition to the physical. By the physical, I am referring to the absorption of the photon/electron and the subsequent release of a photon/electron at an atomic level. If the interaction with a photon/electron that creates the conscious awareness happens on a different level, it could very well be one of a nonphysical field of consciousness.

The mind after all, from a physical standpoint is a nothingness.

 

i'm pretty sure i was born before most such things were invented. if you were born since then, and have lived all your life in a city, then i suppose you might as well be.