the Holographic Universe

by **Sokolova** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 10:41 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>pronoia the concept that many forces are working together on many levels to make existence work well for many of us. Perhaps the work we do would be better aimed at making pronoia work better for more people, rather than identifying ourselves by how paranoid and full of hates we are. <hr></blockquote> Avalon that is brilliant. So, people shall we make time for some 'pronoia', lest we all unwittingly become part of the problem we think we are addressing? Seventh - I too believe that right and wrong, good and its opposite may be divine concepts; in fact I wonder if we don't all know that deep in our own souls. Enkidu - I appreciate your nervousness about aspects of this forum. I too feel anxious sometimes about the lack of boundaries, and I also admit that some of the topics here cross my personal comfort level. 'Black helicopters' following individuals about for example. To me (to me) that seems insane. Why bother with such clumsy surveillance when you can electronically monitor people far more successfully and discreetly? To me black helicopters are an urban myth, misidentification (things can easily look black against a bright sky), because I can see no need for them to exist. But then what if tomorrow I think I see one? At one time I was a CSICOP-supporting skeptic. But then things happened to me that forced me to accept I was wrong. And now the newest physics is rediscovering some of the deeper truths that mystics have always known: interconnectedness, non-locality, the consciousness of all matter. The only truth is surely that the universe is 90% unknown to us, and our models of how it might work are just that - models. We make guesses, we hope we are right, but often we aren't. The point is to be always open, to use your critical faculties, to listen to the little voice of your soul and to be always be prepared to have been wrong. Ellie

by **marykmusic** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 11:22 am

Ellie, you are one of the people whom I always read! This, for example, cuts right to the edge of this thread:<blockquote>Quote:<hr>The only truth is surely that the universe is 90% unknown to us, and our models of how it might work are just that - models. We make guesses, we hope we are right, but often we aren't. The point is to be always open, to use your critical faculties, to listen to the little voice of your soul and to be always be prepared to have been wrong.<hr></blockquote> About black helicopters: I didn't think they existed, either, util I started hearing accounts from people I trusted, and then started seeing them myself. And they are indeed too clumsy for surveillance; their purpose is to instill fear. When that stops working they don't come 'round no mo'. This supports the Pronoia theory quite nicely. --MaryK

by **enkidu** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 12:51 pm

Today Jorn Barger on his Robot Wisdom weblog reports that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is "pissed off" about the war in Iraq--maybe now we'll see some action. We come, we come with roll of drum: Ta-runda runda runda rom! We come, we come with horn and drum: Ta-runa runa runa rom! To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone; Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone, We go, we go, we go to war, To hew the stone and break the door; For bole and bough are burning now, The furnace roars--we go to war! To land of gloom with tramp of doom, With roll of drum, we come, we come; To Isengard with doom we come! With doom we come, with doom we come!

by **tal** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 12:00 am

We spend the first 20 years of our lives constructing our 'world view' and the balance of our lives imprisoned by it. It's no surprise that an individual employed by a prestigious university would reject a challenge to the orthodoxy ... he would have more to lose than most. I'm old enough to remember when plate tectonics was considered heresy and also to remember the paradigm change that took place 'overnight' when it suddenly wasn't. Plate tectonics itself is now being challenged but you'll never read about it in the mainstream press.... Always keep in mind, Galeleo was peer reviewed....

by **enkidu** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 12:56 am

Further, the Harvard perfesser mentioned above is filthy stinkin rich; when his good friend my father died he didn't come to the funeral, he SENT A CHECK. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think you zoners had thought-provoking stuff to say; my head is fun to play with and I feed it lots of caffeine. But the name of the board is Rigorous Intuition; even when I tried to throw my brain out with psychogenic drugs there was always a calm, grounded voice saying, "That lizard that just popped out of the skin of your arm isn't real." I trust that voice. In my personal life, on a day-to-day basis, that voice is almost never wrong, and I say "almost" just because I can't prove otherwise. When that tsunami hit Indonesia, that voice said, "Somebody detonated a bomb on the faultline, but no one is going to come forward and say Hey that was us, we did it." But when it comes to quantum physics, it's too obvious that some people are just making shit up, and the voice in my head ain't buyin' it. If you read The Holographic Universe, I'll wager the bullshit detector goes off in your head too.

by **Sokolova** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 11:06 am

I agree we all have to listen to the little inner voice when it speaks. But sometimes we can get it confused with other things. Sometimes when we resist an idea strongly, it's not because it's false, but because we aren't ready to go as far as it takes us. I think The Holographic Universe's all-embracing acceptance of every branch of new age thinking probably turns off people who would otherwise have accepted much of the basic premise. So let's separate the premise from some of the conclusions. The premise is that the universe works a little like a hologram, in that the whole is present in all of the parts, and that it is driven by a kind of total consciousness that exists in all matter. It says that the observer plays a role in shaping reality. I don't think that's so whacked out really is it? In fact it offers the first chance for a truly holistic, if still quite basic, picture of how things might be the way they are. It offers the first way of integrating the 'strange' with the 'non-strange'. It tells us how things like precognition, telepathy (which has been proved in numerous scientific studies) and self-healing might work, as well as offering a view of how quantumness really generates itself. I think that's pretty cool. Maybe the hologram image won't turn out to be literally true any more than the other models of the universe have ever been, but if it works as a metaphor for a while to help us understand that little bit more about the infinite bizarreness and beauty of the universe, then it's going the right way. Enkidu - I think the doctrines we should most distrust are the ones of our modern pseudo-sciences that try to argue that we know all there is to know and that therefore anything that appears to challenge the 'laws' of the universe must be derided and denied. In truth, most of the 'laws' that govern our lives and the very shape of our minds have been made by us, and beyond our own hubris we have no idea what music the universe is moving to. Let's not forget that most of our truths are just paradigms of seeing that will one day look as narrow and absurd as the image of the earth being carried by turtles. (though of course even that may turn out to have been true in the end!) Ellie

by **enkidu** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 11:48 am

Someone gave me a book called Bloodline of the Holy Grail, in which the author follows up on the currently-very-popular claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children, and he charts their descendants to the present day! He names one Prince Michael of Albany a living descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The author (Laurence Gardner) starts with what is "known" and ties everything up in a neat little bow, and even though I have absolutely nothing to lose by believing his story, the bullshit alarm just rang and rang and rang. As I said in the beginning, a physics professor confirmed that the author of The Holographic Universe began with "sound" quantum physics theory, and then ran with it. What we're all about here on this board is speculation, isn't that true? and it may be true that thinking about something and talking about it brings it closer to Being--which is why some warn Be Careful What You Wish For, right? Maybe I am too close-minded, I've read many many books telling me I need to get in touch with my Inner This Or That. All that does is make me feel even more ineffectual than I already feel. And it may just be an exercise in compensation, when I log on here and try to connect with others in a meaningful way. I feel completely disconnected, cut off from the Absolute and I especially don't buy the idea that my subjective reality is all there is. But in the absence of proof, it's all I've got.

by **proldic** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 11:55 am

you say what I feel.

by **Sokolova** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 2:20 pm

Hi Enkidu I don't think I could subscribe to the idea that subjective reality is all there is either. I don't think that's what Bohm (the guy who first theorised something like a holographic universe) meant. So far as I can see from my reading, Bohm was talking about a kind of total unity through an all-pervading consciousness, in which reality is a kind of final sum of all awareness, and in which no part of the whole can be separated from it, because it contains within it the seed of the whole - just as when you break a holographic image plate into pieces, the fragments will each contain a complete image of the original hologram. So that we - and every other spark of matter in the universe - are connected to every other part and contain a kind of hologram of awareness of the whole within us, and we all have a part to play in moulding reality, because our consciousness and our beliefs become a part of the holographic whole. Our 'thought' influence would be infinitesimally small when it comes to the movements of galaxies, but on things closer to us it becomes increasingly powerful. So, no we don't change the whole universe simply by looking at it, but closer to home, here on our planet, maybe the influence of our collective and individual minds plays more of a part than we have ever imagined on the actual shaping of reality. I hope this makes sense, because I fear I am not to good at putting it across! In many ways (so far as I can see from the point of view of an interested lay person), Bohm seems to simply have had a little more nerve than his colleagues and been prepared to truly admit the strangeness that the quantum world contains. Many of the physicists who reject him seem to be holding up a slightly schizoid viewpoint, in which they accept weird things happen, but would rather have no explanation for them than look outside their paradigms to find one. To give one example -- right now, as I understand it, physics accepts that changes made to a single electron will instantly happen to another electron, even though they are separated by large distances. Physics accepts that this change happens too fast even to be explained by a communication between the two electrons at the speed of light, and that it seems to happen instantaneously -- almost as if changing one changes them all, as if they are all linked at some level of reality we presently don't understand. As I understand it physics currently has no explanation for this, except Bohm's idea of a universe in which all matter is somehow connected and 'one'. There's no argument so far as I know that it's invalid or bad physics, and it's not rejected because it's inaccurate or a poor model. It's rejected primarily because it violates too many taboos of thinking. I don't mean to say by this that David Bohm was totally correct,in fact I'm pretty sure he wasn't, but I think it's necessary to remember that the fact he isn't much accepted isn't an argument in itself against him being right. To me his work is - to quote Starroute - a great metaphor at least. Add it to the work of Vallee and Jung, Einstein and Heisenberg, Sheldrake et al and you are maybe reaching tenatively toward a more holistic idea of the universe than before. The interesting thing for me is the way it draws the mystic into the supposedly hard-edged sciences and finds they may actually be two ends of a circle. Maybe that's also why the idea is so hard to accept? Ellie

by **enkidu** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 4:40 pm

David Bohm didn't write The Holographic Universe, the author's name is Michael Talbot. Okay, and for what it's worth, David Bohm is a respected physicist. Michael Talbot is--a writer. And I really did read the book, Ellie, I know what the book says. "Many of the physicists who reject him seem to be holding up a slightly schizoid viewpoint, in which they accept weird things happen, but would rather have no explanation for them than look outside their paradigms to find one." Richard Feynman is famous for saying (something like), "'I don't know' is a perfectly acceptable answer."

by **Qutb** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 5:15 pm

I haven't read the book (I think - if I did, it didn't leave a lasting impression). But Bohm is bona fide. He worked with Einstein in the 50s, at the end of Einstein's life, and Einstein is reported to have said that if anyone could reconcile the general theory of relativity with quantum physics, it would be Bohm. I don't know if Einstein would have appreciated Bohm's solution, though. What Bohm did was to abandon the principle of local determinism, that all causes must be local. By so doing, he believed to have saved the principle of determinism (everything has a cause), which had been abandoned by some of the early quantum physicists in their conceptions of the sub-atomic level. At least, that's how I understand it, I'm not a physicist and am talking directly out of my behind <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> In "poetical" terms, he saw the universe as constantly unfolding from an "implicate order" in which each part in inseparable from the whole. Each part is thus determined, not just by the forces working on it locally, but by the "whole" - the entire universe, the entire implicate order. Which is not determinism the way we usually think of it, in the LaPlacian sense ("if I knew the positions of all the atoms in the universe and the forces working on them, I would be able to predict everything that is to happen"). Edited by: <A HREF=http://p097.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=qutb>Qutb</A> at: 8/18/05 3:17 pm

by **enkidu** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 5:29 pm

"I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong." "Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

by **Sokolova** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 11:05 am

Sorry Enkidu, I said I was afraid I wasn't being clear. I didn't mean to give the impression David Bohm wrote the book, in fact I tried to say the book was based on Bohm's ideas, and I'm sorry if that didn't come across enough. I also tried to say that Talbot's way of embracing all paranormal phenomena might turn off people who would otherwise be interested in Bohm's ideas (including me a little I admit). So my last post was intended to be about Bohm's ideas - and not Talbot’s book per se.  Bohm is indeed highly respected as you say, but his ideas of 'wholeness' and universal consciousness are not well received. I think that's largely because he does step out of the currently accepted paradigm, and we are all naturally suspicious of things that require big changes in our thinking. I like the quotes BTW. But I'd amend just one of them: You say Feynman wrote: "Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt". I think he probably should have changed 'is' in the last part to 'should be'. Science definitely should be a culture of doubt, but, it seems to me, that it generally isn't. Generally it's a culture of exactly the same kind of faith as religion, wherein pre-existing permitted beliefs and paradigms play the major part in forming 'scientific truth'. In fact - as many people have said – ‘science’ (I use the '' to differentiate it from true science in which I continue to believe) does now function in many ways as the religion of the western world, and its role is becoming the same as the worst kind of state-sponsored religion - to offer reassurance, quiet doubt, suppress dissent and unite the society behind a set of dogmatic beliefs. There's even a new Inquisition - in the shape of CSICOP and their completely unprincipaled, irrational and vindictive campaign to eliminate any consideration of anything that doesn't fit within the accepted dogma of 'science' as they perceive it. Increasingly the concept of 'science' is being unscientifically used as a tool of social control, to set limits on thinking and to marginalise new ideas that threaten social cohesion; to maximise profits for drug companies selling 'cures' that make us sick, to sanctify the destruction of hope and give a seemingly rational basis to the monstrous hubris that seeks to define the universe as being bounded by our ability to 'explain' it in the most absurd and reductionist terms. The ultimate heresy for 'science' is the suggestion of anything that can't be confined within its narrow, mechanistic and unscientific boundaries. 'Science' carefully circumscribes the unknown so that we can pretend it isn't there, even though this circumscription makes a nonsense of some of its own theories. For example, it's happy to believe in a 'Big Bang' as the 'origin of the universe', but won't engage with the fact that this only offers an explanation for how the matter of the universe is in current motion, and doesn't tell us how the matter itself came into being. Put simply, how did the stuff that went 'bang' get there in the first place? That is not a question 'science' is comfortable with, because it can't be answered without confronting the edges of our ability to comprehend. It brings us up against the idea of ‘something’ being made out of ‘nothing’. It's too close to being 'mystical', so it simply isn't addressed. So, the question just floats in the ether, ghostlike, undeniable but inadmissible. As do so many other unaskable questions. This is what turns 'science' (not true science) into religion; its refusal to address the things which challenge it. I suppose what I mean in a nutshell is that the word 'science' is being employed, Orwell-fashion to promote its exact opposite; a canting pseudo-religious set of dogmas designed to sanctify the 'known', and above all to silence doubt - which is, as Feynman said, the true culture of true science. Sorry if you feel like I just yelled in your ear for five minutes, but you got me on a painful area, if you know what I mean. I was raised as a scientist, and with a tradition of respect for the scientific way, and it makes me mad to see it used as so many do now(not you enkidu of course!), to rationalise bigotries and smug hubris. Ellie

by **enkidu** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 11:13 am

can't argue with that

the Holographic Universe

Re: Pronoia

Re: Pronoia

Ellie Thank You

it's no surprise

Valid Point Tal.

Re: Valid Point Tal.

I Hear You Ellie

For what it's worth Enkidu

Re: For what it's worth Enkidu

Wait Wait Wait--

Re: I don't know about Talbot

Richard Feynman

Re: Wait Wait Wait--

nope

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