Living Inside a Hologram
1. Holograms, quantum mechanics, and choices
Making good choices is difficult. Whether the choices are in our business, our social lives, our finances, or our family, the choices we make determine the direction of our lives and our society.
It may be surprising that a field as abstract as physics may help us better understand our choices. I will make the case here that your worldview–and your ability to understand how your choices influence your lifepath–can benefit from cutting edge research on space and time itself.
In recent years, the advent of the digital frontier has birthed the notion of the world as a giant “simulation.” In work currently under academic review, I establish a connection between the physics of quantum mechanics and that of holograms to demonstrate how our “world as simulation” might really be operating. The study of holograms is the study of patterns, and the language of patterns is “waves,” because a pattern is about repetition and the quintessential repeating structure is a wave. Not coincidentally, this is the same language that describes everyday matter through the science of quantum field theory.
The result may be a world in which our choices not only influence the “present moment” but entire timelines of history. In this sort of world, history is flexible to fall into place many different ways based upon our choices.
“Instead of simply entertaining ourselves on a playground of pleasure and pain, we might consider ourselves in a school of choices.”
Such a world is more like a subjective gaming environment than the usual objectivity most of us take for granted. A video game world can be alive in a way that an inert world is not. A virtual world can respond to its inhabitants. It can be programmed with algorithms that are purposeful. A training program, for instance, can wait to see what the trainee chooses before deciding what curricular experience to provide next. Could it be that we exist in a training environment, here to learn something purposeful? Instead of simply entertaining ourselves on a playground of pleasure and pain, we might consider ourselves in a school of choices.
By understanding the world we live in better at this fundamental level, we might come to better understand the consequences of our choices, and in doing so, make more conscious ones.
2. Holograms: The math of The Matrix
(For a glossary of terms used here, appendix A is provided.)
To think more systematically about choice in your life, recall the movie “The Matrix”, in which our world is discovered to be an artificial simulation. What makes this simulated world different from the world we inhabit? It responds to choices. When a character in the movie makes a specific choice about how to proceed with their mission, the histories of objects in the virtual world adjust. Suddenly, instead of being in hallway A, the enemy will be found in hallway B. After this adjustment, the plot plays out in a new, more interesting fashion. For this to happen, objects in the virtual world must not be as solid as we like to think. Rather, objects get arranged into specific situations with respect to the perspective of the person making the choices.
To build a scientific theory of a world like The Matrix, I propose we need to show that the world is holographic. You can find examples of holograms used as counterfeit protection on many credit cards (see fig. 1). They are images which appear 3-dimensional–for instance a face or a flying eagle–because they seem to float above the film and move as we tilt our perspective, giving the illusion of depth. A hologram appears realistic but it is really a trick played by light passing through an interference pattern on a piece of film (see fig. 2).
Similarly, a holographic world would appear realistic, yet the underlying “film” would guide the objects in it. We shall see that objects which seem so solid may in fact be momentary reconstructions of the underlying holographic information, presented to us when we look, but not persisting in our absence.
The possibility that the world is a giant hologram has sparked interest for generations of philosophers, scientists, and laypeople, beginning with physicist David Bohm’s idea of an “implicate order”[1] and the publishing of Michael Talbot’s “The Holographic Universe”.[2] More recently, cosmologists such as Gerard ’t Hooft [3] and Leonard Susskind [4] have drawn a similar conclusion through the study of black holes.
Holograms are different from photographs because they capture their images in terms of patterns rather than pixels. The patterns form something we can call “frequency-space,” a landscape of all the possible patterns that could exist. In fact, this mathematics is central to some pattern recognition technology[5] [6] and in some theories of brain function,[7] possibly accounting for our own brains’ keen ability to recognize patterns. Instead of storing visual information in specific regions of the film (the pixels), the image is stored in patterns of interference across the entire film. Frequency-space is actually quite familiar, the colors of the rainbow–ROYGBIV–being a prime example. Each color describes a particular pattern of electromagnetic vibration.
“Holograms are different from photographs because they capture their images in terms of patterns rather than pixels.”
It is this focus on patterns that makes a holographic world adjustable based on choices. We think of matter as the most fundamental thing there could be. After all, you can’t walk through a closed door. But if patterns of information are more fundamental than material objects, this changes how we should think of material objects.
To envision the way that patterns in frequency-space modify the possibilities for actual events in the physical world, consider the power of a few bits in your online calendar. Those few bits could mean the difference between showing up at a meeting at 8am or 8pm. Let’s say it’s noon when you check your calendar. Did you miss the meeting or not? In a hologram-like world, both possibilities exist, up until you check the calendar to find out. In one possibility, your colleagues are mad at you, and in the other possibility they are expecting to see you in 8 hours. These are two causal chains, both of which are consistent with what you know about the situation since you haven’t talked to them yet. Here, the patterns of bits in the computer’s memory are loosely analogous to the patterns in frequency-space.
In a hologram-like world, a change in the bits which encode “pm” versus “am” can shift a whole downstream collection of experiences. In such a world, it is only when we check our calendar that one or the other situation is reconstructed from the patterns in the hologram to bring our reality to life. Which was it, 8am or 8pm? The resulting life-paths may be radically different.
To understand patterns in frequency-space, let’s think about how music is recorded in the digital age.
Frequency-space is hard to imagine
The invention of the mp3, while awesome, is a hack. An mp3 is a small, portable type of digital music file that has become very popular in the internet age. What makes an mp3 so awesome is its small size.
This is accomplished by converting air vibration data into frequency data. Thus we can tell if a middle-C is being played, or if there is a stray low frequency buzz in the recording. A graphic equalizer can process the data in this “frequency-space” and either remove or amplify the desired sounds.
A process called the Fourier transform changes the data from regular space to frequency-space by completely intermixing the sound data into a soup of frequencies, its spectrum. (What I call regular space is also known as the “time domain”.) But this is done in a very precise way which can later be unmixed. All the information is preserved in this transformation. Importantly, it is possible to do any kind of signal modification one desires using this mathematical process, so long as one converts back to regular space afterwards.
Yet it is here that the hack comes in. A pure application of the Fourier transform process would intermix data from across the entire song. “Beginning” and “end” would be lost in frequency-space because the technique gets rid of time ordering. This is not problematic, because when you invert the process you would get the time ordering back. Yet we don’t do it this way. We humans are very attached to time. We don’t easily make sense of a data file that doesn’t have a beginning and an end. We want to think in terms of a linear progression of time, a string of time-ordered moments.
What we do, then, is chop up the original sound file into short sound bytes. Then we Fourier transform each sound byte to get the frequency data at that moment, keeping the sound bytes in the original time order. In other words, we force time ordering onto the file. This allows us to manipulate the file in ways more familiar to us, due to our familiarity with living sequentially from past to future. But remember, it is just as possible to manipulate the frequencies in the desired way without using this hack, it just isn’t how things are done. It feels less confusing to keep the data time ordered.
Now consider the wavefunction, a mathematical tool used in quantum mechanics to describe the world. The wavefunction in quantum mechanics is a hack similar to an mp3. It is spread over space, like the surface of an ocean, undulating in time. Yet the wavefunction should extend not only over space, but also over time. (I hope it seems reasonable to treat time the same way as we do space, and indeed this is the essence of the theory of special relativity.) But it is very difficult for us to picture this. We insist on having a “Now”. So we break time up into little ordered time-bytes and we say that “at each individual ‘Now’ moment there is a wave function.” Just like with the mp3, we force time ordering onto our description because we default to seeing everything through the lens of “Now”.
“The roadmap captures the entire journey of your car across the countryside, and 4D frequency-space captures a car’s entire journey through space and time.”
There is a better way. My research treats every physical object as if it were an audio file, converting it into frequency-space to obtain its spectra.
Some spectacular results emerge when we work in frequency-space. In the usual approach, we have a 3-dimensional wavefunction sitting in 3-dimensional space, and free to change steadily in the 4th dimension, time. In the new approach we have a 4-dimensional wavefunction spread over space and time. Notice that because it is a map over time, it can’t change in time, in the same way that a roadmap doesn’t change as you drive along the road. The roadmap captures the entire journey of your car across the countryside, and 4D frequency-space captures a car’s entire journey through space and time.
What is frequency-space, then? It doesn’t describe a simple path through space and time. It does not contain any single point identified as “now”, which makes it very hard for us to grasp. In frequency-space, there is no way to illustrate the passage of time.
“We are not simply in the present moment. We are part of a timeline with a beginning and an end.”
Just as with the music file, the Fourier transform is again used to take us into frequency-space. Here, what we see are interference patterns. Imagine a still pond of water when a gentle rain first begins. A web of intermixing ripples extends over the entire pond, as in fig. 3. Note that the pattern you see on the pond’s surface corresponds precisely to the locations at which the raindrops fell. If you saw a pattern of concentric circles, you would know that the raindrop hit right at their center.
In the same way, the frequency-space description of reality is an interference pattern which corresponds precisely to our physical world, recording the way everything is arranged right now and over all time (see fig. 4). We are not simply in the present moment. We are part of a timeline with a beginning and an end.
But if the world is like a holographic image, where is the holographic film located? Is it like a movie screen at the edge of the universe, so that the universe within is like a vast theater? No, the “film” is the interference pattern in frequency-space. It exists right here. It cannot be observed, but it is ubiquitous, existing everywhere and always.
To imagine this, think of how the meaning of this sentence is generated. If we were to ask “Where, in this sentence, does the meaning reside?”, the question makes no sense. The meaning of the sentence arises from the collective interaction of all of the words in the sentence. The meaning doesn’t exist “somewhere”, but it is encoded in the linguistic patterns of the sentence. Similarly, frequency-space exists ubiquitously within all of space and time, a realm not of individual points but of patterns.
The complete ontology of the holographic model is not yet clear. Is what we call the “universe” a cosmic hologram which includes us? Or are we separate observers viewing the hologram from the outside? My research has not produced a definitive answer to these questions. The simplest way to imagine the effect of living in a holographic world is to picture yourself as a witness to the hologram, viewing one possible timeline from the outside. Your place in the hologram is based on your choices, but in principle there are other possible timelines and other possible locations in space and time that you could view the hologram from.
“Frequency-space exists ubiquitously within all of space and time, a realm not of individual points but of patterns.”
However, I suspect that this is ultimately the wrong view, for it adds complications rather than removing them. In that case, what is the hologram and what are we? I fear that answering these questions would be like trying to explain the apparent retrograde motion of the planets by inventing complicated epicycles, rather than seeing the underlying wholeness of planetary orbits. My preferred model is that the holographic interference pattern is us. In this ontology, we are living inside a virtual world of our own creation, and the other objects in that creation are projections of ourselves, with similarities to the view on dream states proposed in depth psychology. In this view,
“The dream is the larger Self that is talking to the narrower ego…The various characters in the dream become representatives of the individual’s particular characteristics.”[8]
The implications of such a view are substantial, and I view it as a tentative proposal beyond the scope of this article.
So how does a hologram create the illusion of 3D? Next, we’ll uncover the key insight about space and time that leads to the world as a hologram.
Is physical reality an illusion?
A hologram is different from a regular photograph because the image in it appears 3 dimensional. What does this mean? Consider the holographic rendering of a city in figures 5–8. The first clue of 3-dimensionality is that the image of the city does not look like it is actually on the film, but above or below it in 3D space (although it is difficult to make this out in a still image reproduction). The second clue of 3-dimensionality is that when the film is tilted through the sequence of figures, the pixels representing different parts of the city move at different rates across the field of view. The buildings in front shift position relative to the buildings in back, making it seem like the buildings in back are farther away. This “parallax” illusion can be created through the simple relative motion of pixels, as any 3D game developer knows.
“Space” has two distinct meanings in a hologram
There is an important point in this: “space” has two distinct meanings. To illustrate this, let’s simplify the geometry of a hologram. In the series of figures 9–12 we start with a side view of four real objects at different heights above the floor. Then, when we look from the top view at a hologram of these objects, the positions of the objects move across the background as we tilt our perspective. This is parallax. The images of the objects in figures 10–12 appear 3-dimensional, even though the film encoding the image is a flat piece of film. Note that you can also see the interference pattern on the film in the background, but your brain essentially ignores this information.
“As we tilt the film with our hand, although the interference pattern on the film tilts with our hand, the objects move relative to the interference pattern on the film.”
Figure 10: Reconstructing the hologram from fig. 9. Viewing the holographic film from above, the geometric objects appear in front of the film
The first “space” describes the coordinates where the different geometric objects appear. But as we tilt the film with our hand, although the interference pattern on the film tilts with our hand, the objects move relative to the interference pattern on the film! The interference pattern on the film is described by a separate set of numbers. They do not correspond to the image of the city, but to the physical piece of film. We’ll call them “parameters.” In the ripples on the lake in fig. 2, the parameters describe the interference pattern of ripples, while the coordinates describe where the water droplets have hit the surface, which is encoded into the ripples.
Space and time in a holographic world
Just as there are distinct parameters and coordinates representing space in a hologram, in a holographic universe, there are two unique descriptions of both space and time.
The first kind of space and time has to do with actual things that take place, the locations and times at which interactions happen. This is the space and time you are familiar with, for instance the location of a particular building in the city. When you say “I bumped into my colleague in the hallway at lunch,” you are describing the place and time of a specific or discrete event, at coordinates (x, y, z,t).
The second form of space and time, analogous to the patterns on the holographic film, is less familiar. Just as our brain ignores the interference pattern behind a hologram, the interference patterns in spacetime are not measurable. These “parameters” help us convert into frequency-space and back, but they can never be directly measured. Hence, the 4D waveform I introduced earlier doesn’t actually look like the things it describes, just as the interference pattern on the holographic film doesn’t look anything like the city it encodes.
“Your physical reality is not continuously ‘delivered’ to your inbox. Rather, it only downloads when you log in.”
So let’s return to the coordinates, which you normally think of as space and time. A subtle point jumps out at us here, the most important point in our quest to understand how choice works in a holographic world. Coordinates only have actual values for actual events you experience. Like rungs of a ladder or fenceposts in a wire fence, the coordinates don’t vary smoothly. Each experience is a discrete interaction or perception, capturing the world in a certain state. For instance, you check your email to discover that you got the contract you were hoping for, but this entire situation takes shape at the moment you read the email. Only the interaction between you and your inbox is real. The history leading up to you checking your email–the time period during which the mail was delivered–is not captured anywhere within the holographic data.
In this sense, reality works more like a “get” email system, in which your email inbox only loads emails when you login, rather than downloading them behind the scenes. Your physical reality is not continuously “delivered” to your inbox. Rather, it only downloads when you log in. At that time, however, you get all your emails as if they were delivered smoothly over time. Each email has a datestamp corresponding to when it was (supposedly) sent.
The real world moves in jumps and starts, becoming actualized only when you check on it. But when you do, life appears to have been happening continuously all along.
The illusion of continuity
The coordinates at which an actual thing happens–the time at which you check your email and the specific email you find waiting for you–is an event encoded into the interference pattern of 4D frequency-space. Even the time-stamp when it was supposedly sent is part of the data you download, but this is all for show. It becomes that only when you check. The time-stamp on that email means you infer that it was sent some time earlier. You have the illusion that things were happening all along even though you are only really sure of what happens when you check.
“Much like the infant who has not yet developed “object permanence,” the physical objects we observe everyday are an illusion in the sense that they do not persist. They only take on a definite form when we interact with them.”
Note, too, that in a typical hologram there is nothing actually present at the location where the image appears to be. The image is an illusion which appears to float above or below the film, even though the data exists on the film’s surface. In an analogous sense, a holographic world would be driven by the underlying holographic interference patterns in frequency-space. The facts of daily life–whether or not a certain email comes to your inbox, whether or not your flight gets cancelled, whether or not the roulette wheel lands on black or red–are not the fundamental reality. Rather, the complicated interference patterns which encode these facts are fundamental. Much like the infant who has not yet developed “object permanence,” the physical objects we observe everyday are an illusion in the sense that they do not persist. They only take on a definite form when we interact with them.
To clarify why this point would matter to your process of choosing, imagine you were expecting to receive an email around 12pm with an important decision affecting your life, say a job offer at a technology company. Yet you don’t check your email until 6pm. Could it be that the holographic world waits to see whether you are ready for the job? Could the outcome depend on the level of commitment and preparation you have demonstrated?
“The causal chain only becomes determined when you check your email at 6pm, at which time any one of a number of possible causal chains can fall into place.”
Let’s say, then, that at 3pm you choose to educate yourself more about the company and train yourself further in the relevant technology. Could your choice influence the decision communicated in that 12pm email? Even though you will only later find out that the decision was made at noon, it is not until 6pm that their decision becomes real for you, at the moment when you check your email. We conclude that selecting one outcome over another after the fact is perfectly consistent with causality. In a hologram-like virtual world there could exist what Carl Jung would call “an acausal connecting principle”, in which the action at 3pm influences the outcome of a decision made at noon, without violating causality. The causal chain only becomes determined when you check your email at 6pm, at which time any one of a number of possible causal chains can fall into place.
The choices you make can impact even those events you may assume have already happened.
Choice and Timelessness
I have described a very specific sense in which the world is timeless, and this begs a question about choice and destiny. Like the navigation system on your GPS describes your whole journey at once, the interference patterns in frequency-space encode all of history at once. And like a fully Fourier transformed music file (not the “hack” used on the mp3 file), the interference patterns in frequency-space have a spectrum which is not described by time yet still encodes how something changes in time.
Consider what this means for light travelling from Sun to Earth. The trip takes 8 minutes. Yet that entire path of travel is encoded all at once. 4D frequency-space is like a map which shows the whole route. The end point, e.g. landing on Earth, is part of the whole map, and the light can’t even leave the Sun without a map which describes its journey to Earth. But then, does it have a choice? Is it destined to reach the Earth rather than the Moon or Mars? What if a satellite intercepts it before hitting Earth?
It seems evident that there must be a plenitude of maps describing the path light could travel, each one describing a unique end point and allowing for all the available choices. Frequency-space describes the object’s potential journey over a whole range of times, without any preference for “Now”. Thus the word “timelessness” is an apt description.
Instead of travelling light waves, now consider the motion of a car along the road. Can it be represented in frequency-space? Since frequency-space doesn’t change in time, it cannot tell us “exactly where the car is at any given moment.” If it did, then the interference pattern would have to update itself moment by moment as the car drove down the road, like the frames of a movie. But we already established that frequency-space cannot change in time. (If you haven’t convinced yourself of that point yet, it’s worth taking a few moments to do so.) Rather, the car’s path of travel through space and time is defined not moment-by-moment, but as-a-whole, over its entire path. As with light from the Sun, frequency-space describes the car over a whole range of times without any preference for “Now”.
“When you make choices in the holographic world, all of the possible consequences of your choice exist as possibilities encoded into the hologram.”
To better understand what this implies about the nature of choice, consider the following analogy. You take a new job for an autonomous vehicles company, and must commute to work in a self-driving company car. You look up the directions before you leave the house and program them into the GPS. Up pops a map of your route, and as the vehicle pulls out of the driveway you kick back to enjoy your ride to work.
When the next morning comes, you hop in, load the same map, and hit “go”. But on the way you notice your favorite coffee shop on a side street! You attempt to turn the wheel or reprogram the GPS, but the system requires a preset route and won’t let you change course. The autonomous vehicle is heading to work because the path is defined as-a-whole from the moment you left the house.
You solve this dilemma the next morning by including the coffee shop in your route plan, and programming this route into your autonomous vehicle’s GPS before you leave the house. Now you have a second map loaded in the system, and both maps are available to you when it comes time to choose between them.
In this same way, the entire journey of something in space is defined as-a-whole in the holographic world. You might think you are making a spontaneous decision to get coffee in that moment, but you are actually choosing between all the various timelines that have “stopping for coffee” as part of them. The subtle difference is this: when you make choices in the holographic world, all of the possible consequences of your choice exist as possibilities encoded into the hologram.
We have come back to “choice.” The photon is not destined to hit Earth–and you are not destined to get to work–because there are so many maps to choose between. Whether you get there or somewhere else depends on choice.
The fence-post reality
Let’s return to an earlier question, “When is Now?” Remember, unlike the usual 3D wavefunction, 4D frequency-space can’t change in time. It is timeless. In a holographic reality, the sense of “Now” is only related to you and your interactions with the world.
In between interactions, when you are absent, everyday objects don’t take definite form. The paths of objects are determined by holographic information in frequency-space, but travel itself is an illusion. An object does not have an “actual history,” only the history that falls into place at the moment you interact with it. Let’s call this “retroactive event determination,” a phrase that captures the idea that you are not changing the past from what it already was, but rather selecting from various possibilities which might have been.
Therefore, when you make choices and interact with the world, you are not interacting with a fixed, set-in-stone environment. The world is flexible. What “has already happened” is not yet decided, because the time period in between the last interaction and this one is unknowable. The certainty of life events is delayed until you make a choice. You would not be surprised to find this behavior as part of a flight simulator or virtual-reality training program.
“The paths of objects are determined by holographic information in frequency-space, but travel itself is an illusion. An object does not have an ‘actual history,’ only the history that falls into place at the moment you interact with it.”
In a holographic world, reality is like a fence. Your interactions with things are like the fence-posts that we can call real. In between the fence-posts are just wires of imagination, linked chains of possibility, in which options are developing but nothing is certain. The hologram contains embedded in it all the posts of the fence, and in fact all the available fences. It is your particular view of the hologram that provides you the specific experiences that you call real life. You have navigated to this view via the choices you made to get here, a “choose your own adventure” novel. (As touched upon earlier, it is not yet clear what is meant by “taking a view,” since we haven’t defined what a “viewer” is, or what the holographic interference pattern is “made of” in relation to the viewer.)
Note that timelessness doesn’t exactly mean that one can change the past. Rather, so long as the past circumstance you want to change lies along the gaps in the fence, then it doesn’t actually have a form yet. What would it mean to “change” it? Rather, it becomes “retroactively determined”, or falls into place after the fact.
“A holographic world allows the paths of objects to fall into place based upon the choice of action you make at the end of the journey.”
Consider again the analogy of language. Associate the phrase “The old train…” with the wire in between the fence posts. This is the undetermined past. Why is it undetermined? It is not yet clear what the meaning of “train” is. The “fence post” at the end of the sentence should make this clear. Let’s say the end of the sentence is “…left the station”, which makes it clear what the meaning of the whole sentence is. However, a different end of the sentence could be “..the young”, changing the meaning of the sentence to a statement about education rather than railroads. Did you change the past? No. It existed in a superposition of possibilities until the final words were uttered.
This example of retroactive determination of meaning is called local ambiguity. It is an apt analogy for the way in which a holographic world allows the paths of objects to fall into place based upon the choice of action you make at the end of the journey.
3. Testability
The conjecture that the world is like a hologram is testable. If the only things we can call “real” are the fence-posts or rungs of the ladder, then our world cannot be both objective and certain. For instance, I claim that the hiring decision conveyed in an email, time-stamped at 12pm, only became part of my fencepost reality at 6pm. At this time the decision became a fact for me, and before that the email message lived in uncertainty, along with the author of the email! There must be some sense in which the author of the email is either not objective or not certain, because the contents of the email they already wrote is, from my point of view, still flexible. Since we experience certainty in our reality everyday–you either did or did not drink coffee today–the certainty we experience must be subjective. Yet so long as there is consistency between my view of the world and yours, it will appear objective enough for us not to notice.
“The mathematics of quantum mechanics in its most pure form points to an ever-expanding tree of possible realities, rather than one actual reality.”
(Note that although we are using applying the “superposition principle” from quantum mechanics on systems that are not generally understood as quantum mechanical (like emails and people), it is crucial to understand that this principle was derived here from the properties of space, time, light and signal processing, not via the usual Hilbert space postulates. Hence there is no reason to limit the application to the usual microscopic systems. This is something addressed in detail in the research.)
In quantum mechanics, there is a testable difference between subjective and objective events. We’ll call the subjective description “relative reality”. That the world is described in this relative manner is a proposal put forward originally by Everett with the Many Worlds hypothesis, then by Wigner with the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment, and more recently by Rovelli and others with Relational Quantum Mechanics.
Far from being far-fetched, this approach is the Occam’s Razor–or simplest–way to think about quantum mechanics. As humans, we want to think that the world we experience is concrete. Yet the mathematics of quantum mechanics in its most pure form points to an ever-expanding tree of possible realities, rather than one actual reality. In the “relative reality” model, what we call an “actual” reality is only relatively true. Although it’s taken many decades for this view to gain traction given the challenges it poses to our concrete sense of reality, over time it is one of only a handful of basic approaches that has survived.
This approach has become more popular as more experimental results have been obtained. Specifically, experiments with entanglement and the violation of Bell’s inequalities have made this “relative reality” model more appealing to mainstream physicists. Three important cutting edge papers grounded in experiment are:
- “Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself” [9]
- “Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world” [10]
- “Testing the reality of Wigner’s friend’s experience” [11]
Due to the subtlety of the issues involved, it would be premature to suggest that the evidence proves the relative-reality view. Yet these experimental results, and to my knowledge all others that have been produced, are consistent with this view.
A formidable challenge in achieving consensus on the issue of interpreting quantum mechanics has been our own human bias toward the existence of an objective reality which has a definite form even when we are absent. With the emergence of more nuanced experimental techniques, I suspect we will gradually gain further confidence in our quest to verify these results in a non-ambiguous way.
However, given that the relative-reality model is not dependent on the holographic universe model, even non-ambiguous proof of the subjective nature of experience wouldn’t prove the veracity of the holographic model. Still, the holographic model explicitly requires these results, so the existing experiments provide a boost to the credibility of what is otherwise quite a difficult proposal to believe.
4. What to do with this information?
Though modeling the world as a hologram may seem like an abstract undertaking, it may have great relevance for our everyday experience. Too common today is the worldview that we must simply react to a world which is already unfolding. Life becomes about coping with change after it occurs, believing that “things are as they are.”
“In a holographic world, there are latent possibilities hidden in every choice.”
Business leader Joseph Jaworski writes,
“If individuals and organizations operate from the generative orientation, from possibility rather than resignation, we can create the future into which we are living, as opposed to merely reacting to it when we get there… Leadership is about creating, day by day, a domain in which we and those around us continually deepen our understanding of reality and are able to participate in shaping the future.”[12, p.182–184]
If we live in a holographic world, what we think of as the “real world out there” may actually not yet be certain. The circumstances yet to unfold can do so in a wide variety of ways, and they may depend on our choices. The past is less constrained than we might think, waiting for us to make choices before the responses are determined. In a holographic world, there are latent possibilities hidden in every choice.
“A world which responds to our choices by bringing the appropriate next learning experience is a world that is sympathetic to each of our specific challenges as evolving human beings.”
In this model, the metaphor of a school comes to mind, in which each lesson is appropriate to the level of development of the student. This provides a sense as to why the flow state of Csikszentmihalyi is so effective: we experience flow when we are treating life like a challenge designed just for us, at the perfect balance of challenge and skill.[13]
Living inside a hologram is a shift from resignation to flow. It involves increased focus on what we need to do to get to the next level of challenge, and decreased focus on losing or winning. A world which responds to our choices by bringing the appropriate next learning experience is a world that is sympathetic to each of our specific challenges as evolving human beings. Yet even more amazing, it is a world which is waiting for us to be ready before moving to the next level. What do we, humanity, need to learn in order to get to our next level?
5. Acknowledgements
This research was undertaken through Theiss Research, 7411 Eads Ave., La Jolla, CA 92037–5037, USA, and supported by the Foundational Questions Institute (fqxi.org; grant no. FQXi-1801) via funding from the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation.
Appendix
Glossary of terms
- Fourier transform: A mathematical procedure used to convert between frequency-space and regular spacetime. Forms the basis of holography.
- Hologram: A 3-dimensional looking image produced with a special photographic procedure.
- Spectrum: The vibrational frequencies present in a signal.
- Wavefunction: A mathematical object that encodes everything we can know about a system; an object is no more and no less than the properties predicted by its wavefunction.
- Wave distribution: The natural extension presented here of the wavefunction into 4 dimensions of space and time.
- Implicate order: David Bohm’s idea that there is a hidden world enfolded into our visible spacetime.
- Coordinates: Numbers describing the location of interactions.
- Parameters: Numbers describing the locations of pixels on an interference pattern on a holographic film.
- Spacetime: The world we are familiar with of length, breadth, width, and duration.
- Frequency-Space or Frequency Domain: A complimentary and equivalent version of our normal spacetime reality.
- Collapse of the wavefunction: A poorly understood process by which an object apparently changes from many possibilities into one remaining possibility.
References
[] S. Nelson-Isaacs, A holographic framework for quantum wavefunction propagation (2020)
[1] D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1980)
[2] M. Talbot, The Holographic Universe (Harper-Collins Publishers)
[3] G. ’t Hooft, (1993). URL https://arxiv:org/abs/gr-qc/9310026
[4] L. Susskind, Journal of Mathematical Physics36(11), 6377 (1995). DOI 10:1063/1:531249. URL https://doi:org/10:1063/1:531249
[5] N.G. Bourbakis, A.T. Gumahad, in Proceedings of the 2nd International IEEE Conference on Tools for Artificial Intelligence (1990), pp. 571–576
[6] L. Gelman, S. Braun, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing
[7] K. Pribram, Knowledge based text character recognition using Fourier transform (1991)
[8] J. Leon. Carl jung’s psychology of dreams and his view on freud. URL http:
//psychopathology:imedpub:com/carl-jungs-psychology-of-dreams-and-his-
view-on-freud:php?aid=9795
[9] D. Frauchiger, R. Renner, Nat Commun 9, 3711(2018)
[10] M. Proietti, A. Pickston, F. Graffitti, P. Barrow, D. Kundys, C. Branciard, M. Ringbauer, A. Fedrizzi, (2019)
[11] K.W. Bong, A. Utreras-Alarc´on, F. Ghafari, Y.C. Liang, N. Tischler, E.G. Cavalcanti, G.J. Pryde, H.M. Wiseman, (2019). URL https://arxiv:org/abs/1907:05607
[12] J. Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (Berrett-Koehler, 2011)
[13] M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Row, 1990)
