Reality As A Quantum Mechanical Holographic Simulation

Why are we here and what are we in?

I spend a fair amount of time wondering why I exist and why we are all here on this planet in this unfathomably huge cosmos.  I think that figuring it out is our assignment – the goal of the game.  I don’t rule out some creation entity that may have triggered the Big Bang, or some other event that may have occurred before that moment, but I am not content simply accepting our existence on faith and without question.  I am not a scientist, but since I first looked into the night sky and understood that stars were very distant suns, I have been trying to answer the “why are we here and what are we in” questions.  I don’t think I will be the one to answer these fundamental questions, but it doesn’t stop me from trying.  History is filled with answers to once intractable questions, so we should be encouraged, not discouraged, as we confront the most difficult questions.

In this writing I will present three concepts, that may or may not be related, regarding our existence.  There is some hard science, some hypothesis and some thought that is best classified as empirically-based metaphysical philosophy.

In the following article from 2002, the late, legendary John Wheeler explains his quantum mechanical view of the universe.

Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking? – Discover

John Wheeler, scientist and dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today’s leading physicists, and the man who chose the name “black hole” to describe the unimaginably dense, light-trapping objects now thought to be common throughout the universe, turned 90 last July. He is one of the last of the towering figures of 20th-century physics, a member of the generation that plumbed the mysteries of quantum mechanics and limned the utmost reaches of space and time. After a lifetime of fundamental contributions in fields ranging from atomic physics to cosmology, Wheeler has concerned himself in his later years with what he calls “ideas for ideas.”

“I had a heart attack on January 9, 2001,” he says, “I said, ‘That’s a signal. I only have a limited amount of time left, so I’ll concentrate on one question: How come existence?’”

The basis of Wheeler’s view of the universe centers on the strange world of quantum mechanics, which is not a hypothetical concept, but a sound and tested theory regarding the behavior of atomic scale particles. A central tenet of quantum theory is that matter possesses the quality of both particles and waves and that observation of that matter determines its state. This quality of matter is accepted as scientific fact and has been exhibited in countless tests over the past 200 years.

Wheeler provides a large scale model of the double-slit experiment to show that observation of matter can even shape the past.

To demonstrate, he sketches a diagram on a scrap of paper. Imagine, he says, a quasar— a very luminous and very remote young galaxy. Now imagine that there are two other large galaxies between Earth and the quasar. The gravity from massive objects like galaxies can bend light, just as conventional glass lenses do. In Wheeler’s experiment the two huge galaxies substitute for the pair of slits; the quasar is the light source. Just as in the two-slit experiment, light— photons— from the quasar can follow two different paths, past one galaxy or the other.

Suppose that on Earth, some astronomers decide to observe the quasars. In this case a telescope plays the role of the photon detector in the two-slit experiment. If the astronomers point a telescope in the direction of one of the two intervening galaxies, they will see photons from the quasar that were deflected by that galaxy; they would get the same result by looking at the other galaxy. But the astronomers could also mimic the second part of the two-slit experiment. By carefully arranging mirrors, they could make photons arriving from the routes around both galaxies strike a piece of photographic film simultaneously. Alternating light and dark bands would appear on the film, identical to the pattern found when photons passed through the two slits.

Here’s the odd part. The quasar could be very distant from Earth, with light so faint that its photons hit the piece of film only one at a time. But the results of the experiment wouldn’t change. The striped pattern would still show up, meaning that a lone photon not observed by the telescope traveled both paths toward Earth, even if those paths were separated by many light-years. And that’s not all.

By the time the astronomers decide which measurement to make— whether to pin down the photon to one definite route or to have it follow both paths simultaneously— the photon could have already journeyed for billions of years, long before life appeared on Earth. The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the photon’s past. In one case the astronomers create a past in which a photon took both possible routes from the quasar to Earth. Alternatively, they retroactively force the photon onto one straight trail toward their detector, even though the photon began its jaunt long before any detectors existed.

This sounds fantastic and absurd, but this very thought experiment was proven by physicists at the University of Maryland in 1984.

Wheeler’s idea was that current and historical reality is shaped by observation, but primarily by particles that interact with other particles.

Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet fixed.

What truly intrigues me is that Wheeler’s ideas, while straying a bit from hard science, are based on the known qualities of matter. Simple observation and interaction may be constantly creating our reality and our past.

The below article, from January of this year, explains how a team in Germany looking for gravitational waves may have stumbled upon the “pixels” of reality.

Our world may be a giant hologram – New Scientist

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The team remains cautious about the results of these tests as the GEO600 is an extremely sensitive instrument that could be providing erroneous readings because of various sources of noise like traffic, clouds and temperature fluctuations, among other factors.  But, the fact that Hogan predicted the specific noise which was recorded is significant.

For me, the most interesting part of this hypothesis, and what ties it in with the Simulation Argument below, is the idea that we may exist in something like a 3D movie projected from a flat strip of film.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

We now arrive at the most speculative concept: The Simulation Argument

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? – The Simulation Argument

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. (My emphasis added in bold.)

The Simulation Argument was first published in 2003 by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom admits that there is no proof that we are living in a simulation, only the possibility. He places the possibility at about 20% and states that this is just his subjective opinion. The FAQ is a good place to start before you read the paper.

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea.

We already run rudimentary human simulations like The Sims, so it does not seem like such a stretch that we will continue to run more advanced simulations as computational power increases. Will we ever be able to make the simulations granular enough to create billions or trillions of virtual consciousnesses? And, if we are living in a simulation, what’s the difference between a simulation and reality? Semantics?

I argue that it is possible that the union of quantum theory and the holographic principle may be the framework of  a reality simulation that each of us literally creates as we observe. It seems like a cool strategy for an advanced software developer.  There are serious problems with this concept, like who created the folks running our simulation and the possibility of the simulated running their own simulations, and so on.  It becomes a bit comical after a few layers, but it is fun to contemplate.

Perhaps one day, like The Truman Show, we’ll reach the boundary of our world and meet the guy in the booth.  Of course, then we’ll be back where we began with probably more questions than when we started.

Similar Posts:

• “Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All”
• “Codex Futurius: Teleportation”
• GRB 090423: Most Distant Object Ever Observed
• “American Adults Flunk Basic Science”
• Michael Talbot Discusses The Holographic Universe