Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Quanciousness Part I: Holographic Cosmos
15 Jun 2009 Leave a Comment
in Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Consciousness Series
Science is mechanistic, materialistic, purposeless, directionless, always discovering new worlds but reaching nowhere. It does not offer us the ultimate answers. With the saw, drill and hammer of reason, causality and logic it has petered out the world molded by the almighty to minisculae of inanimate atoms and molecules dancing in precision with the laws of mathematics. Thus, it preaches nihilistic and materialistic values and speaks nothing of the greatness of virtue and the humility of love.
For ages, this has been the constant rant of religion against science. Sample a quote from Dinesh D’souza, a contemporary champion of religion (particularly his own), and author of the bestselling book ‘What’s so great about Christianity’ (really, what exactly? And what’s not so great about other religions?).
In the secular account, “You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach 3 1/2 billion years ago. You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You came from nothing and are going nowhere.”
In the Christian view, by contrast, “You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with him.”
This was published in the San Francisco Chronicle in an article by D’Souza. Here’s one more from his book:
While the atheist arrogantly persists in the delusion that his reason is capable of figuring out all that there is, the religious believer lives in the humble acknowledgement of the limits of human knowledge, knowing that there is a reality greater than and beyond that which our senses can apprehend.
Now I have a real problem with this statement. Firstly a scientist, maybe not an atheist but a practitioner of reason nonetheless, is always forthcoming to acknowledge what and how much he does not know and how much he can know, and the possibility of him being wrong. Religious leaders on the other hand are dictatorial about the minutest details of how god created universe and man, including the exact time and date. So much for humility!
Well, let me confront this matter head on then. I am going to educate the readers about an idea, an offshoot of contemporary cutting edge science, which attempts to explain mind and matter abreast. It’s a profoundly arresting idea that explains not just the material universe but also consciousness, thoughts and free will. A grand new approach with deep spiritual significance. This idea is called the ‘Holographic Principle’. It holds that universe is actually an illusion, a hologram. That despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. This might seem like fiction or a mystical aphorism but has a very firm mathematical footing.
First let me give you some background. My apologies to the scientifically uninitiated reader in case he/she finds it difficult to assimilate this stuff.
To start with, an elucidation of the birth and existence of universe and of human consciousness, thoughts and emotions has been the holy grail of science since eternity. The latter one has been a much tougher nut to crack. However, pioneering studies have been done in both cosmology and neuroscience and a myriad of thoughts have come out of these studies.
So let me start off with groundnuts first and then move on to the tougher nuts. There are two grand notions in physics. One is Einstein’s general relativity and the other is Quantum mechanics. While general relativity, which is basically a theory of gravity, describes the macro world quantum theory rules in the land of the sub-atomic. These two theories have been tested to boggling accuracies and they have always stood to their guns. Physicist Richard Feynman has described accuracy of quantum theory to measuring North America to the precision of the width of a human hair.
Now the catch! Both theories are worlds apart when it comes to compatibility. They are like Sri Lanka and LTTE, but both equally powerful. They rule different territories but reside and put a claim on the same piece of land, in our case the universe.
General relativity treats the 4-dimensional continuum of space-time ( 3 dimensions of space and one of time) like a rubber sheath which can be curved and warped. Gravitation arises from the curvature of space-time, which makes objects move as if they were pulled by a force. Conversely, the curvature is caused by the presence of matter and energy. And at the heart of quantum theory is something called the uncertainty principle which says that certain pairs of physical properties cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Among these pairs is the pair of energy and time.
While a space-time free of matter and energy should, according to general relativity, be flat like taut elastic the uncertainties of quantum world will allow tiny quanta of energy to be borrowed from empty space and manifest itself as a matter-antimatter pair. Before anyone could, even in principle, make an observation of this event by resolving it along a temporal stretch, the matter-antimatter pair will annihilate into pure energy which will be returned back to space. Smart, ha! This uncertainty lends itself to the real emptiness of space, which is where the conflict arises. Seen at a very-very small scale of distance, the empty space rather looks like seething, boiling foam of particles becoming for an ephemeral instant and unbecoming the next. Perhaps like infinite bugs-bunny-ghosts playing hide-and-seek with each other bobbing their heads out of their bunny holes for a teeny-tiny instant and ducking back before anyone notices.
According to Einstein’s equations, a sufficiently dense concentration of matter or energy will curve space-time so extremely that it rends, forming a black hole. The laws of relativity forbid anything that went into a black hole from coming out again. It is at the heart of this black hole where both theories come into direct conflict and all known laws of early twentieth century break down.
Reconciling these two theories has been the biggest ambition of theoretical physics for more than last half a century. And it is this burning ambition that has pushed humans beyond their intellectual boundaries, produced the humongous amount of avant-garde mathematics, and has took us ever closer to, as Stephen Hawking puts it, “the mind of God”. It has turned old notions on their heads and resurrected even older philosophies to new glories.
Now, this quantum mechanics is a big monkey business. Physicist Michio Kaku says “If a thousand philosophers were to think for a thousand years to conjure the strangest thing they could think of, they still won’t be able to come up with something as strange as quantum mechanics“. In the quantum world a particle can be at many places at the same time. A particle, say an electron which is a discrete entity, is a wave as well which is non-discrete and continuous, both at the same time. In ‘Quantasia’, there is nothing like an objective reality. It’s just a world of potentials waiting to be actualized by an observer. Its laws make a clear distinction between experience & information, observer and the observed, though both are part of the same universe and made of same stuff. But the most bizarre quantum-phenomena award has, for a long time, gone to phenomena called ‘quantum entanglement‘.
Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, you can instantaneously recollect memories of your distant past when something about it is mentioned? How you become instantaneously become aware of your toe thumb the moment I mention toe thumb? That’s the essence of quantum entanglement, the principle of non-locality or instantaneous-action-at-a-distance. It has been observed that particles once together share the brotherhood no matter how much you separate them. If you change one physical property of one partner of the pair the other long lost brother, even if a billion miles away, would experience the same change in the same physical property, instantaneously. This violates the upper limit of speed of any communication which relativity says cannot be greater than the speed of light. Two ghosts talking?
This paradoxical and counterintuitive nature of reality and the unexplainable phenomena had forced the entire science fraternity to question their entire working philosophy. Things they had adapted and those they had rejected. One such philosophical corpse that they had to dig out of its grave was monism, the principle that there is only one basic substance or principle as the ground of reality. And one principle that science has, for centuries, built itself upon but which didn’t seem to be working anymore was reductionism. The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole.
So was there a plan B? Did science adapt itself to this torrent of unexpected findings? The answer of course is yes. Unlike the dogmatic dictums of religion which contort the truth to their own convenience, science contorts itself to suit the mood of reality. One of the earliest questions that has kept the physicists beating thin air is what should be considered as the most elementary of all nature, out of which all reality emanates? Is it a particle, superstring, what? Early 80s onwards, the heroes of reason started thinking long and hard but now, not having the solid ground of reductionism under their feet to stand upon, their imaginations started running wild and torrid like steam escaping from a pressure cooker. And an answer they did come up with. The answer was: Information.
This was a brand new paradigm. The most gifted child of monism. It made a lot more sense. Everything emanates out of information. Physicist John Wheeler has called matter and energy as mere incidentals of information. I’d add space and time to them. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Everything in the universe seems to be communicating to everything. The whole universe is alive with consciousness. And what constitutes consciousness? Experience. And what constitutes experience? Its information!
We ourselves have ushered in an age of computers and communication. Memory storage devices are becoming ever smaller and their capacity is ever increasing. In early ’50s a brilliant mathematician Claude Shannon mooted the question: How much information can you stuff into a communication signal? The formula he obtained was similar to Boltzmann’s entropy equation. Entropy is a physical property of matter whose measure can be seen as the amount of randomness in a system. In 1877 Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann characterized entropy more precisely in terms of the number of distinct microscopic states that the particles composing a chunk of matter could be in while still looking like the same macroscopic chunk of matter. Entropy thus became the most widely used measure of information content. For instance, the design of every modern communications device–from cellular phones to modems to compact-disc players–relies on Shannon entropy.
This led a Princeton physicist named Jacob Bekenstein to raise an even more fundamental question. In principle, what is the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a given volume of space? Or in other words, what could be the greatest entropy that a given volume of space could contain. Infinite, one might say. But it’s not that simple. The answer was to be found in revolutionary studies of black holes done by Stephen Hawking and Bekenstein himself.
Now, let us understand this by doing a thought experiment. Imagine you are in a room. What is the maximum information you could pack within this room? Suppose you used every atom within the room to write information upon. That’d be a lot of information! But you can always stuff in more atoms, cant you? So you keep stuffing in more and more information. As each particle gets lesser and lesser space, it keeps getting angrier and angrier; its face turns crimson and it starts behaving like a maniacal freak banging ever more riotously into other atoms. Technically speaking, its entropy keeps increasing. But you go on and on and on and on. To keep those atoms incarcerated within the room you have use more and more energy. Were it not for gravity, you could go on ad infinitum. But law of gravity places an upper limit as to how many atom-inmates you can keep jailed within this cell. As the atoms get closer and closer the gravitational glue between them becomes stronger and stronger which keeps crushing the atoms’ right to freedom & liberty (precisely speaking, the electron degeneracy pressure) with stronger & stronger force until you reach what is called the Chandrasekhar limit. Beyond that, space-time implodes and the whole room gets eaten up by the big-daddy-monster of all existentiality, the black hole. Oouchie!
Does it burp? That’s a very important question. Bekenstein did the same thought experiment and he found classical black holes to be violating a fundamental law of thermodynamics; the total entropy of the universe can only increase. It cannot decrease, let alone disappear completely. But that is what a classical black hole seems to do (classical meaning when quantum nature is not taken into consideration). When matter-energy collapses into a black hole, it in a way, detaches itself from the fabric of universe. Whatever has gone into it cannot be accessed from within the universe. So you work your butt off, stuffing more and more information into your imaginary room and suddenly, oh, it’s all gone! A classical black hole does not have entropy. Not actually. Hawking tells us if quantum effects are taken into picture, black holes aren’t truly black. If more matter, which means more entropy, is thrown into them, there is a corresponding increase in its mass as well as the area of event-horizon, the two dimensional boundary of a black hole from beyond which, nothing can escape its tremendous suction, not even light. In the simplest case, it has a form of a sphere. He also showed the area of an event horizon can never decrease. Getting any ideas? This was a monumental discovery. Results from string theory, about which we’ll talk later, show all the information that went inside the black hole stays around as ripples on the event horizon. Black hole has entropy and it resides on its boundary. When more matter is thrown into it, the entropy of the black hole increases as an increase in the area of its event horizon. So does it burp after eating up your room? You bet it does! And in this burp, you can find all the information that the big-daddy-monster ate up.
So all the information inside a black hole is written on its 2-D boundary. This is the manifestation of holographic principle. Could our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be “written” on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram? Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of many alternative ways of viewing reality.
To understand better, we have to first understand what a hologram is. Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object were still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. A holographic image is stored on a photographic film as an interference pattern of a light beam scattered from the object and another, reference light beam from the same source of light. The resulting light field is an apparently random pattern of varying intensity which is the hologram. If the process is reversed, i.e. if the hologram is illuminated by the original reference beam, a light field is diffracted by the reference beam which is identical to the light field which was scattered by the object or objects. Thus, someone looking into the hologram ‘sees’ the objects even though it may no longer be present.
A Laser created hologram
The logos on mobile phone batteries, the back of your credit cards etc. are all low quality holograms. Holograms can be reconstructed in thin air with the use of lasers. Holographic principle is used in various other imaging techniques like MRI scans where images are mathematically reconstructed inside as a digital image inside a computer from the interference pattern.
What followed from the above discoveries was a generalization that the information that can be stored inside a volume of space is proportional to the surface area of its boundary. What does that imply? Is objective reality merely a phantasm? Some kind of a hologram? Is the real reality outside the universe? The major of world’s religions, the major of world mystics would be smelling the sweet air of vindication at this moment. Eternal vindication! Let’s explore further.
The idea of a holographic cosmos was first mooted by Gerard ‘t Hooft. It was a follow up of a visionary physicist, David Bohm’s groundbreaking work. Bohm, as a graduate student of John Wheeler, the man who coined the term “black-hole”, was mighty dissatisfied with the ways of contemporary physics of his time. He made the startling assertion that the universe has a deeper, “implicate” order which manifests itself as the “explicate” order of the everyday world. What we understand as objective reality. The real reality is that there’s no reality. Not in the way we see it. The quantum dualities, the paradoxes, the entanglement all point to the fact that universe is actually just an illusion. In one of his books ‘Wholeness and the implicate order‘ Bohm writes:
“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the “explicate” or “unfolded” order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders”
Through his idea of an implicate order he contends that all paradoxes disappear as reality is but one. He gives an analogy to explain the phenomenon of entanglement.
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fishes, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
Another analogy that he gave to propose that all plurality of the manifest world is but revelation of an underlying singularity is to consider a pattern produced by making small cuts in a folded piece of paper and then, literally, unfolding it. Widely separated elements of the pattern are, in actuality, produced by the same original cut in the folded piece of paper. Here the cuts in the folded paper represent the implicate order and the unfolded pattern represents the explicate order.
The holographic cosmos idea was brought to its Technicolor reality by string theorist Leonard Susskind. String theory is the fruition of the ambitious reconciliation efforts mentioned earlier. It’s an idea that says that all the potpourri of elementary particles, the quanta of matter, energy and the four fundamental forces of nature are different vibrations of a single, 1-dimensional mathematical entity called the superstring. Like strings of a violin, they vibrate at different harmonics. These multitudes of harmonics produce the manifold notes that form the entire symphony of universe, life and everything that exists including space and time. These strings vibrate not just in our familiar 4 dimensions of space and time but an abstract 10-dimensional space-time with six dimensions that curl up on themselves extremely tightly such that they cannot be seen or felt. To give an analogy of tightly curled dimensions, imagine looking at a high-tension power cable from a distance. It looks like a true 1-dimensional line. But on closer inspection you notice it has a girth, a closed circular dimension. The infinite shapes in which these dimensions can curl dictates the degrees of freedom for vibrations of strings. There can be 10500 such shapes all corresponding to different possible universes one of which is ours!
Till 1995, there were five different string theories. It was an embarrassment for most string theorists, people working on the most ambitious project in the history of mankind. An embarrassment of riches! In ’95 a man named Edward Witten changed the whole landscape of physics. In a revolutionary move of sheer intellect, he united all string theories in an 11-dimensional theory he named as M-theory, ‘M’ standing for “Magic, Mystery or Matrix according to taste” in Witten’s own words. Witten conjectured that under higher states of excitation, strings can expand into higher dimensional entities called ‘branes‘. These branes can grow to a size of a whole universe and in fact our universe is speculated to be one such brane. M theory has also been dubbed as Membrane theory. Like a blind man that feels the legs and trunks of an elephant and mistakes them for different animals, Witten proved that the five string theories were actually trunk and tail of one large beast, the M-theory. Witten was proclaimed as the “Most intelligent man on Earth” by the millennium edition of TIME magazine.
It is these branes of M theory which lend themselves as the most promising candidates for being god’s photographic film for playing his mischievous tricks on us. The ‘ripples‘ on these branes can contain all the information of a whole universe in all it’s quantum majesty. In the same year, Susskind presented a formulation of then new M-theory using a holographic description in terms of charged point black holes, the so called ‘D0 branes’ of type IIA string theory, one of the five string theories. In 1997, Juan Maldacena, a colleague of Witten, gave a much more concrete picture of holographic principle. Using M theory, or specifically “3+1 dimensional type IIB membrane”, he showed that two universes of different dimension and obeying disparate physical laws are rendered completely equivalent by the holographic principle. He demonstrated this principle mathematically for a specific type of five-dimensional spacetime (“anti de Sitter”) and its four-dimensional boundary. In effect, the 5-D universe is recorded like a hologram on the 4-D surface at its periphery. Superstring theory rules in the 5-D spacetime, but a so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-D hologram. A black hole in the 5-D spacetime is equivalent to hot radiation on the hologram–for example, the hole and the radiation have the same entropy even though the physical origin of the entropy is completely different for each case. Although these two descriptions of the universe seem utterly unalike, no experiment could distinguish between them, even in principle. This was later confirmed by Witten for space-times other than anti-de-Sitter.
Is this all true or just fancy mathematics? Are these theories open to experimental scrutiny? Partly, yes. Though we can’t directly observe the reality of these grandiose claims we can still predict the effects they have in the observable world and measure them. So has there been any experimental evidence? Quantum theory says space cannot be divided into infinitely smaller chunks. You can, at best, use one indivisible chunk of space to write one bit of information. This chunk of space is of the area of 10-66 cm2, the area of the smallest possible brane. It’s called Planck area, after the founding father of quantum theory, Max Planck. It’s such preposterously small magnitudes which makes direct observation by any conceivable experiment unfeasible. If the hologram theory of universe is correct then this chunk of area would reside not within our universe, but on its holographic boundary. Since volume is always numerically greater than area, in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the corresponding chunks within our space would be much bigger than a plank area, of 10-36 cm2. At this scale our instruments can claim, with inflated chests, that they are up to the job. Certain kind of gravitational disturbances, or disturbances in the space-time fabric which, if holographic principle is correct, would occur on this magnified scale of distance rather than at planck-scale, can be good vindicators of the holographic universe idea. Exactly such disturbances have been detected in 2008 by GEO600, a gravitational wave detector located near Germany.
Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a final theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physical processes. If so, the vision of information as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.
For the likes of D’Souza, who would raise his palms heavenwards to the sounds of gothic music reverberating in the background, and rush to proclaim that this is a grand illusion designed by the great almighty god, that’s its god’s hand painting those branes with information, I’d hate to be a killjoy. The holographic principle is profoundly rooted in arduous mathematics. A loving god wouldn’t be bound by mathematical laws I guess! The real repartee comes in the next part. Stay tuned.
Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Quanciousness Part II: Holographic Mind
15 Jun 2009 1 Comment
in Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Consciousness Series
Here comes the part my fingers have been itching to type out. Science could explain the whole darn universe or things more august than a mere universe, but can it explain life, consciousness, free-will, love, hate, jealousy? Ok maybe! How about paranormal experiences, extra sensory perceptions, telepathy, the mystical super-human powers? Are these mere fancies of a lunatic? Surely there must be a higher power.
For those of you who have not an inkling of it, I am proud to present the Holonomic Theory of Brain.
Before waving the green flag to this exuberant journey, let me help you fasten your seat belts and make sure you are fully ready for this.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. Somehow, the parts were as good as the whole as far as memory retention was concerned.
Holograms have a curiously remarkable property. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
During the middle of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychology was at its enterprising best. It was bravely foraying into new territories and gathering perplexing and inexplicable results. It was expanding its roots and out of these roots were germinating newer sub-disciplines like Parapsychology. One of the most eccentric findings of parapsychology was a class of phenomena termed as Extra Sensory Perception or ESP. The consensus of the Parapsychological Association is that certain types of psychic phenomena such as psychokinesis, telepathy, and precognition are well established. While a lot of findings remain shrouded in skepticism, all of these findings just cannot be brushed away or considered as pure debauchery of its claimants.
The phenomenon of precognition, or foreseeing events before they happen, has been pretty well established. Not just in psychics but normal people like you and me, albeit with different ability. It has been found that every person has a small measure of precognition ability. Studies have been done in which volunteers were asked to watch a series of randomly sorted pictures on a computer and their brain activity was measured. All these studies have had consensual results. A fraction of a second before a frightening image was displayed, a sudden surge in brainwaves was observed with an accompanying rise in fear hormones like adrenalin. We get a premonition of terror before it actually strikes us. Same has been confirmed for a lot of other emotions and mental states.
Similarly, telepathy has been a well known acquaintance to science as well as fiction. Telepathy has been one of the most established of all paranormal phenomena, no doubt accompanied by a healthy dose of skepticism, controversy and fraud. Several different kinds of tests have been developed to investigate telepathy and to make sure it was not in any way a work of chance. Volunteers who claim to have telepathic powers have been put to rigorous tests under controlled laboratory conditions like sitting down one volunteer to look at random computer generated pictures and transmit them to another volunteer sitting across the wall in another room who has to guess what the first person is looking at. Results declare that a lot of such volunteer pairs have been able to portray what the other person was looking at with a fair amount of accuracy that cannot be statistically dismissed as mere chance. Perhaps the weirdest kind of telepathy, called ‘Extended mind‘, has been used by both CIA and KGB during the Cold War era. Extended mind is a concept in which mind becomes one with matter and boundaries between mind and the external world disappear. During the height of cold war, people professing Extended Mind powers were used by both the secret agencies on opposite sides of the Pacific to guess out details of the respective rival country’s nuclear installations. Descriptions and the make of nuclear facilities were orated by psychics employed by CIA to artists who used to sketch them down to the finest details. These pictures were confirmed much later by satellite images and high-altitude reconnaissance data and were found to be in surprising agreement with descriptions of psychics!
The opera of fields, the tango of entanglement!
Plausibly the most glaringly perceptible harnessing of super-human powers is demonstrated by the monks of the ancient Shaolin temple in China. These practitioners of martial arts, over a period of over thousand years, have learnt to mobilize an essential life force which the Chinese call ch’i. They use it in Martial arts as well as medical healing. They claim that everybody carries ch’i but they can concentrate ch’i into one part of their body on will. I remember watching a documentary on Shaolin temple in which the kung-fu master was able to twist a metal spear with its blunt end on a rock and the sharpened head poking into his throat! Ch’i has been proven to be a real energy form than just a deception. I also remember watching a medical practitioner of Ch’i mobilizing the energy into his hands and transferring it from there into a sick person. When a drenched towel was placed on the sick person’s stomach, steam started rising from it. Infra-red cameras detected a real, thermal radiation emanating out of the practitioner’s hands.
So how does science takes these punches in the face? Quite seriously. From all the scientific studies one thing is crystal clear. There is nothing mystical about the form of these energies. They are complex electromagnetic fields interpenetrating into each other. What remains mystical is the source of their origin within the body and the way some people are able to mobilize them. Until now!
Brain, no dubt, is the most miraculous contraption of nature. Deep insights into the nature of consciousness by some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century has revealed an inextricable connection with the weirdo of physics; the quantum theory. That’s understandable. Uncanny questions merit uncanny answers. The connection was first argued for in 1989 by the Oxford mathematical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose.
In The Emperor’s New Mind, he argued that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. Penrose hinted at the characteristics this new physics may have and specified the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics. He claimed that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is a deterministic system that for the most part simply executes algorithms, as a billiard table where billiard balls act as message carriers and their interactions act as logical decisions. He argued against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the human mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer.
We can all empathize with Penrose’s view. Human thought is after all non-deterministic, non-causal and non-algorithmic. And human memory is non-local. Free-will rips into the future with a zeal that has a character of bemused disorientation. Could a robot be created that would possess free-will, think, build philosophy, build its own moral precepts, cry tears of joy, have the ability to get angry, but not get angry when a dear friend, in a fit of rage, says something hurtful? Nah! It’d involve so many calculations that it’ll probably blow its head off. My semi-qualified judgment but still, I think if such intelligence could be a product of artificial synthesis, it’d be an impossible feat to achieve without taking the quantum route. In the world of computation, the age old brain is the undisputed king!
Apart from Penrose, there were other people at that time pondering hard over consciousness. Among them was Stuart Hameroff. Hameroff was pretty excited by microtubules, components of the cell cytoskeleton. He was pretty amazed by their role in cellular navigation. Microtubules are dynamically unstable and are found in almost all cells. They lend major structural support to the cell by acting as scaffold for the cell, and assist in major cell functions like cellular division. Their dynamic instability lends them a capability to expand, contract and function as a cellular motor. It was this last function that gripped Hameroff’s interest. In a bacteria, microtubules forms the motor that rotates its flagellum, which can be compared to a ship’s propeller, that help’s it navigate its way to its home or its food, or its mate! Microtubules make a bacteria look as much designed and conscious as man in that they are complex, have a sense of purpose and they know what they are doing. It led Hameroff to speculate that they were controlled by some form of computing. It also suggested to him that part of the solution of the problem of consciousness might lie in understanding the operations of microtubules in brain cells, operations at the molecular and supramolecular level. Penrose and Hameroff proposed the Orch-OR theory of consciousness but we’ll talk about that later. First things first.
The man who finally nailed the quantum theory of mind was a Stanford neurosurgeon and psychologist, named Karl Pribram. Inspired and excited by David Bohm’s idea of implicate order, baffled by the whole-in-every-part maxim of memory, and the similarity of ideas budding inside his head with the holographic principle led him to call up Bohm and propose a collaboration. The fecund duos groundbreaking work produced what is called the Holonomic Brain Theory, which provided not only a consistent mathematical explanation for consciousness but also free-will and emotions. This theory is the real confluence of mind and matter, of body and spirit, of man and the higher power.
Hameroff had argued that the microtubulin fiber inside neurons function as sites for quantum activity. The question of why would incite a much detailed technical discussion which I shall avoid. Pribram had a similar idea but his interpretation was radically different.
Karl Pribram has demonstrated with his holonomic theory of brain dynamics that the cerebral cortex is the site of a holographic information process he calls a multiplex neural hologram that is dependent on local circuits of neurons without long fibers that do not transmit ordinary nervous impulses. Pribram says “These neurons function in the undulatory mode and are above all responsible by the horizontal layer connections of the neural tissue where holographic interference patterns can be built” .The neural hologram is build by the interaction of the electromagnetic fields of the neurons similarly to the interaction of sound waves in a piano. When a piano is played the keys strike the strings generating a vibrational standing wave between the two ends of the string, creating an interference pattern (This interference can be destructive or constructive).Nodes of constructive interference, of these sound frequencies, create the harmony or harmonics that are the notes making up the music we listen to. Pribram has demonstrated that a similar process is continuously occurring in the cerebral cortex by means of the interpenetration of the electromagnetic fields of the adjacent cortical neurons, generating a harmonic field. According to Pribram’s model his harmonic electromagnetic field distributed in the cerebral cortex, holographically stores and encodes a huge information field responsible for the emergence of memory and consciousness. As the music is not in the piano but in the resonating field that surrounds it, so our memories and consciousness are not in the brain, but in the holographic information field that surrounds it. So the notion, that mind creates consciousness gets turned over its heels. Consciousness is Universal. It is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Pribram’s neural wave equation, describing holographic neural network processing is similar to the Schrödinger wave equation, a central equation of quantum theory which describes the wave nature of every particle of matter and energy, with the addition of the de Broglie-Bohm Quantum Potential. This is not coincidental and opens the possibility of holographic interaction between receptive fields in the cortex with the holographic quantum universe described by David Bohm. Thus the Holographic quantum field around our brain resonates with the universal consciousness, the Schrödinger wave function of the entire universe, allowing all perception to arise! [1]
This new holographic paradigm allows us to rethink the manner in which information processing occurs in the nervous system. In this context, Pribram’s quantum holonomic theory of brain function is one of the most brilliant and revolutionary contribution to neuroscience in the 100 years since the initial studies of Sherington!
The brain uses the same mathematical image reconstruction techniques as are used in the imaging techniques, namely Inverse Fourier-transformations, formulation of which earned Dennis Gabor, the inventor of Hologram, a Nobel Prize.
According to Bohm, this implicit wholeness, of which our universe is an explicit, holographic, manifestation, is not a static oneness, but a dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process. It brings together the holistic principle of “undivided wholeness” with the idea that everything is in a state of process or becoming. This universal flux he christens as Holomovement. The world is awash in this flux and our mind, whether awake or asleep, is in constant connection with this flux which gives dynamicity to our thinking and feelings. The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow. Rather than starting with the parts and explaining the whole in terms of the parts, Bohm’s point of view is just the opposite: he starts with a notion of undivided wholeness and derives the parts as abstractions from the whole. The essential point is that the implicate order and the holomovement imply a way of looking at reality not merely in terms of external interactions between things, but in terms of the internal (enfolded) relationships among things. He notes how “each relatively autonomous and stable structure is understood not as something independently and permanently existent but rather as a product that has been formed in the whole flowing movement and what will ultimately dissolve back into this movement. How it forms and maintains itself, then, depends on its place function within the whole”. For Bohm, movement is what is primary; and what seem like permanent structures are only relatively autonomous sub-entities which emerge out of the whole of flowing movement and then dissolve back into it an unceasing process of becoming. The universal truth of creation and death!
Our ego-consciousness seems to mask the universal relatedness implied by the Holographic Principle, and it is perhaps only through transcendence of the ego-consciousness that the higher orders of experience can become conscious. In the phenomenon of synchronicity, there seems to be a meaningful connection between individuals that breaks through the barrier of ego-consciousness. Such a connection is reported by many individuals in the so called higher states of consciousness like dreams, deep meditation, or near-death-experiences. Brain mapping studies performed during the occurrence of these harmonic states have shown a highly synchronized and perfectly ordered spectral array of brain waves that form unique harmonic waves, as if all frequencies of all neurons from all cerebral centers played the same symphony. This highly coherent brain state generates the non-local holographic informational cortical field of consciousness interconnecting the human brain and the holographic cosmos.
The waveforms, within the matrix of a distributed system, allow fluctuations taking place to create new patterns, according to Pribram, and the resulting dynamic potential can then organize new foci of activity oriented to the precipitation of strategic planning and exercise of free will.
A question of profound import that arises here is why, if the world is in some sense a hologram and all objective reality an illusion, do we observe the immense vastness as a hard reality. The Orch-OR or Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory of Hameroff and Penrose explain this in terms of wave-function collapse by the act of observation, or decay of the wave nature into one hard reality and the discreteness of everyday life. This comes in conjunction with the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics that at every wavefunction collapse the world gets split into infinitely many universes each with one version of reality in contrast with a single superposition of all realities that was existing before the wave-function collapse. This is quite counterintuitive and Pribram & Bohm’s model deny a wavefunction collapse. Bohm being John Wheeler’s doctoral student shares his view that ideally, there should be no distinction between the observer and the observed as both of them are part of the same universe. The principle of universal consciousness wouldn’t really wish a tussle between subjectivity and objectivity. Both observe each other and both are the observed.
Pribram-Bohm model takes a different road to the hardness of conscious experience. They propose a lens-defined model of the brain in which our senses act as lenses. The wavefunction does not collapse (Bohm uses the concept of a pilot-wave to ‘steer’ the evolution of the wave-function deterministically). Rather our senses pick out particular frequencies from the noise of the whizzing fields and focus on the selected frequencies for perception. Bohm has said that if you take the lenses away, what you are left with is a hologram.
A hologram! Yes!
From a personal perspective the world makes a lot more sense now than it ever did before. Like an earth diminished to shelled debris by an Armageddon and then everything running back in time and settling back into pristine order, whole before part, the undivided wholeness and the ‘whole’ in its every part. Everything instantaneously connected to everything as manifestations of a monistic reality. Every particle alive with experience. Every particle ‘talks‘ to every other particle in universe.
Telepathy?
Non-local quantum entanglement.
Ch’i? Para kinesis?
Greater synchrony of brainwaves with the holoinformational flux.
Precognition?
That’s a toughie! In a quantum-relativistic universe there’s nothing like a gone past or an imminent future. It’s all ‘nows’. Now-past, now-present, now-future, all existing in a holy communion on that eternal boundary, chatting with each other, recreating themselves as their own definitions. There are no known laws of physics that forbid you to talk to your past or your future to talk to you!
My college years, I spent wondering. How does an enzyme fit right into its target molecule with such an impressive efficiency? It’d be like a lock and key floating in a tank of water and miraculously coming and fitting together. How does a 1 dimensional strand of DNA know how its corresponding 3 dimensional protein will fold in 3 dimensions? They talk! Yeah. Literally. People are actually studying these communication patterns.
The manifest universe enfolds itself like layers upon layers onto the holographic boundary. Each layer being a different world with its own laws, own level of consciousness. More complex it gets, more conscious it gets. From quantum world to the macro world to life.
I surmise it’s a dawn of a brand new era. The holographic principle has not been rigorously proven by experimentation but there has seldom been an idea which is so mathematically elegant but has proven to be false. There are a lot of things which cannot be explained consistently, in both mind and cosmos, without invoking the holographic principle. The complex mathematical analyses of brainwaves, the evolutionary patterns of brain structure with a grossly disproportionate increase in the area of brain surfaces as compared to volumes all point of the holographic principle. Nevertheless, science works on the spirit of questioning and there is no reason why any theory should be exempted from standing to the test of critical scrutiny.
Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Quanciousness Part III: Holographic God
15 Jun 2009 Leave a Comment
in Scientific Spirituality & Quantum Consciousness Series
Currently, the holographic principle is the favorite citation as a proof of existence of God. At its face, the holographic principle does seem like an intriguing and elegant idea that points straight to straight to the existence of god. The argument that it is a stoically mathematical principle doesn’t really stand its ground. A car also functions deterministically in conformity with mathematical laws but that does in no way rule out the presence of a designer. A car is, without a doubt, not a self assembled entity. Nor can the designer not be in love with his creation!
Without question, the holographic principle vindicates the ancient philosophies long upheld by religion and currently disparaged by most objectivists. The ancient wisdom has found resurrection like phoenix from its ashes. The eastern mystics would be dancing in their graves. So if our ancient philosophers and sages could know these higher truths simply through the means of introspection and meditation isn’t science, with its precepts of empirical evidence for validation of any of its claims, too far behind religion which transcends these humanistic precepts and leaps straight to the higher truth?
Well, before answering that let me point out that ‘ancient wisdom’ does not translate to religious axioms. Every age has its own means to achieve its ends, including the quest to unravel the higher truths, to unravel the deeper subtext underlying objective reality. As the ages come and go so does the means and their accompanying merits and limitations. Our ancient sages knew the power of meditation because that was the only means available at their disposal. The new age savants have sophisticated mathematics and swanky gadgets which can unravel much deeper structure of reality, but as an amusing limitation leaves out the holistic picture to be deduced rather than being directly sensed.
There is no reason why ancient wisdom should be disparaged or neglected. That is against the spirit of science. But even more menacing is the diminishing of modern man on the altars of ancient glories. But, sadly, such is the practice of religion. The practice of self decrepitation! Nevertheless, philosophies evolve and sometimes revisit their histories, but religion does not. Religious dogmas have remained immutable.
Coming back to the holographic principle, most of the implications drawn by theologians stem from ignorance of it. Physicists make it clear that the holographic principle is an analogy and warns us against taking it too literally. It is our guide to the deeper and bigger reality. Religious arguments claim that if all of the information required to actualize a universe comes from its boundary and this boundary is unapproachable to our experiments and instruments, then there has to be a god monkeying with this boundary, the one who writes all the information on this boundary. The consciousness permeating the whole universe and connection with it lets us communicate with god without god having to be within the universe. Raphael Bousso, one of the key developers of the holographic idea helps us in being clear minded; he states “The world doesn’t appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one”. The second thing is that religion employs neither unprejudiced introspection nor empirical evidence to achieve its ends. It, rather, uses the fantastic metaphors of religious books as a literal means to get to the higher truths. And it jumps and grabs, whenever it finds similar metaphors of science which are simply out of scope of articulation within everyday language.
Sure, it is an enticing prospect to further the concept of a higher power. But this higher power, I am sorry to say, is not the God of religion. It’s not a personal God. It’s not the god that who suspends the laws of nature on behalf of, and for, a single petitioner as an answer to an individual’s prayer. It’s not sentient, loving god. In fact many modern theologians cringe at the idea of a sentient god.
Popular physicist and author Paul Davies in one of his public lectures said:
“So strongly did some theologians object to the idea of God as part-time tinkerer that they invented the derisory term ‘God-of-the-gaps’ to describe it. The main objection to a God-of-the-gaps is not so much the happy-go-lucky – indeed, less than competent – nature of this style of designer, it was the ever-present risk that scientific advances would systematically close the gaps, squeezing God into smaller and smaller interstices, perhaps to be displaced altogether in due course. A God who lurks in the dark corners of human ignorance is a God who must make a slow and inexorable retreat as science progresses.”
By ‘god of the gaps’, he means god as an answer to every gap in human understanding of reality. In fact, questions about these gaps were not raised by religion in the first place, they were raised by science. Where do the laws of physics come from? Why do they have the form that they do? Why are they bio-friendly? Because these weren’t really questions to religion as all of them had an innate, implicit answer: GOD.
Science has mooted these questions, tried to transcend the human senses and make sense of their ineffable answers in mundane terms. One of these is the Holographic Principle. And it has shaken many of the underlying foundations of science. It has shown a new fundamental way to look at things. Progression means the best use of available tools. So science can acquire new means to discover reality, shun some and reacquire some others every now and then. If science has found the gaps, only it can fill it. For example, string theories say it is possible that the universe and its laws co-emerged, with the laws sharpening over time to converge on what we observe today. If this gets proven, one gap closed!
The holographic principle sends the ultimate message of the cosmic communion. So Mr. D’Souza, I might be a mere grab bag of atomic particles, every one of it is alive with consciousness. You might be one special creation of a loving god but I am a creation of a hundred trillion little gods each one of whom I love immensely. How can a universe be meaningless where every atom is alive with experience? If god gives our life a purpose, why do a majority of people kill and die in sheer vain? In a universe which gives me the freedom to create my own reality, how can my life possibly be purposeless? I could make it so much better than what someone else could bestow on me because I can change it if I don’t like it. I choose my own reality, my own purpose in life. My consciousness is my supreme God, though technically I should refrain from using the word ‘my‘.
Here is a message of universal oneness. The all permeating universal consciousness. The real purpose is to become one with it. The purpose for being good, being moral. Goodness for goodness’ sake, duty for duty’s sake. Not for god’s sake. Why do I take so much botheration to write so much? To give information. Information builds the world. Let us have the right bits to build the right world.
