Monday, December 25, 2006

3rd Hint.... You might be in a Holographic Universe by Louis Evan Palmer

Whenever you have holes in a theory, you naturally suspect that the explanation is not quite all there. When the theory has to do with reality and consciousness then, of course, it's all the more important that it's addressed seriously, yet all the more likely it won't be, unless you can find a technique that allows almost anyone to see through the fault and understand, and be able to use, the new explanation.


Some interesting tidbits in the assault on the contention that matter is the primary reality and everything including mind flows out of that.

Our reality appears to be completely shaped by our organs of perception as we understand them. For example, humans have two eyes and this gives us the ability to see depth due to the overlap of the two fields of vision. No binocular vision, no depth of vision.

Two interesting vision-related phenomena have been under study - one is called is binocular rivalry, the other is called stereopsis.

Binocular rivalry refers to the situation where one image is seen by one eye and another image is seen by the other eye. In any natural situation, you'd be seeing two aspects of the same scene. But, if by chance, or by experiment, you happened to see one image in one eye and another image in the other eye then binocular rivalry comes into play. There are many interesting permuations but to boil it right down - you end up seeing only one image even though two images are presented. Your mind decides which one will dominate and the other image disappears. While this phenomenon has been under study for centuries, most intensely in the 20th century and beyond, what is being looked at are the various scientific aspects - the intensity of the light, the similarity or difference between the images, the timing, etc. etc. The salient point for this discussion is that the mind is deciding what is to be seen. This opens up the question as to what else, or how much, of what we see (or hear or smell or sense or taste) is decided by the "mind". What might we be blocking out? How do we arrive at a consensus as to what is to be perceived if that's what is happening?

The materialists will say that it's some aspect of matter that determines what is to be seen but it does seem to be more like a quantum phenomenon than an ordinary physical one. That is, the observer affects what happens.

Stereopsis refers to a situation where the mind (or the brain) takes two images and merges them to some extent which the mind then sees as a single composite image. Again, what appears to be the "raw" input and what we perceive differs as a result of a decision in our "mind". This seems to fit in with our powerful drive to make sense of the world by seeing patterns and causality and connections. We will create a narrative even out of a potentially Rorschach blot universe.

This drags us into that dreaded conundrum - how do you know what you don't know? How do we know what we don't perceive? How do we know what we perceive but ignore; and why? How much is what we decide versus what is? Is there a "what is"?

3rd Hint.... You might be in a Holographic Universe, Louis Evan Palmer, The Way It Can Be, http://twicb.blogspot.com
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Copyright Louis Evan Palmer 

He lives in Ontario Canada. His short stories have been published in numerous publications. 

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