Mythical Creatures and Other Fully Explainable 'Unexplainable Phenomena' - by Queue
Nicker on 15/9/2013 at 04:54
Quote Posted by SD
Chupacabra, meh, when they start building shrines to it and singing songs and writing epic texts about it,
then I'll think they're crazy.
Be careful what you (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzSN7he2BUE) wish for.
Renzatic on 15/9/2013 at 06:46
Quote Posted by demagogue
...either way it's going to be mindblowing stuff. Have you ever thought about what the holographic principle really means about the nature of reality?
Interesting that you bring this up now, because I came across holographic principal just a couple days back. It's something that sounds so utterly profound and incredbily weird, but I just can't picture exactly how such a system would work in my head.
We imagine space in three dimensions. All our tactile experiences lead us to believe as much. That objects can be positioned relatively above and below, left and right, in front of or behind each other. It's a seemingly logical conclusion that you can't encode a universe with 3 spatial dimensions on a 2 dimensional object without losing information. It'd be like trying to represent a 4 dimensional object in 3D space in such a way that we can see in its entirety. Unfortunately, this is impossible to do. We can only see 4D objects by the 2D-3D shadows they cast. There isn't enough "space" in 3 dimensions to truly represent it. So based on this, it's easy to extrapolate that you can't represent a true 3D world on a 2D space.
A 1 dimensional line can't represent a square unless you extrude its space to two dimensions. A flat square can't represent a cube unless you extrude its space to three dimensions. A cube volume can't represent a tesseract unless you extrude space to four dimensions. It's a logical, seemingly unarguable line of reasoning. You can't fit a safe onto a 1 sided sheet of paper. You could say that it could break the safe down into flat sheets then crush it down into 2D space, but even those seemingly flat sheets have a front and a back that can't be represented in 2D. You'd lose something. Even a hologram is a trick. It can provide you the illusion of parallax on a 2D surface, but it's still lacking the full amount of information that would be contained by the same objects in 3D space.
Apparently, despite all common sense telling us otherwise, this line of thinking is completely false. You can, according to our current model that will eventually become the theory of everything (or at least it will until we eventually find out there's more than everything), encode as many dimensions as you want onto a 2D space without losing any information. In fact, that's what the universe is. What we see around us is fully 3 spatial dimensions (possibly 4) with one time dimension. That much is correct. What's wrong is that we think what we're seeing isn't the true universe when it isn't. It's but a 3D projection into 3 dimensional space cast from a 2 dimensional surface. Like the universe is drawn on the surface of a balloon surrounded by an infinitely (?) bright light of indeterminate origin, and the "shadows" being cast inwards makes up the 3 dimensional universe we see. The even weirder thing is is that we apparently also exist on this 2 dimensional plane, same as everything, but experience the universe from the 3 dimensional projection.
...and if I'm following the theory correctly, that's just all kinds of fucked up.
SubJeff on 15/9/2013 at 07:43
It's bonkers but not against common sense, is it? You can describe a 3D shape in 2 dimensions pretty easily.
The bonkers bit is the projection, not the encoding.
Renzatic on 15/9/2013 at 08:08
It's the one part I find most difficult to imagine. I'll explain why in probably way too simplified examples.
Say you have a white ball. On this white ball, you draw a letter, we'll say A. Now you take ball, face the side of the ball away from you, then take a picture of it. You now have a 2D representation of the ball. Thing is, the photo doesn't have the information of the other side contained within it. As far as the picture goes, that A doesn't exist.
Now you could say from the perspective this projected universe model that all the information that makes up the physical construction of this ball exist on opposite sides of the balloon the universe is encoded onto. When the light outside the balloon is shone inwards, it casts the complete shadow of the ball into its proper position in 3D space. The problem with this idea is that the actual universe would be a mirror image of what we're experiencing, and really...the whole idea that the constituent parts that make up everything are placed on opposing ends seems kinda redundant and not at all natural.
So what other answer do we have? That the 2D actuality is unwrapped on a surface so all sides of a 3D object are represented on it? That makes even less sense. For one, the end result we see wouldn't be due to projection of light so much as something that reads the data on the 2D surface and reorganizes the shadow properly into 3D space.
It's all weird, and none of it is easy to imagine.
edit: ....though I'm probably being way too literal about all this.
SubJeff on 15/9/2013 at 09:42
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Say you have a white ball. On this white ball, you draw a letter, we'll say A. Now you take ball, face the side of the ball away from you, then take a picture of it. You now have a 2D representation of the ball. Thing is, the photo doesn't have the information of the other side contained within it. As far as the picture goes, that A doesn't exist.
I'd argue that this is 2D representation of
only one aspect of the 3D-ness of the ball. It is not a full 2D encoding of the entire 3D entity. A 2D encoding of it would be text describing it in such a way that when the text is put through a brain decoder that decoder interprets the 2D information as 3D. Hence, reality! :p
faetal on 15/9/2013 at 10:36
Holographic principle is actually a more simple way of looking at the universe and isn't at all at odds with accepted dogma, all it does is reduce the universe to being represented as information and that the links between various data points in an endless sea of data contains patterns with emergent properties. Dimensionality, matter, life, everything are just more and more complex results of the relationship between the data.
Renzatic on 15/9/2013 at 10:41
The problem with that is that encoding and decoding sounds far more complex than what's actually (supposedly...theoretically...I dunno) going on. It sounds simply as an light, matter, and spacetime interacting in heretofore unknown ways, producing strange results.
Though I've been reading up a bit on it, and I think we're approaching this from FAR too much of a laymans perspective. (
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/holo/) This is a nice little article kinda points to the fact that we're applying far too narrow and literal a viewpoint to the weirdness of the universe.
We need Demagogue up in here to explain why we're all dumb and wrong.
faetal on 15/9/2013 at 15:02
There is no need to encode and decode. I think of it like a protein in that the amino acid sequence determines to a great extent how a protein folds, based on charged groups and hydrophobicity, which is where most of the function derives from. The notion of a pure information universe is that each piece of information is determined by its relationship to others and the summation of these relationships is the chaos from which reality emerges. It could be that there are infinite cogent ways for this information to hang together, but that the emergent pattern which is human consciousness relates to the information in a specific way, which emerges as our universe. It's entirely possible that infinite other intelligent informational algorithms exists in universes alongside our own, simply because the way the information connects for them follows different rules.
demagogue on 15/9/2013 at 21:24
The way Susskind's lecture was explaining it (disclaimer: I'm no expert, so this is my poor memory & understanding)... IIRC he wasn't exactly saying all 3D was really 2D in essence. It sounded to me more like he was saying, for any system, you could have a 3D description and a 2D surface description, and they're both very different descriptions of course, but nothing you could do could distinguish which is the right one; there's no fact to the matter, or they're both right at the same time.
It was easier to see with the example he gave. There's two descriptions of activity around the horizon of a very large black hole. In the 3D local description, a spaceship passes the horizon & doesn't even notice. Nothing changes. In the 2D surface description from people far away, the horizon is millions of degrees and incinerates & atomizes the ship into a pooling smudge smooshed out across the horizon. And then there's some fancy math which says all the info smooshed out across the horizon could be reconstructed into the 3D ship passing inside; like the deeper it goes in, the more smooshed out it gets.
Now the wild part was that there isn't any way for an outside observer to tell the difference; I mean, see that the two descriptions are inconsistent & existing at the same time. The guy in the spaceship by definition can't send a signal out that he's fine. And (the really crazy part I thought) if the observer tried to do an experiment, like bounce some light or rays just as the ship nears the horizon to see that it's in tact, the rays would have to have so much energy to get back that the experiment itself would incinerate the ship in exactly the way the math says he should look.
So the punchline was supposed to be something like, there are these two realities side by side, the ship passing the horizon without even noticing anything different to a local observer, and the ship smushed out across the horizon at a million degrees to a distant observer, and they're both true at the same time, both true descriptions of the same thing, but from different perspectives. Then the next punchline was that you can apparently do the same thing for any arbitrarily enclosed space anywhere. So then the big punchline is supposed to be something like, at the end of the day, reality is data, that can even be packaged in different ways as long as they all translate into each other, that interacts with other data out there to make what we see. We're not really talking about little balls bouncing around "out there" anymore as the best way to describe reality.
Renzatic on 15/9/2013 at 22:48
So ultimately it's less "we're 2D projections into 3D space" as it is an extension on the concept of the observer in quantum physics appled to a macro level.
In other words, the universe looks and acts differently depending on where you're standing in it. What constitutes the entirety of the stable universe from one perspective is simply a thin, chaotic, two dimensional boundary at the periphery of something larger from another.
So in the situation where you cross the event horizon from a black hole, your information is being lost to everything outside of it, and looks to be obliterated in the process, but from your perspective, the conversion from one locality to another is nothing more than taking a one way trip into another section of space.
So I guess Nujeff was more correct than I was in that post above. It's not so much that there's a universal decoder though, so much as it is our brains actively decoding the information as we're given it from elsewhere, and the end result of what we get depends on where we're standing while we're looking at it.
