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Two Source Holographic Time
Our recent discussions on the nature of time have got my head spinning. Last night, talking to friends, I put together another possible model for “how time works” that we might play with and pick apart. I realize this sort of conjecture is probably rather grandiose in its scope, but so be it. I’ve seen enough weird things in relation to time lately that it seems important enough to explore further.
So let’s start here. Holograms. Lots of you have probably read Michael Talbot’s book about the holographic universe. If you haven’t, or you need a refresher on how holograms are created, check out this quick summary:
A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
Which has lead me to the creation of the following diagram, applying that principle to time itself. In this diagram, I have substituted the “two lasers” described above for two points along a timeline: the past and future. But instead of making it a single unbroken linear timeline, I have made a bit of an intuitive jump, and placed each of these events at the origin of their own x-y axis. The idea here being that perhaps there are certain events which could be thought of almost as entities unto themselves. These are things that exist for whatever reason out there in the space-time continuum. And they have a certain amount of power or almost energetic pull or attraction on us as we seem to transit through time.
Ordinarily, we think of the present, the past and the future all being on the same line in time. But what if they are not? What if each event that exists is a thing unto itself, and the moments which we call “now” are more like the “interference patterns” where two lasers meet, captured on film in the creation of a hologram? If that’s the case, then the way that I would imagine our brain/mind might work is by firing the third laser onto the “film” which then renders a three dimensional image duplicating the original. It may be a convoluted metaphor, but it may also help us explain such peculiar phenomena as our seeming ability to actively select for certain slices of reality based on what filters our minds are running (more here).
Other ideas this calls to mind. In science, there is something called sources and sinks. The easiest examples of this would be probably heat. Your fireplace is burning wood, and becomes a heat source. Someone opens the door and the heat rushes out the door. It is a heat sink. The basic idea is that it flows from where there is more to where there is less until the entire space is covered evenly (which is what entropy is, I think, the tendency of sources and sinks to even themselves out). And perhaps this is how time works as well. In science, they don’t talk about “cold” being it’s own thing. Cold is just absence of heat, just like dark is absence of light.
And so the absence of time would be what? Not-time? Eternity? Maybe it is the other way around. Maybe “eternity” acts as the source in this case and “time” doesn’t exist in the same way that cold doesn’t exist. Time is just the absence of eternity, the distance of the source from the sink. In my diagram above, which one would be the source and which would be the sink? Is the Big Bang (or the Creation) the source of eternity, and time runs outward and downward from there? (Check out these cool diagrams of sources and sinks in two dimensions and see if these correlate somehow)
And thinking about sources and sinks lead me also into thinking about electricity and electrical circuits, the flow and attraction between positive and negatively charged points. If we look at this diagram of the battery and light bulb (lifted from here), which one of these might be the “past” and which would be the “future” in our diagram? Would the battery be the past - as I was conjecturing that the Big Bang might be the “source” of time above? Would that then make the light bulb the future - drawing us to it like moths to the flame, even though it is merely the outward transformation of the current flowing out of the source, the battery?
Very interesting stuff which I have only a dim awareness of at the moment. But perhaps it is a step towards understanding something greater. After thinking this idea through, I realized I had been once again been beaten to the punch by Philip K. Dick. Check out his “two source cosmogony” in the Tractates to Valis (number 47). This subject also makes me want to re-read his novel Ubik, which deals extensively with metaphors of regression through time.
- Holographic Repatterning
- Information As Currency Relies On Source Valuation
- Holographic Software Agents
- Ghosts and Overlapping Time
- You’re nothing but an AOL hologram
- Prev: Explaining the “23″ Phenomenon
- Next: A Broken Spirit
November 16th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Another idea that JK put forward last night when we were talking about this: that time is being fired at us almost as though out of a hose. As a result, we think we are swimming through a stream linearly, but in actuality perhaps we are standing still and it is time that is flowing around us (more like we are rocks in the stream)
Dick seems to talk about this in lines 30 - 37 in the Tractates
http://deoxy.org/pkd_tcs.htm
November 16th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
[…] The problem with creating conceptual models of time (Holographic Time) is that we end up understanding our conceptual diagram and mis-understand time. […]
November 16th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
More importantly what is consciousness that is observing the words and the conceptual ideas of the mind? Without an understanding of consciousness that is perceiving time and events how will we know if our understanding is distorted or not? Who is the conscious observer of this conceptual entity called time.
November 17th, 2006 at 9:32 am
i just accept that i`m the god of my understanding and get on with watching and being involved in the creation of the show.
i like the idea of being part of a fragmented consciousness scattered across the face of the planet experiencing billions of different points of view as the world spins in space.
we are the space men, the time travelers, the magicians……….it`s just that every time we turn our heads we forget.
it`s as if we are on giant forgeting machine.
maybe that`s the deeper meaning of the movie groundhog day, where bill murray eventually notices he`s repeating the same day over and over again.
November 17th, 2006 at 9:43 am
We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. “The Empire never ended.”
The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.
We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.
these above are from pkd`s tractates. i think we get glimpses of how to read and interact with the creative and coincedances are a clue to pay more attention……….see more clearly, day by day. (part of the lord`s prayer we used to say every day as children in england.)
November 17th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Einstein teaches that time is kinda like space…
The ‘arrow of time’ is a perennial scientific conundrum: why does heat flow from hot to cold? The classical laws which we understand concerning the motion of atoms are ‘reversible’, meaning a universe run in reverse looks OK; the laws which we understand concerning heat are ‘irreversible’, meaning that a universe run in reverse looks really silly (smashed glasses reassembling themselves etc.) And we are taught at school that heat is just the motion of atoms, right? If you dig down to quantum mechanics you come across the idea that observation can change things irreversibly. From there you’ll find Bell and Aspect, whose basic conclusions are that we don’t really understand what ‘observation’ is in the first place.
The holographic idea made sense to me the first time I heard it, ‘cos I’d already come across a crazy thing in electromagnetics by these guys Stratton and Chu, working from the ideas of that old fossil Huygens. If you draw a bubble round a region of space, and you know what the electromagnetic fields are on the bubble, then it turns out that you know all the fields inside the bubble too… Gnarly.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Interesting description.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:22 am
and if god is eternal or eternity, then we can only be joined (we go to god, god on earth, however that event might play out) by no longer experiencing time, or we would know we were with god because time is no longer a factor.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Oh, and check out ‘Collective Electrodynamics’ by Carver Mead (one of the fathers of the integrated circuit). Dig this: the theory is that light cannot be emitted by an emitter unless that light will at some point in the future be absorbed by an absorber somewhere.
This is all getting close to alchemy… are we talking about objective phenomena, or about how people see the world? Or both? Lots of weirdness on this road.
November 17th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Convoluted? Give yourself some credit, it’s actually one of the best metaphors I’ve seen.
You might want to take a look at Peter Carroll’s 6d (3d space + 3d time) model, if you haven’t already, and Ebony Anpu’s Tesseract Working.
It sure seems like there’s some reality hopping going on, very likely a big one recently and a bunch throughout history; especially if you look at the number of times during the cold war in which we were right up at the brink of complete world annihilation; yet, here we are, still going! If there have been so many close calls through history that we are aware of, imagine how many more must have happened that we never heard about. Maybe, each time, we shed the uninhabitable parallel world like a snake sheds its skin. Do prophecies of doom make it easier to avoid their target reality, harder, or are they just ephemeral trivia?
Constellations of coincidence and paradox radiate out from the fulcrum point and can provide evidence that the universe has pulled another fast one, right in front of our eyes, however the connections and distribution patterns are rarely, if ever, trackable to their source. They follow a tenuously connected thread of seemingly random association, numerical asshattery, irrelevant linguistic jokes, and puns of the worst sort. Countless souls have spent their lives analyzing the tiniest threads of this phenomenon, so vastly complex beyond our comprehension that it appears practically random, and assembled them into the most preposterous metaphysical conspiracy theories. Down that road lies madness. It is much better to just observe. Get a feel for the ebb and flow of these cosmic tides so you know instinctively when to jump or where to push your way into the universe next door.
We did not fall, period. That thought is just a false sense of nostalgia for past ignorance, a hopeless desire to be the eternal infant sucking in bliss on mommy’s tit.
Eating the Fruit of Knowledge was the best thing that ever happened to us, easily worth one thousand lifetimes of suffering, a bargain at twice the price.
November 17th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Thank you, this looks really interesting!
No coincidence, all investigations into Nature (known as science, history, mathematics, etc.) are (I believe, tyro that I am) equivalent to the Hermetic Operation in principle, but are tainted by superfluities which must be purged. Attempting to clean the wound with a dirty scalpel only exacerbates the problem, hence years are wasted on phlogiston, string theory, and false histories, not to mention the dangerous Industrial byproducts. The blade is so rusted and corroded that it turns back upon itself and is deflected from its goal.
Don’t look down, then.
—
Tim, have you considered that the source and sink may be one, only distinguishable by function? The past and future could be thought of as simply two (virtual, conceptual) directions into which one can inquire, the present being the only apparent starting point.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
No, I haven’t considered that! Thanks
Right, like in the cartoons - characters get caught up in the chase, run off the cliff and it’s only when they look down and realize they no longer have the cliff under them that they fall!
November 18th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Frederick Alan Wolf in his Parallel Universe: The Search for Other Worlds describes a universe which is 15 billion years old, sustained by the head-on collision of an infinite number of probability waves from the future and the past which meet in the present moment to create an infinite number of unobserved, possible universes, some more likely than others to become “real.”
Why do we seem to live in one universe, rather than an infinite number of them? Our brains, Wolf speculates, may somehow composite all of this infinite number of possible universes into one lived-in universe at the moment of observation; the past and future meet to create the present we choose at the moment we choose it, and go off their merry ways to become probabilities again when we aren’t looking any more.
In Wolf’s view, there is no set future and no set past; the present moment is the only one that is “real,” and even that a temporary illusion over which consciousness functions as a kind of overlay, creating one world from an infinite number of possible ones.
At this very moment, Wolf speculates, an infinite number of possible past yous may be sending singals to the future you, and an infinite number of future yous may be sending signals to the past; the closer these signals get, and the more the resemble each other, the greater the chance they have of becoming real in the present.
Wolf describes these clashing waves of probability travelling in opposite directions through time as “streams”; when the streams encounter each other in the present, consciousness somehow “marries” them. He speculates about how to “tune in” future possible realities:
“It is quite possible that visionaries are those who… marry streams coming from far time-distant sources… If we were totally able to “marry” corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realize the timeless state… But we fail to do this because we fail to discriminate between the many past and future sending stations attempting to communicate with us… …Well, if there are parallel futures out there, all broadcasting back in time to us, surely there are some people who hear them or see them…”
(Frederick Alan Wolf, Parallel Universe: The Search for Other Worlds, p.224, pub. A.D.1988)
November 18th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
I used the following analogy once in a story to explain the nature of time.Time is a river, the past is a glacier, frozen and unchangable, the present is a waterfall, a constant motion of right now. The future is a wetlands of possibilities, with channels and streams of infinite choices and outcomes.We experiance the river forward but it runs backward, from the wetlands to the glacier, from possibilities to history, and we can only experiance the falls of Right Now.Not perfect, but then, I am no Stepehn Hawking.
November 18th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I was reading around about the history of the Gospels last night and discovered something called the “Two-source hypothesis” about its origin, which I thought was a really interesting coincidence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-source_hypothesis
November 18th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
Rev Max: how does magick fit into what Wolf is decribing? There seems to be mechanisms by which we can alter what reality we end up observing….