The Holographic Universe (8 page)

Consciousness as
a More Subtle Form of Matter

In addition to
explaining why quantum physicists find so many examples of interconnectedness
when they plumb the depths of matter, Bohm's holographic universe explains many
other puzzles. One is the effect consciousness seems to have on the subatomic
world. As we have seen, Bohm rejects the idea that particles don't exist until they
are observed. But he is not in principle against trying to bring consciousness
and physics together. He simply feels that most physicists go about it the
wrong way, by once again trying to fragment reality and saying that one
separate thing, consciousness, interacts with another separate thing, a
subatomic particle.

Because all such things
are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of
consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer
is
the
observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results,
the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory. In fact, Bohm
believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for
any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep
in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of
enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess
some of the traits of living things. As Bohm puts it, “The ability of form to
be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something
that is mindlike already with the electron.”

Similarly, he believes
that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no
meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life,
too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. Even a rock is in
some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in
all of matter, but in “energy,” “space,” “time,” “the fabric of the entire
universe,” and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and
mistakenly view as separate things.

The idea that
consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded
throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every
portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the
universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we
could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could
also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the
whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each
small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire
cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives
new meaning to William Blake's famous poem:

The Energy of a Trillion
Atomic Bombs in
Every Cubic Centimeter of Space

If our universe is only
a pale shadow of a deeper order, what else lies hidden, enfolded in the warp
and weft of our reality? Bohm has a suggestion. According to our current
understanding of physics, every region of space is awash with different kinds
of fields composed of waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least
some energy. When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can
possess, they find that
every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more
energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe!

Some physicists refuse
to take this calculation seriously and believe it must somehow be in error.
Bohm thinks this infinite ocean of energy does exist and tells us at least a
little about the vast and hidden nature of the implicate order. He feels most
physicists ignore the existence of this enormous ocean of energy because, like
fish who are unaware of the water in which they swim, they have been taught to
focus primarily on objects embedded in the ocean, on matter.

Bohm's view that space
is as real and rich with process as the matter that moves through it reaches
full maturity in his ideas about the implicate sea of energy. Matter does not
exist independently from the sea, from so-called empty space. It is a part of
space. To explain what he means, Bohm offers the following analogy: A crystal
cooled to absolute zero will allow a stream of electrons to pass through it
without scattering them. If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the
crystal will lose their transparency, so to speak, and begin to scatter
electrons. From an electron's point of view such flaws would appear as pieces
of “matter” floating in a sea of nothingness, but this is not really the case.
The nothingness and the pieces of matter do not exist independently from one
another. They are both part of the same fabric, the deeper order of the
crystal.

Bohm believes the same
is true at our own level of existence. Space is not empty. It
is full
, a
plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of
everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic
sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small “pattern of
excitation” in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. “This excitation
pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent,
stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of
manifestation,” states Bohm. In other words, despite its apparent materiality
and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the
stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not
even a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing shadow,
a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things.

This infinite sea of
energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order. Because the
implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our
universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has
been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness
that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double
helix, to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies. And even
this is not all it may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to
believe the implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed
of orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development

Experimental
Support for Bohm's Holographic Universe

A number of tantalizing
findings in physics suggest that Bohm may be correct. Even disregarding the
implicate sea of energy, space is filled with light and other electromagnetic
waves that constantly crisscross and interfere with one another. As we have
seen, all particles are also waves. This means that physical objects and
everything else we perceive in reality are composed of interference patterns, a
fact that has undeniable holographic implications.

Another compelling piece
of evidence comes from a recent experimental finding. In the 1970s the
technology became available to actually perform the two-particle experiment
outlined by Bell, and a number of different researchers attempted the task.
Although the findings were promising, none was able to produce conclusive
results. Then in 1982 physicists Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard and Gerard Roger
of the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris succeeded. First they
produced a series of twin photons by heating calcium atoms with lasers. Then
they allowed each photon to travel in opposite directions through 6.5 meters of
pipe and pass through special filters that directed them toward one of two
possible polarization analyzers. It took each filter 10 billionths of a second
to switch between one analyzer or the other, about 30 billionths of a second
less than it took for light to travel the entire 13 meters separating each set
of photons. In this way Aspect and his colleagues were able to rule out any
possibility of the photons communicating through any known physical process.

Aspect and his team
discovered that, as quantum theory predicted, each photon was still able to
correlate its angle of polarization with that of its twin. This meant that
either Einstein's ban against faster-than-light communication was being
violated, or the two photons were nonlocally connected. Because most physicists
are opposed to admitting faster-than-light processes into physics, Aspect's
experiment is generally viewed as virtual proof that the connection between the
two photons is nonlocal. Furthermore, as physicist Paul Davis of the University
of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, observes, since
all
particles are
continually interacting and separating, “the nonlocal aspects of quantum
systems is therefore a general property of nature.”

Aspect's findings do not
prove that Bohm's model of the universe is correct, but they do provide it with
tremendous support. Indeed, as mentioned, Bohm does not believe any theory is
correct in an absolute sense, including his own. All are only approximations of
the truth, finite maps we use to try to chart territory that is both infinite
and indivisible. This does not mean he feels his theory is not testable. He is
confident that at some point in the future techniques will be developed which
will allow his ideas to be tested (when Bohm is criticized on this point he
notes that there are a number of theories in physics, such as “superstring
theory,” which will probably not be testable for several decades).

The Reaction of
the Physics Community

Most physicists are
skeptical of Bohm's ideas. For example, Yale physicist Lee Smolin simply does
not find Bohm's theory “very compelling, Physically.” Nonetheless, there is an
almost universal respect for Bohm's intelligence. The opinion of Boston University
physicist Abner Shimony is representative of this view. “I'm afraid I just
don't understand his theory. It is certainly a metaphor and the question is how
literally to take the metaphor. Still, he has really thought very deeply about
the matter and I think he's done a tremendous service by bringing these
questions to the forefront of physics's research instead of just having them
swept under the rug. He's been a courageous, daring, and imaginative man.”

Such skepticism
notwithstanding, there are also physicists who are sympathetic to Bohm's ideas,
including such big guns as Roger Penrose of Oxford, the creator of the modern
theory of the black hole; Bernard d'Espagnat of the University of Paris, one of
the world's leading authorities on the conceptual foundations of quantum
theory; and Cambridge's Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in
physics. Josephson believes Bohm's implicate order may someday even lead to the
inclusion of God or Mind within the framework of science, an idea Josephson supports.

Pribram and Bohm
Together

Considered together,
Bohm and Pribram's theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world:
Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting
frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper
order of existence that is beyond both space and time: The brain is a hologram
enfolded in a holographic universe.

For Pribram, this
synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least
not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is “out there” is a vast
ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because
our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into the
sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world. How is the
brain (which itself is composed of frequencies of matter) able to take
something as insubstantial as a blur of frequencies and make it seem solid to
the touch? “The kind of mathematical process that Bekesy simulated with his
vibrators is basic to how our brains construct our image of a world out there,”
Pribram states. In other words, the smoothness of a piece of fine china and the
feel of beach sand beneath our feet are really just elaborate versions of the
phantom limb syndrome.

According to Pribram
this does not mean there aren't china cups and grains of beach sand out there.
It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality.
When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if
we could get rid of our lenses, we'd experience it as an interference pattern.
Which one is real and which is illusion? “Both are real to me,” says Pribram,
“or, if you want to say, neither of them are real.”

This state of affairs is
not limited to china cups. We, too, have two very different aspects to our
reality. We can view ourselves as physical bodies moving through space. Or we
can view ourselves as a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the
cosmic hologram. Bohm believes this second point of view might even be the more
correct, for to think of ourselves as a holographic mind/brain
looking
at a holographic universe is again an abstraction, an attempt to separate two
things that ultimately cannot be separated.

Do not be troubled if
this is difficult to grasp. It is relatively easy to understand the idea of
holism in something that is external to us, like an apple in a hologram. What
makes it difficult is that in this case we are not looking at the hologram. We
are part of the hologram.