Post, Pre & Amillennial- Any Other Choices?

[BeachOfEden]

I was checking out this religious quiz on what type of Millennialism are you? It's by the same person as the religious quizes on What Type of Theology Are You? And so on..but...the problem with this quiz....or more so..the basic problem with the belief choices in the field of Millennial studies is that basically you only have '3' choices:

 

(1) Pre-Millennialism

 

(2) Post-Millennialism

 

and

 

(3) AMillennialism

 

I am NOT AMillennial or Preb..or whatever it is called..the type of liberal view where everything in the Bible is viewed as only in the past....

 

But I am posively NOT either Post or Pre..because both of these invlove a belief in the rapture..and I don;t even belief in a "rapture" at all...

 

My view of Millennialism is more liken to the Hopi or SunBear's...but I don;t know of any theological name given for such millennial beliefs. Anyone else feel like they don;t relate to any of these millenial beliefs either?

[AletheiaRivers]

It is true that most premillenialists (and some postmillenialists) believe in a rapture, but not all do (JW's for example). It's true that many amillenialists are preterists, but not all are, and those that are preterists might not be "full" preterists, but instead "partial" preterists. You could be a premillenialist and NOT believe in a rapture. You could be an amillenialist and believe that some of the prophecies in the Bible are for the future. So don't worry about any of that right now. Instead, focus on the "main" differences.

 

The question boils down to whether you think Christ is physically present on Earth for the 1000 years or not. And to whether you think the 1000 years is a literal 1000 years, or if it's metaphorical.

 

1 - Do you believe Christ is going to return physically at the beginning of the 1000 years, bind Satan and remove him from the picture, reign physically for that 1000 years of perfect peace, and then at the end of the 1000 years, judge the living and the dead?

 

or

 

2 - Do you believe that Christ is NOT going to return physically at the beginning of the 1000 years, but instead his reign during the 1000 years will be heavenly and invisible, that good will overcome evil gradually during that 1000 years, and at the end of the 1000 years Christ will return physically to judge the living and the dead?

 

or

 

3 - Do you believe that the 1000 year reign is metaphorical, that Christ reigns now from Heaven (and has done so since he was resurrected), that good and evil will remain in relatively equal proportions until the second coming, and that in some future unspecified time Christ will come again and judge the living and the dead?

Edited December 23, 2005 by AletheiaRivers

[BeachOfEden]

Well, I believe that part one of Christ's rein began when he was resurrected to the right hand of God..and at this p[oint this became the heavenly part of Christ's rule..or that is, at this point the heavens were renewed..thus The New Heavens began....

 

but that part 2 of his rein...that is..the renewl of the earth has NOT yet began aka The New Earth..and is yet future.

 

I believe that when Christ comes he will rein over the earth for 1,000..of which I believe is a literal 1,000..at the end of this 1,000 years the restoration of all life will be complete and the Devil will be destroyed. I 'think' Christ's rein will be spiritual FROM heaven...but I think it might be true that he would actually come on the earth physically..as the Abraham Faith Church says..but..either way...I am cool with it either way...whether Christ's merely rules invisiblly from heaven or whether he would actually come ON earth physically..either way I am open to.

 

The important part for me is:

 

(1) The physical earth is NOT literally detroyed..rather the planet is spiritually cleansed..and the restoration of ALL life...NOT just human...ON earth..everything becomes eternal ( including wildlife, animals and nature) Acts 3:21......The whole universe becomes eternal...

 

...and...

 

(2)A FAIR & INCLUSIVE resurrection during the 1,000..rein of Christ over earth..and that this to me means...ALL good-hearted people....be they Hindu, Buddhists, non-Christian as well as christian and that this is NOT about only this or that group or denomination being saved..rather that ALL get a fair chance.

[October's Autumn]

What about when we die we die?

[BeachOfEden]

What about when we die we die?

 

This would be no resurrection.

[October's Autumn]

What about when we die we die?

 

This would be no resurrection.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Exactly. To quote the Rabbi: We only know what we have now.

[BeachOfEden]

This is my Progressive belief....

 

Some say that when you die..you

 

(A) Go to heaven

 

( Are resuurected on the new earth

 

© You simply cease to be

 

So, which do "I" think is right?

 

(D) ALL of the above.

 

If God belives you to acceptable for heaven and that's where you want to go...then you'll go there

 

If God deems you are acceptable to live on the new earth and that's where you want to go..then you will

 

If only want to live this life and you do not wish to extend this life..then God will honor your wish.

[FredP]

Obviously, if I had to pigeonhole myself into one of those three boxes, I'd have to be amillennial. But it's still a really artificial fit, since the "millennium" doesn't really figure into my thinking at all. As I've expressed during my many ruminations on time and Eternity -- that Aletheia loves so much! -- I don't believe that redemption occurs in the temporal future, or that Christ will come back to earth to reign for some period of time, whether it be a literal or metaphorical 1,000 years. Eternity is not an infinitely long time: it's the ontological ground of time itself. All universes will pass away -- by which I don't mean that God will destroy them out of anger, but simply that they are temporal in nature, and will run their due course. But because time is grounded in Eternity, Eternal Life comes to us as the character of presence, of NOW-ness, of each and every moment -- not as the protraction of temporal life into a never-ending future. This is what is meant by the often misunderstood claim that "now is all there is": not that there is no past or future, but that all moments -- past, present, and future -- are grounded in the great NOW that transcends and gives meaning to all time.

 

If anything, "the millennium" doesn't mean that Christ will reign for a long time, but that, in Eternity, Christ reigns over time itself.

[flowperson]

As I've said elsewhere here before, I believe that it is all about time and space effects and how we deal with their inherent ability to confuse our minds and feelings which are conditioned from birth to seek out and adhere to order so that we may prosper and survive ( how Vulcan !!)

 

Yes, Fred, I also believe that Christ is the person meant to preside over eternity in our reality, and that He will call the temporal shots on G-d's behalf. People always seek out specific times and places in order to "order" processes that have significance to their realities, hence the proliferation of millenial theories. But as this article in today's New York Times points out, it is not all that easy to determine what reality really is in our realities.

 

Whew!!!

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html

 

flow....

[AletheiaRivers]

Great article Flow. I actually read the entire thing, out loud, to myself and to my husband. I'm a big Brian Greene fan and I highly recommend "Fabric of the Cosmos" and "Elegant Universe." I have both on CD.

 

I, like Fred, would have to, based on the three choices available regarding the "millenium," put myself into the amillenial category, because it's the closest to my views. I think I could, in all good conscience, say that I hold this view because it does view the millenium as metaphorical.

 

However, if I was pushed, I would have to admit that my view towards the millenium is even more metaphorical than many Protestand amillenialists might be comfortable with. I say "many" though, and not "all," because, despite the fact that Eastern Orthodoxy speaks in temporal, anthropomorphic terms, the view towards the future of the cosmos as held by the EO church, is very mystical and atemporal.

 

I think my New Years resolution (besides losing weight ) this year will be to try and not get so hung up on language.

[flowperson]

Sheeshhh !

 

You have to lose weight too ? I'm old enough to know I'm going to fluctuate about 5-10 lbs. over the year's passage. Heavier in the winter and a little lighter in the summer. But then I joke with people that my mom had to buy husky diapers for me when I was little.

 

You know me, I don't like making choices of the millenial sort because that automatically labels one, but probably I'd go your way and consider the thing metaphorical in most ways. However, there is also my belief that God is the author of history and the master manipulator of events in time to make His/Her historical truth unfold according to His/Her will. I believe that this article demonstrates how easy it is to fool all of us mortals regarding His/Her immortal and eternal intent.

 

flow....

[flowperson]

This post is further to the above NY Times article regarding the difficulty in determining time and space realities and our perceptions and beliefs that may grow out of these things. IMO these things are the happenings that are usually considered to be the mystical roots of religious belief.

 

On other threads here it has been mentioned that the possibilty of a holographic paradigm for understanding the interconnectedness of the all is floating around out there. I have also mentioned the book, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot as a resource. I've recently purchased another copy and plan to reread it because I believe the concept to be even more important these days than it was when I first learned of it and read Talbot's book fifteen years ago or so.

 

It will also be recalled that contemporary theorists in cosmological and physics research, such as Harvard's Lisa Randall, are now seriously looking at these ideas because they seem to draw together the disparate threads of the picture into a comprehensible whole that has the attributes of both meshing with ancient cultural beliefs and current observations.

 

I ran across this abbreviated explanation of the overall principle as explained by Michael Talbot on the web the other day and thought I would share it here. It makes a realistic amount of sense to me. See what you think.

 

flow....

 

 

The Amazing

Holographic Universe

 

By Michael Talbot

 12-23-5

 

 

 

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

 

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

 

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

 

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

 

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. 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.

 

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. 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.

 

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

 

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

 

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

 

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

 

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 fish, 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.

 

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

 

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

 

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

 

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

 

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

 

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

 

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

 

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

 

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

 

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

 

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

 

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

 

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. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

 

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

 

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

 

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

 

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

 

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with evey other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

 

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

 

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

 

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

 

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

 

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

 

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

 

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

 

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

 

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

 

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

 

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

 

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

 

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

 

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

 

 

Creation - Holographic Universe - 2

 

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

 

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

 

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

 

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

 

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

 

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

 

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

 

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

 

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

 

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

 

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

 

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.

 

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

 

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

 

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

 

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

 

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

 

[FredP]

I thought that the "two subatomic particles flying apart while communicating" experiment was performed a lot longer ago than this. Isn't this the Michelson-Morley experiment, or am I thinking of something else?

 

Anyway, I am a big fan of Bohm -- who by the way is the real thing, not some frufru pseudoscientist -- and I think the holographic model is going to turn out to be either exactly correct, or at least pretty damned close.

 

It's not, of course, that the universe doesn't exist, or is an illusion -- it's that its separateness is an illusion. The universe is real, and is exactly what it is.

 

Thanks for the posts Flow! This is great stuff.

[flowperson]

The Michaelson-Morley thing was about measuring a precise value for the speed of llght I beleive.

The tinkering with holographic phenomena was not possible until quite recently in scientific terms ( just after WW II ) since the laser was not invented until 1947 by a Hungarian named Gabor if I recollect correctly.

 

And thank you my leige for the acknowlegement of my humble contributiions to the discussions here. Lots of white vans with protruding antennae are cruising by as we write and read !

 

flow....

[DavidD]

There is such a thing as overgeneralization. To go from the entanglement of subatomic particles that were created together and have very good reasons to be entangled to saying that the entire universe is entangled is quite a leap. All my life I have heard facts about quantum mechanics morphed into fantasies that met some pre-existent desire of some dreamer. Some of those dreamers were a lot better physicists than I was, like Richard Feynman, who believed in parallel universes resulting from choice somehow. A lot of words have been invested in such ideas, but they remain no better documented than the contents of any dream.

 

I made computer models of memory in the seventies, trying to reproduce this quality of an output recapitulating a previous state, from an input that is only a piece of that state, part of the "hologram" metaphor. It can be done, if one doesn't get too lost in the how a real hologram works and remembers instead that it is neurons doing this, not photons. Exactly how these neurons do everything they do is still a great mystery. Synaptic plasticity doesn't explain everything yet. Neither does the hologram metaphor.

 

Physics shows in great detail how the physical universe is one, how a few forces and particles explain everything, with some areas where it's hard to be explicit how they do. My consciousness may be entirely due to that, or there may be something else to explain whatever part of a mind turns out to be unexplainable by the physical brain. Call that something else spiritual reality or whatever else. Regardless of that, there is some kind of separateness in my consciousness and apparently everyone else's consciousness. I doubt it is as absolute as those who believe they are totally free in their thoughts or choices at some level. Yet there is a separateness that seems even more important a thing to perceive as unity. God is God, and I am not. I have many examples to illustrate that, even if it is also true that I am part of God in some way.

 

The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was the same regardless of the path the light took, meaning there is no ether required for the EM waves to propagate through, as startling at the time as anything now.

[flowperson]

There is such a thing as overgeneralization. To go from the entanglement of subatomic particles that were created together and have very good reasons to be entangled to saying that the entire universe is entangled is quite a leap. All my life I have heard facts about quantum mechanics morphed into fantasies that met some pre-existent desire of some dreamer. Some of those dreamers were a lot better physicists than I was, like Richard Feynman, who believed in parallel universes resulting from choice somehow. A lot of words have been invested in such ideas, but they remain no better documented than the contents of any dream.

 

I made computer models of memory in the seventies, trying to reproduce this quality of an output recapitulating a previous state, from an input that is only a piece of that state, part of the "hologram" metaphor. It can be done, if one doesn't get too lost in the how a real hologram works and remembers instead that it is neurons doing this, not photons. Exactly how these neurons do everything they do is still a great mystery. Synaptic plasticity doesn't explain everything yet. Neither does the hologram metaphor.

 

Physics shows in great detail how the physical universe is one, how a few forces and particles explain everything, with some areas where it's hard to be explicit how they do. My consciousness may be entirely due to that, or there may be something else to explain whatever part of a mind turns out to be unexplainable by the physical brain. Call that something else spiritual reality or whatever else. Regardless of that, there is some kind of separateness in my consciousness and apparently everyone else's consciousness. I doubt it is as absolute as those who believe they are totally free in their thoughts or choices at some level. Yet there is a separateness that seems even more important a thing to perceive as unity. God is God, and I am not. I have many examples to illustrate that, even if it is also true that I am part of God in some way.

 

The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was the same regardless of the path the light took, meaning there is no ether required for the EM waves to propagate through, as startling at the time as anything now.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Thank you for a most intriguing post. I would be interested to know the context in which your 70's memory initialization and replication work occurred. Industry? Government ? Academia ?

 

Anyway, my suspicion is that the work probably was not limited or stymied by the conceptual or experimental-procedural constraints, but probably due to the limitation of the signal transmission environment of the processors that you may have been utilizing. And here not so much by the speed with which the signals were processed, but by the flow characteristics of the circuitry in which they had to travel.

 

From what you wrote, I believe that you would agree that there may be some theoretical point in time and space where individual perceptions could exist of separateness-aloneness in conjunction with some sort of connectedness-unification to-with a greater wholeness. And further that this theoretical singularity in space-time might arise in brain tissues, at least that's what I've been able to decode from the information in this discussion.

 

IMO musical structures (hence mathematical constructs) will likely play a large part of this theoretical harmonic convergence at that future time-space locus. I ran across this article on today's NY Times website and I believe that it points to a direction that may work in the future to resolve the experience-based conundrum that you found in the 70's.

 

BTW, Richard Feynman is one of my personal heros and if the future described in the article comes to be then there is a likelihood that his dream of choosing locations in parallel universes may have a possibility of occurring under special circumstances, at least individual perceptions of that. You, of course, also remember that Feynman, prescient futurist that he was, had a deep and abiding pessimistic outlook regarding a future that included nanotechnology. But here we all are already in that future, and life seems to go on, no ?

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/technology/29nano.html

 

flow....

[DavidD]

"I believe that you would agree that there may be some theoretical point in time and space where individual perceptions could exist of separateness-aloneness in conjunction with some sort of connectedness-unification to-with a greater wholeness."

 

I retired from academics in 2001. I never accomplished much in research, but fortunately I had other talents.

 

I knew someone in the seventies who said that in the future everything with a switch would have a microprocessor. He's someone who would have foreseen completely computerized houses by now. It is significant both what he got right and what he got wrong. I suppose it's the same way now with nanotechnology.

 

Standard neuroscience says that consciousness must be something trivial, an emergent property of any information processor that builds up a sufficiently detailed map of the outside world that also includes ourselves intimately associated with that world. If it were just that, we would have conscious machines by now, as they expected in the fifties, but we don't. Maybe that's because consciousness requires this incredibly interactive feedback by which everything we do to act on the world or even just to passively be in the world is fed back to us through our senses, maybe even something spiritual as well. We have to think about it long and hard to believe there is any seam in this at all, that the world of our senses might be an illusion that only I as an individual sees exactly the way I do, even though others see something pretty close. Most people manage to have such an insight eventually. Then they either embrace that or reject it.

 

We also have a mind that is biased toward finding hidden causes, something evolutionary psychologists say is a gift from evolution shaping us according to what might be rustling some nearby bush, and a mind that thinks in symbols. So we have a mind that can imagine all kinds of constructs for how we are or aren't connected to things beyond us, while at the same time being utter slaves to our biology and the ways in which we are definitely connected to the physical universe through our brain and body.

 

We can imagine all sorts of millenialisms almost as well as we can imagine an apple. Are any of them real?

 

We can wait and see. We can simulate the process in our minds or on paper or sometimes even on a computer as I did with a few simulated neurons for memory, way too little to test for what's required to have a real human memory. Hopefully we can be honest about the limits of our simulation. My mental exploration of millenialisms has me saying I don't believe any of it, but maybe I missed something. I've made enough mistakes to know I don't always know when I have made one. So I have to figure that into the process as well.

 

Human beings come to black-and-white thinking naturally. We can conceive of being connected. We can conceive of being alone. We can't conceive of exactly how our connections and our separateness exist within a worldview that includes everything about me and everything about the world, physical, spiritual, whatever. So people simplify. I think it's oversimplication to emphasize either connectedness or separateness in that. One can find some of each in our experiences without getting very abstract. Neither is illusion. I'm sure it would take me a long time to say why I'm sure that neither is illusion. It would take me a long time to say why I'm sure all millenialisms are illusion, unless God says otherwise. There are a lot of things I'm content to explore only so much.

[flowperson]

Very well put. I agree. There are limits of belief in everything.

 

flow....