Truth and reality are determined on two sides. One, as in religion, proceeds from the top down, beginning with the sensuously known whole. The other, characteristic of science, proceeds from the bottom up, from the unknown but logically deduced small. Holography partakes of both. It falls on the religious side because it presents as a sensuous vision, while scientists accept it because it is substantial. It is there, and along with its conditions it can be reproduced at will, a routine requirement in science. However the hologram sits there uneasily because the relation is not well understood. To see this we need to look briefly at the history of mass.
Until the close of the 19th century mass stood as the criterion of constancy in physics. In its initial expression the commanding phrase ran, “matter can neither be created nor destroyed.” That was it, the rock on which physics stood.
Later, with the advance of precise measurement and experimental methods it was observed that the same rule applies to energy, and so, on purely empirical grounds this was added as a corollary. Later again the two rules were joined in harness: “neither the mass nor energy in a closed system can be created or destroyed.” It was not long however before this was overtaken by the theory of relativity, and the speed of light moved into place as the standard.
The foundation of physics has moved progressively over the years and is due to move again, because the observer, introduced by Einstein to anchor one coordinate system relative to another serves only as a cipher to establish a point of view, when in fact observation is critical to the whole. A new age is dawning whose horizon demands that we understand consciousness itself, not only intuitively but in terms of its essential moments wherein we sense the presence and activity of forms in terms of mass and motion. Physical science can no longer bow out by dismissing mind as irrelevant. The task is to determine how the mind works.
The two sides, from the ‘top down’ and the ‘bottom up’ emerge in this endeavor, where they must be seen, no longer as incompatible, mutually exclusive and antagonistic, but as complementary sides in a unity. Between them they will meet the challenge, and the hologram is right at their junction.
The origin of all things “from the top down” has been taught from generation to generation in all civilizations. It is the authority of the elders. The opposite direction, that of building from the bottom up is the way of science. It was taught in ancient Greece, but gained wide acceptance only in the 20th century in Darwin's theory of evolution. As sides in a single understanding they hold the truth between them.
The reference to creation is well enough known. That to evolution is to Empedocles, circa 500 B.C., who proposed that four elements exist, air fire earth and water. Governed by the opposing forces of love and hate, or attraction and repulsion, they remain unchanged, but mixing in different ratios they bring all known diversity of living forms into existence. He pictured this synthesis of diverse from simple components as, “heads without bodies, trunks without limbs falling down awful heights of air.”
More than 2000 years later, Darwin, working from observational data gathered in biological research developed his theory of natural selection. As this gained recognition the world's historical timeframe broadened out from the previously accepted six thousand years, to the millions and billions required for evolution. Physics moved in to consolidate the ground won and ushered in the nuclear age. The speed of technical advance however overran its philosophical foundation, and in particular the Grecian definition of the atom was slighted. This breach now has to be repaired.
From atomos, ‘A + temnein’, ‘not + to cut’, the Greeks defined the atom as an element so small that it “cannot be divided and remain what it was.” The meaning corresponds to the idea that a pound of butter cut in half is still butter. No change of kind occurs, but an atom cut in half is no longer the kind of thing it was.
“Smallest thing” and “cannot be divided without change of kind” are the two criteria of our understanding of atomic reality. Neither moment can be dismissed. A further example which reminds us that the Greeks originally thought of unity and division in terms of living things, will make this clear. The genus Bos, exemplified in a herd of cows, is a ‘thing’ (genus), whose unit is a cow, but a cow divided is no longer such a unit. Its division brings about its death, and in death it ceases to be what it was, a member of the herd.
The atom then, seems not to be like the hologram, which can be divided and still be what it was. Alongside the hologram, physics takes the complementary side of building from the atom up. It then occurs that atomic division equates to mass/ energy conversion, and this obeys the Grecian formulation.
Looking at the detail, if the photographic plate that casts a hologram is cut into parts, each fragment still casts a replica of the whole. The brain is the same, for although an electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, as during an operation, cannot itself be felt, it produces a unique response such as a movement, or a visual auditory or other experience. However, the loss of cortical tissue due to an injury, even if massive, does not efface the specificity of the response. Like the hologram it only reduces its strength.
On the other side, an atom, as in radioactive decay is said to have a lifetime, but we do not, for that reason say that it is alive. This brings the definition of life into focus. Life's criterion is mind, and here physics retreats, refusing by self-imposed decree to discuss mind at all, because for it, science begins with the objectivity that rules mind out of the picture. For it, mind is mere opinion, or worse, belief and dictation. The Greeks, in defining the atom implied in reverse the integrity of form that we associate with living things, an integrity that we also find represented in the hologram.
Instead of affirming the validity of the Grecian expectation (a change of kind) upon ‘splitting the atom’, physicists dubbed the newly emerging entities particles, much as we might drop a cup and find its particles scattered all over the floor. The intact cup and its fragments are of the same order. They differ only in size and shape. This is not true of the results that attend particle physics operations.
The atom, by definition, cannot be split without suffering a change in kind. We now know that the split involves the transition of some mass into energy. A more comprehensive understanding of the factors involved is required. In particular, if ‘splitting the atom’ must theoretically open out as a new domain, what exactly is the nature of this domain? To postulate the answer, rather than lead up to it gradually, it is mind itself.
It is not however mind as we experience it, mind subjective in the form of consciousness that merely has to be aware to know, but mind objective, mind as the working mechanism or physiology of the brain; and again, not mind subject to logical analysis and explanation, but to mathematical elucidation. The relation is not that of bricks and mortar to a building, but to the design inherent in the mind of its architect. When the latter takes the form of a great city, an advanced culture or the science of a rocket landing on the moon, this product reflects exactly the mind that envisions physical structure in the first place.
Mind is an epiphenomenon without tangible existence. Treated as the function of the brain it is suddenly determinate, an object of study like anything else. As such, as mind objective, it fulfils the Grecian expectation of a kind different from the mass of the physical world. This locates the proper subject of physical science, which is currently unfolding as particle physics, wanting but the realization that this science, quantum mechanics, describes the natural working mechanism embodied in the thinking brain.
The question now arises, can mind be objective to itself? Aristotle asserted that it can be, and declared that ‘to think about thinking’ (for thought to take itself as its own object), is the first and highest expression of our human nature. It is first because it is the insight that makes us human. Animals do not do this, and it is the event that created us Homo sapiens, the wise or sapient creature. It is highest because it is the most sublime activity, and thinking about thinking, or philosophy is the highest form of such thinking in the fact that it takes itself, the highest activity as its object.
Aristotle's philosophy, as the summation of Grecian thought, was meticulously examined in the early 20th century. Details were corrected, but his main contribution survived the criticism and remained securely in place. Our theory of mind, as the unification of the division between knower and known, as sides that fall apart into subjectivity and objectivity to reunite in the mechanism of thinking, fits into the Aristotelian plan. This unity in division as the substance of knower and known creates our understanding, and so sense of mind. We can now examine this more closely.
The world from the atom up, namely the world of tables and chairs, is ‘formed objectivity’ within the bounds of human understanding. That from the atom down, the domain of so-called subatomic particles, is this understanding itself, viewed in itself, as the mechanism or process of the brain in its thinking activity. It is mind objective.
This turnaround is a pivot that calls for attention. Our understanding, which resides in our mind is said to be subjective. We reserve subjectivity, the polarity of the knower in the knower/ known relation, for the conscious act of the thinking subject. When treated as objective to itself (as in the Aristotelian formulation), it brings the mechanism of our understanding into focus, where it presents in medical science as the genesis and activity of the thinking brain. Conventional physics retreats from recognizing this objective side of mind, but it is time to cross that threshold.
Particle physics, from its origin, has dealt with the idea of mass, seeking to determine its behavior and laws. These fall uniformly into the logic of equations, which constitute the tracks upon which the physical train runs. Stripped of its equations it would, as a subject, disappear. The equations, however, belong to our trained understanding. Their substance is our understanding, and therefore the mind, which in equation form is that understanding particularized and objectified. They represent therefore a handle by which to grasp the overall subject, which is mind.
Modern atomic theory arose from its ancient Grecian forerunner. The latter itself developed even more anciently in painstaking analysis going back into prehistory. It had asked, what is the smallest thing, meaning by ‘thing’ kind, as in animal bird tree rock chair table… Kind is the recognition of form, made possible by the evolution of the brain and further encoded in language and number. The form then emerges in a pure state in the hologram divorced from its material substratum.
David Bohm, in the early to mid 20th century seized upon the hologram as a prime manifestation in developing his theory of an explicate and implicate order. Expanding on this we can now say that the implicate order is rooted in the physiology of our genetic being. The explicate order, contrariwise, springs from, or has its roots in the brain, and is projected in our vision and knowledge of a determinate world. This projection, the fact that we read our understanding into a world outside us, creates or is the explicate order.
In their first reflection these orders correspond to space (world related), and time (mind related), so to the world and our appreciation of it. In this way Bohm introduced the idea of mind into science. He criticized the interpretation of experiments that purported to show action at a distance, claiming that in a holographic universe no distance is involved. This can be true only of mind. He did not however carry this analysis to its end point, that the object of science, as represented in particle physics is objective mind, which layers onto the anatomy and physiology of the brain. He did however plant the flag of holography in science, reasserting the importance of form and the whole in determining its conclusions.
Slighting the theory of the atom, physics has painted itself into a corner, unable to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity. Disengaging itself from its own foundation it swept atomic theory under the mat, giving its full attention to the new domain, quantum mechanics, opening up. With, however, a threshold error. From Ruthford on, and in particular his 1909 to 1911 period wherein he discovered the atomic nucleus and promulgated his ‘solar system atom’, it accepted his notion of lesser particles of a physical nature. This was in breach of the Grecian philosophy as distilled in the atomic theory of matter.
It did not occur to him that he had turned a new page in discovery, a page with a title of its own, that the subject being explored was the dynamic interpretive influence that comprises, and is embodied in the human mind. Like Narcissus he misread the image in the pool. He did not see that the behavior being reflected back was that of the intricate patterns that define and articulate the mechanism at work in the human mind, when this is taken, not subjectively as meaning, but objectively as ‘in brain’ existing.
Put this in place and the nature of ‘particle’ physics appears in a new light, one that makes much more sense. Insulating itself from mind and cutting its ties to its own atomic foundation physics finds itself in a cul-de-sac without the least idea of how its findings can be fitted into the wider picture of everyday thought and life. Granted there it no better way to make bombs and generate power, but the prime mover in this is precisely human thinking, and this it what nuclear physics is about.
Aware that the atomically small and astronomically great should lock together, physicists are uncomfortable in the intuition that physics cannot itself scout the problem. It is hamstrung in this by its own self-definition that it begins where mind leaves off, and its resolution, rooted in an unhappy past to have nothing to do with mind, which it equates with opinion belief and dictation. It shuts its eyes therefore to the objectivity of mind, does not see it as the nature of extant reality. What then are these plus and minus bones, these particles forever interacting? What purpose, whose order do they obey?
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” These words, formulated by the ancient Egyptians and taught to Moses, essentially describe a holographic existence, affirming mind as the thrower of all reality. It is not that God waved a wand and brought the universe into being. God, the personification of universal life, and the universe are polar aspects in one relationship. Matter is a condition of mind, and mind reciprocally of matter. Each is a side of the other.
As the center of intelligence the brain is a holographic machine. It produces a hologram which is equally mass, a whole composed of sides. The first step in repairing the damage wrought by ignoring the Grecian definition of the atom is to see that, when split, its fragments belong not to the material world, but in change of state, to a different order, namely that of objectified mind, the true object of so-called particle physics.
Given this appreciation we can reestablish the subject and begin joining the sides, from the bottom up and top down, whittling away at the gap between quantum mechanics and relativity. The task—once quantum mechanics is seen as the study of the functional process at work in the operation of the brain—may seem more difficult than ever, but with its main parameters clarified, we should be able to proceed more certainly to an anticipated result.
To sum up, to create a hologram we split a beam of coherent light, sending one ray to a photographic plate, the other to the same, but reflected from an object. The hologram replicates the form of the object in light devoid of matter. Our vision does this and more. It takes incoherent light from an incandescent source, reflected from objects close and far away, and analyses it into a comprehensible vision of a dynamic reality.
The brain is the master holographic machine. It is the projector, not itself the produce of an external machine, which takes not coherent but natural light from an incandescent source, reflected from objects and analyzes it into our intelligible vision of a full color and motion reality.
Instead of a divided beam of light we have the right and left hemispheres of a material brain, joined by a broad band of right/ left connecting fibers, the corpus callosum. Instead of a massless image we have the world as known, determined before us in our sense and understanding.
As a species we have taken tens of thousands of years to arrive at this level of understanding, still forbiddingly distant from resolution, but if we can render the path a little more clearly definable we may hopefully advance a step or two to the goal, the full understanding of the world and our role within it, with greater expectation of a successful outcome.
Stephen W. Taylor MbChB © 2004 November 10, updated Nov. 24.