Realities - A Universe Built On Information

I said Sunday that I would talk a bit about reality for you.

So I will.

The first aspect of reality is it's plural.

Plurality of it hinges on partly on scale and partly on what is participating in one of those realities.

This has some bearing on physics,

Of course.

So about,

I'll be close to 50 years,

Maybe even a little more.

About 50 something years ago,

50 years ago,

A guy named Jerry Zuka wrote a book called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

That was kind of a companion book to Fritz Capra's The Tao of Physics.

So the main presentation of these two books was incorrect,

But the point was,

When Jerry Zuka made a comment that the most psychedelic thing you could possibly do is to enter the 20th century.

Meaning a psychedelic drug is supposed to completely blow your mind.

And if it didn't,

You didn't take the right psychedelic or the right quantities.

Completely blow your mind.

So,

Jerry Zuka,

Which I disagreed with most of what he said,

But he did say that and it was correct.

Entering into the 20th century basically obliterates people's ideas of nonsense.

Because entering into the 20th century is so mind blowing and so interesting and so puzzling and so convoluted in some ways that there is no reason to be presupposing adjacent conventions.

There is no mystical nonsense,

Singing stones,

Seeing stones,

Psychic readers,

People that talk to the dead,

Chinese medicine.

All of this stuff completely falls by the wayside in the light of 20th century physics.

For example,

The head physicist at a Canadian physics institute,

Very famous but I don't know the name of it,

Talking to his students said,

The simplest thing in the universe,

I'm not sure that's linguistically going to work,

But the most simple thing in the whole universe is in fact the totality of the universe itself.

Taken as a total,

And our universe is limited to about 13.

8 billion years,

Not quite that but in distance around us.

That's the visible universe 13.

8 billion years around us.

We can see about,

Well we've got photographs of the universe,

About approximately 300,

000 years after the Big Bang.

Let's see before that,

And the universe itself is much,

Much,

Much,

Much,

Much bigger than the visible universe.

So if you picture like a ship on a sea in a dense fog with a certain diameter of observation possibilities.

Sitting in the middle of a dense fog,

Limited by the visible universe at about 13,

Approximately 13.

8 billion years around.

The universe is approximately 90 billion light years across,

45 billion light years standing anywhere in the universe and running your,

Running your,

You can't really see it,

Running a line around you,

It's going to be a radius,

It's going to be a 45 billion light year radius from anywhere you observe the universe in the universe.

The universe is far,

Far,

Far bigger than we can see.

When we see,

When we look out into the universe and see we're looking into the past,

The further into the universe we look the farther into the past we're looking.

That's why we can't see past about roughly 300,

000 years after the Big Bang because at that time,

There's nothing but heat and energy.

No atoms,

No nothing except heat and energy,

Radiation.

So I said I would talk about the holographic principle.

This,

The holographic principle is a consequence of what was called the Black Hole Wars.

The Black Hole Wars was physicists,

Astrophysicists,

Cosmologists,

Everybody's duking it out over the issue of black holes,

Whether information goes into a black hole and it never,

Never is heard from again.

In other words,

It's inaccessible to us,

It disappears from the universe,

Our universe.

So there's various scientists on either side of that including Stephen Hawkins,

Who was,

Was against the holographic principle to begin with but finally was persuaded and came to realize it was correct.

There is one major standout right now that's Kip Thorne,

Who won the Nobel Prize for measuring gravitational waves about three years ago.

He's not the only guy that measured it but he was the head of the team that measured it on an experiment called LIGO.

So he successfully measured gravitational waves,

For which he won the Nobel Prize,

But he never conceded to the holographic principle.

There was a problem with black holes and information entering the black hole now.

Information is not information like how far is it,

How tall is it,

What color is it.

Because you have no big booty,

No booty,

Whatever.

Information is strictly ones and zeros.

Everything can be encoded in ones and zeros.

Everything.

So you can represent everything by ones and zeros.

So it's kind of like Morse code where you can use any language,

Speak any language and you do dots and dashes and send the signal down a wire.

Somebody at the other end is taking it down,

Who understands Morse code and is translating the dots and dashes that you encoded and decoding them into words.

It's not what the words hold or entail in information theory it's simply the dots and dashes going down the line.

In other words,

There's nothing,

It is not,

Can't be judged qualitatively.

It's not ordinary information as we think of information.

So it's all ones and zeros and when you watch streaming films when you watch,

Listen to CDs and so on,

It's all one and zeros.

That's all that's on there.

Your machinery decodes the ones and zeros into sound or pictures,

And you see them as pictures or hear them as sounds not,

You don't hear ones and zeros.

Okay,

Nothing,

The universe is the simplest of all things,

Because nothing in the universe is happening.

Period.

Zero.

Nada.

That's because I've got a British physicist,

Quantum physicist,

P.

A.

M.

Dirac,

I don't know what year this was,

It was after the war,

1950,

Let's say.

He was working on some equations.

And well,

Most equations don't have a single answer.

So you work the equations and try to work out all the answers that are possible in that equation.

Mathematicians traditionally when they come up with negative numbers in these equations,

They just push them aside and try to work on trying to get positive answers,

Because negative answers mean nothing.

In other words,

I will give you four negative apples if you give me two dollars.

Well,

You're going to give me two dollars and I'm going to hand you nothing,

Because negative apples don't exist.

No such thing as a non-apple.

Negative numbers,

Let's just say non-apples are everything else.

Negative numbers have always been rejected by mathematicians as representing nothing.

Less than nothing,

You might say.

Paul Dirac took a page out of Einstein's book.

Einstein,

Working on the special theory of relativity,

Proposed that you just,

Just for the sake of interest,

Assume that the principle that light cannot travel,

That light has a finite speed in a vacuum and that speed is 300,

000 meters per second.

Just assume that and see what you get.

We got the special theory of relativity out of it.

Many years before special relativity,

That was experimentally verified over and over and over in every possible way you could think of.

And P.

A.

M.

Dirac did this,

Same idea,

With the principle of antiparticles.

Antiparticles represent the negative answers to the sum of this equation.

While any mathematician with any sense would have rejected those negative numbers,

P.

A.

M.

Dirac said,

Hey,

Just for fun,

Just for fun,

Let's just assume for fun.

What if there really are negative particles that are commiserate with the negative answers to my equations?

What would the consequences of that be?

And he came up with antiparticles,

Which not too long after he described them mathematically,

They were demonstrated in a lab,

Colliders.

So every particle in the universe has its opposite,

An antiparticle.

Every single particle in the universe has an antiparticle that goes with it,

Which means all pluses are balanced by all minuses.

Now,

If all pluses are balanced by all minuses,

There can be no movement or motion in the universe,

Period,

Because every plus energy is negated by a negative energy.

So there is actually is no activity in the universe whatsoever as the universe as a whole.

One place you're going to get activity is in pieces of the universe.

So this is completely different scale.

So when you look at parts of the universe,

We might call them,

You can see activity,

Meaning matter,

Stars,

Fusion going on,

Fission going on,

So on.

The universe as a whole is not moving in any direction.

No,

Nothing is going on in the universe as whole.

It is much simpler than a hydrogen atom,

Which is the simplest element in the periodic table,

Function of scale.

Now,

If these things don't begin to blow your mind,

You don't understand what I'm saying.

So you're going to have to go do some homework.

They are far more wild and crazy and mind blowing and mind boggling than any imaginary bullshit that people come up with,

Like healing rocks or healing crystals or calling the psychic hotline.

Get in touch with somebody who's talking to your dead relatives on the other side,

On the other side of the veil.

They're not,

In terms of excitement and mystery and fantastic mind boggling,

They're not even in the same ballpark.

They're just like a child getting overexcited over a pill bug or a worm or something.

The net amount of energy in the universe is zero.

And with zero energy,

Nothing can happen.

Have to have energy to make something happen.

We just get little,

We only can glimpse little pieces of it.

And we see a lot of activity,

What we thought was a lot of activity.

When we look out into the heavens,

We see all kinds of stars inside.

And I think I said the other day,

I don't know if you were here,

But everything you can possibly see in that 13.

8 billion year visible universe only amounts to a little less than 5% of the energy in the universe.

It's about 4.

5 or 4.

6% rounded up to 5.

So in conclusion,

Are we done out here?

Well,

Not knowing anything is the subject of more than a decade long struggle called the Science Wars.

Back in the mid 20th century,

An anthropologist named Claude Bevy-Strauss who contributed quite a bit to scientific knowledge,

Came up with the idea that based on his research that our realities are constructed in our heads.

Our realities are constructed depending on our environment,

Depending on our socialization and so on.

Constructed reality led to French deconstructionism.

In other words,

Derrida and Foucault wanted to dissect the constructed reality to find out what things made up the constructed reality.

So Derrida and Foucault were pushing the envelope quite hard.

In other words,

They were going way beyond anything,

Any experimental evidence or anything to back this up,

But they carried away.

Basically said,

Oh,

All reality is a construction.

Well,

If all reality is a construction of our central nervous systems,

Then what is science?

What is the scientific method doing?

So this battle was going on between scientific understanding of what traditionally had been called reality or realities and depending on scale.

And so this battle,

You know,

Like a tennis match,

You could watch a single back and forth over the net for at least a decade.

And the consensus finally came down to,

And it's about as good as it gets,

There's something external to us called reality,

But we don't know what it is.

We have no sensory access to it directly,

So we don't know what it is.

But the consensus is,

And that's as good as it gets in science,

The consensus is there's something external to us that Plato called reality.

But what it is,

We don't know.

So we've come to grasp not what is reality,

But what is realities,

Because our brains do not know the difference between fantasy or imagination and what we've always called reality.

And anybody that's ever seen anybody put on virtual goggles and play a game or do whatever they do can see that people's nervous systems,

Central nervous systems are activated just as if there were giant purple monsters after them,

Or they were leaning over a cliff or whatever that is.

And that's what we call reality.

And what we call reality is virtual reality.

So this is virtual reality,

But this virtual reality is more real than that virtual reality.

But that's what can be said about it is we don't know what reality is,

Because we have no access to it in the story,

Period.

We can come up with agreed upon aspects of that reality that seem to be correct,

Or in a pragmatic sense,

They're useful.

So for example,

I don't care what kind of animal you got.

If you go to the top of a 25 story building and throw that animal off the side it's going to splatter on the sidewalk,

Unless it's a bird.

Cut its wings off and then throw it off and it'll splatter.

Okay,

Doesn't matter if it's a dog's reality,

Or a human's reality or a lizard's reality.

It doesn't,

They're not independent.

This is not an independent reality,

When it gets come to me and tossed off the building.

So there's lots of things that are like that that don't seem to be dependent on the central nervous system.

Be dependent on the central nervous system.

Activation.

I'm saying that I mean the sympathetic nervous system activation.

So you got to deal with this idea that a 2200 foot fall is a reality to any animal that doesn't have wings.

So,

It can't be entirely constructed.

There's a number of examples of that,

I'm not going to get into.

Okay,

The holographic principle is about information,

Meaning,

Meaning ones and zeros going into a black hole.

So information,

Information,

As you know there's a ring around the black hole.

And anything that passes that perimeter cannot escape from the black holes gravitational pull.

Well information can't escape from it either.

Once it crosses that limit.

It's pulled into the black hole.

Now,

You see it,

An artist rendering or illustration or something of a black hole.

It usually looks like a column with a mouth on it and a column going out,

You know,

Parallel with our view.

And so the singularity which is the smallest thing you're going to get to.

I don't know,

I don't know what the scale is there but it's about the smallest thing you're gonna get to it's not the smallest but it looks like that stuff goes into the into the black hole and get sucked down to the singularity.

Well,

That's what the black hole wars was about was about information going in crossing that threshold,

And pulled in by gravity into the black hole and disappearing forever from our universe.

Well,

If that was true,

Then all of our physics is wrong.

Physics is based on certain fundamental building blocks like energy can neither be created nor destroyed the first law of thermodynamics.

So if information,

Which is same thing as a,

As the laws of the thermodynamics.

If the information could be lost into a black hole.

That meant our all of our physics was wrong.

So the battle was going on over reconstructing our physics.

Do we need to reconstruct our physics.

How important was this issue.

And was the information lost forever to the universe.

The smallest possible measurement is called a plank,

A plank unit named after Max Planck the physicist who came up with quanta.

He didn't like it but that's what he came up with quanta.

So it's at past the Planck unit all mathematics breaks down.

Period.

It's like going back to the Big Bang mathematics breaks down at the Big Bang.

So it turns out,

The answer to why information is not lost in the black hole turns out to have something to do with the Planck unit.

So if all information is ones and zeros,

Even down to the Planck unit,

And that's the basic smallest distance measurement in the universe.

It can't physically be measured yet but it's a mathematics breaks down past that.

The smallest possible physical measurement.

OK.

How many ones and zeros can you get in one Planck unit.

Say a square.

How would you say that.

A Planck unit in a cube or square.

The answer is 111 or 10.

So if you take a building.

If you walk into the library at Alexandria.

If you were to walk into the library at Alexandria,

You know before it got burned down,

You would see all kinds of shelves,

Shelves shelves shelves shelves shelves floor to ceilings shelf shelf shelves shelves shelves everywhere,

And they did all the books,

They could get their hands on.

So every ship that came into the Port of Alexandria.

The library police went on board and confiscated all the books.

They took them back to the library they made copies.

They gave the copies back to the people on the ship that owned them,

And they kept the originals.

So,

There's math was the largest library of the ancient world.

Now,

Encoded in the ones and zeros.

How much information,

Could you store in the great library at Alexander,

Alexandria,

And the answer turned out to be.

You could only store as much information as the floor,

The walls and the ceiling can hold.

In other words,

You could take all the written material off the shelves of library of Alexandria.

And write this stuff down on the walls and the ceiling and the floor.

That's analogous to cramming information into the library,

Based on ones and zeros at the Planck scale.

And the,

So the answer was that the volume of the room.

The volume was not a function of how much information you could contain in it.

The square area was,

Was the container of the information.

In other words,

You couldn't pack the library in the volume,

Because it would,

It would be instantly millions of degrees in temperature.

But burn up like that.

The only thing you could do was,

That was,

Give the maximum amount of information the room would hold was to put your ones and zeros on the walls and the ceiling and the floor.

The only way that it wouldn't burn up.

Likewise with a black hole you think of something going into a black hole traveling down some kind of column to a singularity,

But stuff doesn't go into the black hole.

Everything is torn apart by gravity,

Turns into ones and zeros,

And it's stuck on the surface of the black hole,

Because the volume of the black hole is no different than the volume of the library.

You can only put so much information there,

It'll burn up and it'd be hotter than a black hole.

The information is not going into some black hole,

It's stuck on the,

For want of a better term,

What they call the surface of the black hole.

And the singularity is not a place at the bottom of the cone.

It's a time at the bottom of the cone.

So just as tomorrow is a time,

And you're getting there,

Whether you like it or not,

You're heading for tomorrow,

Inevitably,

There's nothing you can do to avoid it except die.

You're heading towards this point called tomorrow in the story.

So the singularity is a win at the bottom of the black hole.

See,

What I'm laughing over is saying the bottom of it,

It's not a fucking cone.

It's stuff goes into and heads towards this singularity of space time.

It's a win.

That's why it can't be avoided.

The holographic principle suggests that the stuff that we perceive as stuff in the universe is part of the volume of the universe,

And therefore it is not actually being stored in the volume of the universe.

It can't be.

It's being stored on the edge of the visible galaxy,

Of the visible universe in two dimensional form and being projected as a three dimensional hologram into the rest of the universe.

If this doesn't blow your mind,

I don't know what will.

I'll just forget it.

I'm done.

It should boggle your fucking mind if you understand that everything in the universe is stuck to the edge of the visible universe.

I'm doing this like it's circular,

But who knows?

So everything inside it is a hologram,

Basically?

Everything inside is a holographic projection from the surface of the universe inwards.

Yes.

So this all might be a hologram?

It might be.

Either this is a fucking hologram or all of our physics are wrong.

That's it.

This is not some thing that just somebody popped up yesterday with.

This is accepted physics.

Either this is a hologram or all of our physics are wrong.

Now,

Take your choice.

Most people will not simply go,

Well,

All of our physics is wrong.

We better start at zero like Neanderthals or something.

It's called the holographic principle.

And the reason it's so hot is because nothing can store an infinite amount of information.

Because nothing can store an infinite amount of information.

There has to be some mechanism to erase information.

To make more storage room.

And it turns out that erasing information is the most entropy generating thing in the universe.

In other words,

To erase the memory on your.

.

.

They have these giant cooling rooms and air conditioners and all that bullshit in the giant computer rooms.

Because processing of information,

The erasing of that information generates the most amount of heat.

And anytime you put something into your computer that's replacing something else,

Something else is being erased.

Nothing has an infinite storage of information.

Therefore,

There must be erasure.

Erasure generates the most waste heat beyond any other process.

Period.

So I guess,

For example,

The air condition that you use your air condition is going to be cool inside here.

But it's going to release more heat somewhere outside.

Yeah,

That's the arrow of time or the arrow of entropy.

You're going to generate far more entropy by cooling this room up.

You'll generate more entropy out into the universe at large.

Like 90% or better.

In other words,

It's only going to be about a 10%,

12% efficiency of changing energy into cold air versus the waste heat that comes from it.

So,

Taoist magic,

Taoist medicine,

These would be Chinese medicine,

Is one of the artifacts of people not understanding how mind blowing the universe is.

And they just come up with some mind blowing crap.

So basically after the Taoist masters died,

Lao Tzu,

Chuang Tzu,

Chuang Tzu was a real person,

Lao Tzu probably not,

But Lao Tzu was given credit for writing the Tao Te Ching,

But it's probably a compendium of authors that wrote this under the pseudonym Lao Tzu.

So,

After Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu or the people that wrote as Lao Tzu died,

The people in China basically turned to the same thing everybody else in the civilized world was looking for.

They wanted cures for illnesses,

And they wanted the secret to immortality in the West called the philosopher's stone.

So philosophers,

Philosophers,

I can't think of what you call chemist people ever chemist.

Alchemist.

Alchemist,

Yeah.

Alchemist,

Thank you.

Alchemists were after two things,

Transforming base metals into gold,

And they were looking for the secret to eternal life.

The philosopher's stone.

Okay,

We have succeeded in transforming other elements into gold.

We succeeded where they failed.

We can do that now.

But we haven't figured out how to get the elixir to eternal life,

But that's what happened if in Aronofsky's film The Fountain,

The protagonist in the film is a medical researcher,

Trying to defeat death.

And he's looking at death as a disease,

Like any other disease and he wants to find a cure for dying.

Okay,

That's basically the secret of eternal life.

Well,

There were no different in the East.

They wanted the secret to eternal life or immortality as well.

In fact,

The Taoists became magicians.

They're going to cure illnesses by balancing yin and yang,

Yin and yang,

And they're going to find the perfect balance of yin yang in some kind of formulaic version of elements of some kind that you're supposed to drink or snort or shoot up.

I don't know.

Mostly drinking,

I think.

Well,

They were,

They became hucksters.

Became hucksters selling medicine,

Medicinal cures,

Based on balancing the Tao,

Like the Tao was unbalanced with why you're sick.

They made a lot of money selling the idea of elixir of eternal life of some sort,

Just like the alchemist in the West,

John Deeb,

Comes to mind.

We don't have any truck with this Taoist baloney.

We understand the Tao.

We're not getting carried away with it like the French deconstructionists,

Derrida,

Foucault did by taking the thing way the fuck out here.

We understand the Tao.

And it doesn't have anything to do with living forever or healing anything or any other nonsense.

So basically Taoist magicians appeared on the scene quite early.

Hucksters.

Magic show guys.

Not real magicians,

But magicians.

Well,

Let's see.

I know I've left a lot of physics out,

But that's going to have to do for the evening.

So,

Good to see everybody.

Thank you so much for showing up.