TIL I am a Hologram on the Event Horizon of a Singularity AMA

Emergent Order for Nothing

The kind of universe we live in started with a fluctuation in nothingness - order from chaos. The prime singularity - a pinpoint of negative entropy within the bounds of nothingness or positive entropy. From this nothingness a type of order emerged. What exactly the structure - a very smooth ball of super heated plasma - emerged from is in some doubt. Hawking claims that a fluctuation in quantum gravity started the ball rolling. The rest of the story is amusing.

We normally think of the universe as a balloon expanding to almost limitless extent. There is nothing inside of the balloon - it is not expanding as something fills it because nothing is inside and nothing is outside of the balloon skin. The skin of the balloon is all that exists. We also think of this balloon as expanding over time. I propose a slightly different way of looking at the situation. Imagine that time is an independent variable like space. This way of looking at space and time is known as phase space. In phase space all the chunks of time exists together with all other chunks of time. In this construal, the singularity broadcasts phase space instantly over 13.72 billion years (our point now on the arrow of time). The past, present and future all spring into existence at once. It is conceivable but not provable that there is an 11 dimension super string vibrating which is the root of all of this activity. Time (sic) will tell.

The substance that spreads over phase space is a hologram flattened onto the event horizon of the singularity at the core of the universe. We can discern the nature of the event horizon of our universe in the event horizon of black holes. Black holes form in phase space inside the universe in the time allotted for second generation stars - our slot in time now. In this framework, black holes come from super dense matter from the collapse of stars into a dense ball of basic particles that bend phase space back in on itself. No energy in the form of radiated electromagnetism (including visible light) can escape the gravitational pull of the singularity. This singularity is smaller than the primal singularity generating our universe over phase space because the black hole is part of the universe emitted by the primal singularity.

In four dimensions, a black hole is roughly a sphere with an vanishingly thin skin. The skin or the outer surface of the balloon is called the event horizon. Everything between the singularity and the event horizon falls back into the black hole. Including time.

The direction of time is reversed inside the event horizon of a black hole. At the interface between the event horizon and the outside universe on an vanishingly thin surface - all of the matter that falls into the black hole flattens by one dimension. In other words, if I am an astronaut falling into a black hole I become an vanishingly thin projection of the information content of myself - my fundamental particles are plastered across the surface in a film at the smallest dimension of space-time. The smallest unit of measure in our universe is a distance called the Plank length. The information content spread across the surface (in phase space) of the event horizon is a hologram.

This is the famous bet that Hawking made - he was betting against his intuition just to make trouble - he posited that information is not preserved across the event horizon. The question was "Is information preserved across the event horizon or for matter trapped within the black hole".  In other words, can I discern what is inside the event horizon? Remember that because time flows backward inside the event horizon, from the viewpoint of the singularity at the center, the event horizon is radiating energy inward toward the singularity. In other words all those photons that we think of as radiating outward from the singularity actually behave as if the photons that barely reach the event horizon seem to be (from our inertial framework where the arrow of time flows 'forward') emitted by the event horizon and moving forward in time toward the singularity.

Pwned by Holograms

The outward sign that all this is really happening is the presence of Hawking radiation. At the scale of fermions and bosons, the primal ingredients in the Standard Model of Physics, all empty space is not really empty. Pockets of negative entropy (extropy) spontaneously appear just like the event that caused the universe in the first place. In empty space, matter and antimatter particles are spontaneously generated and usually quickly recombine which produces bursts of energy in empty space. There is no such thing as 'empty' space since empty space can generate energy spontaneously.

When matter and antimatter emerge at or on the event horizon, one particle may be inside the event horizon and one particle might be outside the event horizon. The particle inside the event horizon then moves in the direction of time within the event horizon. The inside surface of the event horizon is radiating spontaneously generated particles from the matter/antimatter pair in the reverse direction of time seen from outside the event horizon. Outside the event horizon, the particles collide with other particles and release energy which radiates outward from the event horizon - time is flowing forward on the outside of the event horizon so that over the dimension of time, energy is spontaneously generated. This energy released is called Hawking Radiation and is the best way to locate a black hole. We detect the emission of Hawking Radiation because time is split in half at the event horizon.

The signature of the energy emitted contains all of the information flattened to vanishingly thin extent across the surface of the event horizon. This is a hologram of all of the matter and energy that has ever fallen into the black hole. It is also a way to reconstruct, over the dimension of time, all of the past and future history of the black hole. Think of the hologram as a movie projector that in standard time or time flowing forward has all of the individual images superimposed over each other.

Think of a stack of 216 frames of Star Wars: A New Hope on a table. At 72 frames per second this is a 3 second slice of standard movie time. 3 seconds of time is known as a 'specious present' or the size of the chuck of activity within working memory. When I shine a very bright light through the stack I can see everything in the 216 frames at the same time. My optical machinery cannot discern a conceptually complete image of 3 seconds of a movie. This is a cartoon schematic of what a hologram really is because holograms are made of pure energy or electromagnetic radiation and not 35mm squares of celluloid film. But the point is the same - holograms contain all the information in all regions of phase space.

Back to our astronaut falling into the black hole. To an observer left behind on the space ship just outside of the event horizon the poor chap seems to become compressed or stretched and can be assumed to stop living at some point along the path to the event horizon. Actually the information contained in the body is preserved as it is spread across the surface of the event horizon into a film of vanishing thinness. The information contained by the astronaut becomes a constituent element of the hologram.

Similarly, I am information spread across the surface of the event horizon of this universe. These holograms inherently preserve my information from moment of birth to death. In fact the entire history of the earth is a hologram on the surface of the event horizon. All Gaia (the sum of all DNA activity or DNA information over the span of life on earth) is a hologram on the universal event horizon.

For this reason, time is a tenseless quantity - all time exists all 'at once' across the universe. When I remember the past I am mapping a subjective version of an earlier hologram with a hologram inside my mind. When I remember the future I am doing the same thing. For the past, I leaf past intervening moments of past time all the way back to the time I am imagining. For the future I leaf forward. Note that my memory is an attempt to match, as much as possible, my interior hologram against the 'real' hologram which exists locally in a slice of time in the past or future. In this sense memory enables time travel. I can move in the direction of increasing entropy - the direction of the arrow of time for biology - or I can move in the direction of decreasing entropy - against the arrow of time. My objective self (my meat suit or interior milieau) must move forward in time (toward the direction of increasing entropy) to maintain homeostasis with a minimal expense of energy. Moving in reverse against the forward swoosh of time can only happen with imagination - an emergent quality of brains with minds.

These memories are tangible brain states or what is know as neural correlates of consciousness. I really, truly have a local hologram that sort of matches the universes hologram. The extent to which I can adequately model the past or the future increases my survivability chances. I can make a decent guess about what happens next and from my response policy I can travel forward to a hologram that I need so that I can maintain homeostasis. I have covered this in earlier posts.

Any questions?