The Implications of a Holographic Universe

Last year, I read a book called The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Then yesterday, I discovered a Youtube video called The Holographic Universe: It's All Illusion, which was posted by someone called "Secretkeyactivator."

Overall, while I found the book and video to be quite intriguing, I'm not truly convinced that the universe is a "hologram."

In any case, since the first premise of my philosophy, "Spirtitual Rationalism," is that "Reality is Real," I found the assertion that "the universe is an illusion" to be quite provokative.

With that in mind, I felt compelled to post a few thoughts on the video...

*The video's insistence that “Reality is an illusion,” is extremely, extremely misleading. Even if you 100% bought into the video's premise of a holographic universe, that wouldn't mean that "Reality is an illusion." Even if there was an ultimate "Super-Reality" beyond matter, the “Reality” we live in is still real. Every day, we still interact with conventional matter, and our sensual perception of that matter (while not perfect) reflects an accurate exterior (which, as one of the users pointed out, is essentially proven by the fact that “if you fart, both of us smell it”).

*Furthermore, the idea that Reality can be manipulated by perception alone (a product of misplaced conclusions from quantum physics and popularized by the best-selling book The Secret) is also wrong because as another user pointed out, if a boulder crushes my skull, I’m dead even if I never “perceived” the boulder before it fell on me.

*Even so, as someone who’s on record as believing in the soul (i.e., a consciousness separate from the material body), I like the idea of “Reality” being like a TV program in which our consciousness “tunes in.” We can carry the idea further by saying that our “pure self” (i.e, our soul) originates from what we might call a "Super-Reality," enters this "Reality" upon birth, and then, upon death, returns to the “Super-Reality."

For the purposes of my book, and my evolving philosophy of “Spiritual Rationalism,” this doesn’t mean “Reality is an illusion;” on the contrary, Reality is extremely real; it just means that there’s a reasonable way of looking at how consciousness interacts with “Reality” in a way that doesn’t rely on an atheistic, materialist framework.

-Todd