ghost in the hologram

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore suggests my ‘conscious self’ does not exist, that in fact my body/mind does whatever it does, and then one half second later creates a ‘story’ that’s fed to my conscious me so I’ll believe ‘I’ decided and did what’s already been done.

Her basis for this is intriguing – the mad scientists wired test subjects and watched their brains while they did complicated tasks.

The scientists figured they’d see the brain sections light up in three distinct stages:
1 – We make the decision to do the task,
2 – Our brain figures out how to do the task,
3 – We do the task.

Instead they discovered that
1 – Our brains figure out how to do the task,
2 – We decide to do it,
3 – We do it.

Our brain-body begins an action before our self is aware we are going to do anything, and our ‘self’ we think is running our show is actually always lagging one-half a second behind whatever our body-mind is doing. Our ‘self’ is a passenger, not the driver.

But that’s okay because not only is my me not the real me, we also live in a hologram.

The recent article “Our world may be a hologram” reports scientists accidently found evidence the Universe is composed of discontinuous holographic chunks where the space time continuum breaks down (like a newspaper foto breaks down into disparate dots if you look at it too closely), and there’s low-level low-level cosmic noise where the clumps clatter about.

One scientist had previously predicted this noise should exist in theory and what it would look like if found. A second group of scientists in search of gravitational beams — totally unaware of the first guy’s theory — dug two 600 meter trenches at right angles to each other so they could split a laser beam and send half the beam down each trench and back; once the two halves were recombined into a single beam, they could study it for changes expected from gravitational waves. They didn’t find any graviton action, but did discover an inexplicable rumble in the low registers they could not get rid of and could not explain.

Finally the two groups met, exchanged data, and their analysis suggests we live in a hologram, that our entire universe is a hologram.

So, not only is my ‘self’ a fake story told to me by my body-mind, but I am also a projection living in a three-dimensional hologram representing some distant two-dimensional master program. All hail our Master Programmer. I am holographic code in some cosmic game boy.

I figure the half second lag between my body-brain action and my knowledge of same must be the time it takes the Master Universe Holographic Entity Program to update and refresh our Universe’s contents — sort of a half second cosmic screen refresh.

Shakespeare would have loved this stuff, what with his we’re all masked players upon the stage. We do seem to be reading other’s scripts.

I wonder where free will comes in in all of this. Can holograms adlib?

(Here’s the article if you’re curious.
newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true)