|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Reality and the Physics of Maya
| Article
# : |
11320 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
5,601 Words |
| Author
: |
Alex Comfort
Alex Comfort is a physician, biologist, and author of numerous
literary and scientific works. Before returning to England,
he was clinical lecturer at Stanford University and adjunct
professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. |
In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc…Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exists prior to his knowledge of them.
--Louis de Broglie
I want to begin this discussion with a model which would be very familiar to your children, if it isn't to you-the video game "Asteroids." It consists of a VDT, a black box containing the game circuitry, and two control panels for the players. When you switch on, objects--asteroids and spaceships--appear on the screen. If they collide, there is an explosion, and the objects disappear. A spaceship, moreover, can fire at an asteroid, and, if it scores a hit, can destroy the target or cause it to break into smaller asteroids.
What we have here is a three-space world of two linear effect rules, very much like billiard balls on a billiard table. One could, with additional circuitry, expand that into a four-space world with depth. If in the future we get holographic games on a liquid-crystal screen, the asteroids and spaceships will appear to be solid objects--behind glass, as it were--and if by any flight of technology we were also able to make them tangible, they would in fact be objects, indistinguishable from chessmen or billiard balls.
The point of the model for our purposes is that there are no objects there. The "objects" are being synthesized in our heads, from dots of light on a raster, and these in turn represent mathematical, relationships hard-wired in the black box. The components of these virtual objects are nonlocal with respect to the objects themselves: they bear no translational resemblance to them, and they are not even there all the time--for example, during frame flyback.
I introduce the video game because it is a useful model of what we call middle-order reality: the experiential world which science studies. The experimental world--as the name implies--is a display: one which we are adapted to handle. The function of nervous systems in organisms is to create such a display. The video game would work as well with the display. The video game would work as well with the display turned off, but the display is an economical way of short-circuiting algebra which would otherwise be transcomputable for nervous systems. Brains,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
