I read an article in Scientific American called “Information in the Holographic Universe”, and it turned my brain into a puddle of rice pudding.  The main gist that I wrestled out of the article was that our perception of reality might actually be a hologram produced as a side effect of two interacting two dimensional (i.e., flat) realities and not the three (or four) dimensional world we think exists.  Scientists support this claim by saying the maximum entropy (or randomness…or amount of information) that a given space can hold is determined by surface area (which is a 2D measurement) and not by volume (3D measurement).

Ouch.  I know...it’s a noggin-scratcher!

Here’s somewhat of an example... Hold your forefinger vertically at eye level about a nose-length away from your face.  Stare past the finger.  Do you now see two fingers?  Which finger do you think is the real one?  To me, that's a tough question…maybe it’s just me.  Anyway, my answer is both…it’s a combination of perspectives (like a Cubism painting). 

So try to imagine reality to be like those two fingers…just two different perspectives combining.  In truth, there are two fingers there, but our perception tells us one finger exists.  Think of the Yin Yang (or I-Ching) symbol...two halves make a whole.  Our perception just cuts to the chase. 

So this thought birthed a tangent for me to ponder…a very dangerous thing, but it lead me to questions.  What else do our eyes trick us into believing?  Heh heh, I’m sure that list would be very long, but I focused on a concept called persistence of vision.  This is an optical illusion caused by our eyes when viewing a lighted image followed by darkness over and over in quick secession.  This illusion is most popularly executed in the form of movies (though some may argue).  Movies? an illusion?  Yep, we’ve all been had…taken to the cleaners…tricked.  While you watch a movie, the screen (with most films) is literally blank almost half the time.  (So, can I get half my money back?).  What’s happening is light/darkness switch is moving so fast that your eye can’t send messages to your brain quickly enough. So what really looks like

- - - - - - - - - -      

appears as

___________

Odd, huh? 

There’s another trick also coming into play called phi phenomenon.  This is basically what your brain does to fill in the gaps between motions.  Example:  While reading a comic book, you see one frame of a character reaching for a gun and then the next frame is the character pointing that gun at something.  Your brain connects the two separate actions and combines it as one logical continuous action…reaching, grabbing, swinging around, and finally pointing.  So your brain makes a whole conceptual scene out of the two separate images that are "actually" there. 

Once again, you’ve been tricked by your own body.  However, you got to realize that we do need persistence of vision and phi phenomenon for day to day existence.  Without them, blinking would drive you insane, and our ancestors wouldn’t have been effective in tracking food (i.e., none of us would be here).  So don't get too ticked at your eyes; they are just trying to do a job efficiently.  Besides, other sense organs like your ears like to dup you as well...I won't go into that here.

So, further down the logic-spiral, my mind continues to wander along this thought-chain.  More questions arise.  If our reality is truly 2D (sort of like a movie screen) and our eyes and mind can’t work fast enough to keep up with actual reality, how much of our existence do we spend as a "blank screen"?  Mentally speaking, how much of our perception of reality is just spackled in holes filled in by our logic-dictated brains?  In other words, how much of the time are we really what we think we are?  Where do we exist during those “blank” moments?

Scary thoughts.  Imagine if you spent half the day simply not existing.  What if someone pressed pause on one of those "blank screen" moments?

What about creatures who move faster or slower than us?  How do we appear in their perceptions?

That calls to mind an animated film called Das Rad (The Rocks).  It’s a story about the progress of Mankind as viewed by two long-lived people made of stone.  They never really see Man; they only see what we build and destroy…which happens in a blur.  One of the stone-guys is barely even interested. 

So what about creatures that move faster than us?  We must appear almost stone-still to them if not “blank” most of the time.  They would perceive our blunders well in advance of us making them. 

How would faster creatures appear in our perception?  Would they be a blurred shimmering vision (like sped up film), mostly blank (because their perception would allow for longer moments of blankness), or completely invisible (because they have more blank moments in their secession…so we could only see them if we were really, really looking)? 

So reality might be a hallucination, and our concept of ourselves may be mostly mental spackle.  It's very much a humbling thought.  However, I find it very uplifting and inspiring.  It gives me an "undiscovered country" to seek out.  Still, you may wonder how these thoughts apply to bass and more importantly, music.  Hmmm, buy my album.  Heh...