Laying Down the Bohmian IMAX

I was very interested in the question asked by Woodsprite in terms of itlad/ctf and life assurance. We have discussed the nature of the how the recordings are made and KLLM has wonderfully expanded this concept into his "Virgin Life" VL theory. In order to possibly clarify my position on this I would just like to refer to the following section from ITLAD:

This book, its words and ideas and everything around you is an internally generated version of reality, a copy projected in front of you like an unbelievably complex sensurround, virtual reality computer game. This is generated by the manipulation of hologram-like images and using the processing power of the greatest computer in the universe – your brain.

Here you are reading this book, or should I say perceiving an image that contains this book. Look up and take in what is around you. Its all an illusion, a series of inwardly generated holographic images. You are not here at all, you are being fooled into thinking you are. You are somewhere else entirely. From this place you are generating the world around you, re-creating it piece by piece and second by second. We already know this from the evidence of quantum physics. As Hugh Everett proposed, there are literally trillions of universes, you exist in just one, a version of John Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’ creating it as you go along, each micro-decision that you make causing ever-increasing new timelines, like the branches of some magical tree.

But there is one huge problem with this personal universe. If you have always only existed within your own self-created version of reality, how have you created such a rich and varied environment? If this universe is all you have known how have you created giraffes, quasars and rap music? In order to create such concepts you must, at some time or other, known of these things and projected them into your version of reality. How can it be otherwise? You are like a baby who is abandoned on a desert island. As the baby grows up he has no knowledge of anything external to the island. How could that baby mentally visualize anything outside of his direct experience, a glacier for example. So it is for you. It is likely that within your universe exists the Eiffel Tower. You may even visit Paris and take in the view from the top. Now here is the weird thing; I am writing these words at my home in Harrogate, England, on a beautiful June morning. This is my version of Harrogate and my idea of what a beautiful June morning should look like. I have chosen the Eiffel Tower as an example of a well-known man-made feature. You now read these words in your version of the universe, surrounded by objects and weather conditions of your own creation. But strangely you immediately visualize Paris with the Tower dominating all around it. How can we both have a similar vision in our heads? How can we both have inwardly created an object that we both can agree on in terms of size, shape and location when we have never met and exist in totally different versions of reality? Sometime in both our pasts there must have been a real world populated by real objects, animals and buildings. Indeed this original ‘objective’ universe may be analogous to the biblical Garden of Eden, a place were we all perceived the original blueprint of objective reality, a place were the original Eiffel Tower stood in all its glory. This internally generated world is a facsimile, a copy, but as with all facsimiles and copies there must be an original – a first edition if you like.

And so there is. There was a time in both our distant pasts where we first perceived not only the Eiffel Tower but also all the wonderful objects, concepts and structures that we now populate our illusory world with. This very fact is one of the major clues as to what is really going on.

My position in this has never really changed. For me there has to have been some form of initial 'reality' state' by which the Bohmian IMAX was recorded. Indeed I suggest that each human being 'records' their life in a unique and personal phaneron that in some way 'overlaps' with other individual phanerons. How this mechanism works is the next big challenge and I know that there are some simply fantastic suggestions being made.

There have been few criticisms of CTF and ITLAD but the major one, which I have a good deal of sympathy with, is that I mix together the Copenhagen Interpretation, Everett's Many Worlds (Minds) and Bohm's Implicate/Explicate Order - all of which are, on the face of it, mutually exclusive. MWI was postulated as an alternative to Copenhagen and the Implicate Order was a post-Einsteinian attempt to explain quantum behaviour in slightly more classical terms. However I genuinely believe that within each one is part of the answer ... for me they are not mutually exclusive but, in some bizzare way, complementary. Indeed had I left well alone and gone with either of these three as the bedrock of scientific support for CTF I would not have been criticised. Each one supports my theory - but all three together make the theory really work.

But remember, as I bang on and one about, this is only a theory. it may be right and it may be wrong ... but I have placed it in the public domain for one reason and one reason only ... to generate debate!