Epicurean gods and the holographic principle
...Epicurus' view on the problem of evil was that there were gods, but that they were neither willing nor able to prevent evil. This was because they lived in a perfect state of ataraxia (serenity); it is not the gods who are upset by evils, but people. Epicurus conceived the gods as blissful and immortal yet material beings made of atoms inhabiting the empty spaces (metakosmia) between worlds in the vastness of infinite space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
...their atomic bodies are in some way as deathless as the atoms out of which they are composed: all atoms are eternal, but they are the only example of atomic compounds that can constantly regenerate themselves and thus not disintegrate with age and death. "The gods by definition live a life of serenity. If they bother about our lives they cannot be serene, they cannot bother about us." http://www.american-buddha.com/luc.epicur.htm
...The mode of existence Epicurus attributed to gods has become a matter of controversy. They have only ‘quasi-bodies’, for example, and are constituted by nothing more than the wafer-thin and lightning-fast ‘images’ (simulacra) which according to Epicurus enter our eyes and minds to become the stuff of vision, imagination and dreams. Some scholars take this constitution out of simulacra to describe a highly attenuated mode of being which somehow makes the immortal gods an exception to the rule that compounds must eventually disintegrate, so that they are able to live on forever, not in any world like ours (since all worlds must themselves eventually perish) but in the much safer regions between worlds. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/
Basically, Epicurean gods consist of some indestructible fundamental entities on the boundaries (cosmological horizons?) of 3D spacetime regions, that are free of the ordinary matter and divide different universes (he calls them metakosmia) interacting with this 3D world only through projections. Wow! - that's a holographic universe! The popular rendition (and Epicurus WAS writing for laity) of the idea sounds surprisingly Epicurean:
...Quantum mechanics starts with the assumption that information is stored in every volume of space. But any patch of space can become a black hole, which stores information in bits of area. Perhaps, then, all that's needed to describe a patch of space, black hole or no, is that area's worth of information. The idea is called the holographic principle, after the way that a hologram encodes 3D information on a 2D surface. The world doesn't appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one. The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sidebar-the-holographic-p
Epicurus' theory of "atomic gods" seemingly implies that they are made of indestructible, pixellated coding bits on the boundaries of spacetime regions. Gods are not concerned with our troubles because our world is but a holographic image of theirs -- no more than we are concerned about the troubles of our shadows, or our computers are concerned about the video games that they play for our amusement.
...their atomic bodies are in some way as deathless as the atoms out of which they are composed: all atoms are eternal, but they are the only example of atomic compounds that can constantly regenerate themselves and thus not disintegrate with age and death. "The gods by definition live a life of serenity. If they bother about our lives they cannot be serene, they cannot bother about us." http://www.american-buddha.com/luc.epicur.htm
...The mode of existence Epicurus attributed to gods has become a matter of controversy. They have only ‘quasi-bodies’, for example, and are constituted by nothing more than the wafer-thin and lightning-fast ‘images’ (simulacra) which according to Epicurus enter our eyes and minds to become the stuff of vision, imagination and dreams. Some scholars take this constitution out of simulacra to describe a highly attenuated mode of being which somehow makes the immortal gods an exception to the rule that compounds must eventually disintegrate, so that they are able to live on forever, not in any world like ours (since all worlds must themselves eventually perish) but in the much safer regions between worlds. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/
Basically, Epicurean gods consist of some indestructible fundamental entities on the boundaries (cosmological horizons?) of 3D spacetime regions, that are free of the ordinary matter and divide different universes (he calls them metakosmia) interacting with this 3D world only through projections. Wow! - that's a holographic universe! The popular rendition (and Epicurus WAS writing for laity) of the idea sounds surprisingly Epicurean:
...Quantum mechanics starts with the assumption that information is stored in every volume of space. But any patch of space can become a black hole, which stores information in bits of area. Perhaps, then, all that's needed to describe a patch of space, black hole or no, is that area's worth of information. The idea is called the holographic principle, after the way that a hologram encodes 3D information on a 2D surface. The world doesn't appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one. The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sidebar-the-holographic-p
Epicurus' theory of "atomic gods" seemingly implies that they are made of indestructible, pixellated coding bits on the boundaries of spacetime regions. Gods are not concerned with our troubles because our world is but a holographic image of theirs -- no more than we are concerned about the troubles of our shadows, or our computers are concerned about the video games that they play for our amusement.