We Are Spirits in a Virtual World

(Shannon Wheeler, the "Too Much Coffee Man")

Sort of a mind-boggling article here, which actually answers a question that came up in conversation a day or two ago. You may recall that Stephen Hawking famously acknowledged he had lost a bet on whether "information" in a black hole was lost forever. Black holes dissipate through time, and he believed that matter and its information would be destroyed in that process. That was in contradiction to established rules of information theory and entropy, which claimed information cannot be destroyed. But it turns out that quantum fluctuations in the black hole's event horizon encode that information, and is in principle retrievable. The surface area of the event horizon is proportional to the amount of information/mass contained in the singularity.

Long story short, the "boundary" of the black hole, the event horizon, "encodes" the information contained therein. And recent findings suggest that the universe we see- life, the universe, and everything- is encoded on the universe's surface. We are merely holographic projections of the boundary of the universe.

Now in trying to translate this into something I can comprehend, I don't doubt I've butchered some of the facts and conjectures, and I welcome corrections and clarifications.

Still, it does give a whole new meaning to the aphorism, "Beauty is only skin deep," doesn't it?