New Member (throwing out some ideas)

I'll add in a couple more quick comments. This model could also support both a stationary universe (no big bang) as well as the fast inflationary period that appears to have occured shortly after the apparent big bang. If the big bang is simply looking closely at the edge of a one of these "reflective" planes, then the non-linearity in that force (a repulsive force, which would cause the universe to appear as if it were expanding faster than otherwise) would correlate with the inflationary period.

Also, this might be verified if we see a form of instant "super gravity" fractally reflected at an even larger scale. (Basically if gravity is seen as a perceptive long period propogation of waves between confined plates, that mirrors smaller scale actions, then gravity itself would be likely reflected on a similarly larger scale ... also inversions of forces might be possible during these oscillations). Anyway, it seems the universe continually has surprises, there may be countless others and the matter is simply to find the ones we can understand, and take advantage of them. (Again, there are practical reasons why, even if the universe didn't truly operate in the fashion, we could still likely extract much useful information in a humanly comprehensible manner (planar representation) and with one less dimension of computing elements anyway (helps with cooling and computational requirements ). And again, I'd recommend modeling a stationary "conscious" observer that simply changes focus (easily implemented as warping the nearby field) to "see" from different perspectives, as this correlates with a constant observed light speed and could even give clues as to what consciousness is ... I know it might sound funky, but the function of an eye could could be fractally mirrored as well ... (and maybe the difference between sanity and insanity is which side of a mirror you're on? )

Ok, I apologize for the more metaphysical bent but who knows what's possibly if many phenomenon can be fractally compressed into a few resonant cavities, consciousness would seem to require data compression so this isn't impossible. Consider also that if quantum computations are as powerful as many predict, then evolutionarily it would make sense that the brain takes advantage of this and there's evidence that seems to suggest that delicately balanced organic bonds in the brain could be sensitive to these low level forces. In that case the body would be something along the lines of a radio dish (the cochlea uses such resonances to separate out differen frequencies as well) and power amplifier communicating with quantum level energies.

Another possibility - an observer could possibly move or rotate some for a couple reasons - if it's holographic, with rather distorted reflections, then a slight shift in viewpoint could create a much larger perceived motion (imagine looking at a circus mirror, where the light is reflected in a convex fashion), also if light/energy primarily came from perpendicular to a reflective plate, an observer could slide sideways (toward gravity/acceleration?) without the speed of light being significantly affected.

To look at it more generally, how did consciousness arise and why does the universe appear 3-D when we can only sense surfaces?

Answer: Because we sense surfaces (2-D), over a time period( + 1 additional dimension), and memory and prior learning correlates this into a 3-D world. For example, a single snapshot of random dots on a screen gives no perceived 3-D component, only changes over time, correlated with prior images generates this.

Even the eye itself and retinal connections don't do a 1 to 1 transformation. There are electrical sweeps that pass across the physical surface of the eye, while the brain correlates nerves that are close together by sensing which ones fire simultaneously - it's an adaptive optical system that could effectively learn to see almost any random jumbling of "pixels". We see the eye as a smooth surface, but consider that our own eyes have also already undergone this adaptation, so we've already correlated spacial features into a relatively linear system. So it could be that the smooth appearance of the surface of an eye is truly very coarse and fractalized but it so happens that looking out of an eye and looking into an eye are the opposite transformations ... like looking into a microscope or a telescope are simply inversions of the same focusing process.

For example, they put glasses on a pidgeon at birth that inverted its vision, and the pidgeon grew up normally but underwent a transitional phase of discoordination when they took these glasses off, yet it eventually adapted (now consider that this adaptation is doing quicker and more efficiently at a young age when there's less overhead to modifying connections in the brain, that after learned responses have come into play).

To give a concrete way of simulating this, you simply need to create a system with 1/d^2 relationships (I'm rather certain this can be done on a grid and simply using Manhatten distances) that implies planar interactions (though truly you need some thin 3-D layer, though it should have longer term fractal effects), this can be almost as chaotic as you want. Then project these onto a surface and perform an adaptive Kohonen mapping that places correlated inputs close together ... then sit back and watch the show. Three dimensional artifacts, as see by looking at this plane <i>over time</i> will be extracted by the Kohonen network and convert a chaotic 2-D representation into a coherent 3-D system with spherical interactions. (At least that's what I'd assume would happen. There are many tweaks of this that could bias the representation in different ways ... for example, pattern recognition prior to this could be used to either expand or compress this representation (Radial basis functions or Eigenvalue extraction might be good) and lowpass filtering of samples could generate a more analog feel to the output ... if you see an orbiting electron, that's the universe. If you increase the network density, you get successively finer and finer detail of what some representation of the universe looks like - after all, the simulation would be part of the universe and if these fractal characteristics were real, then at least some part of reality would be mirrored in it)

Sidenote: To save computational power, you can do a fast 2-D convolution (2-D FFT) of two 1-D processes to probably generate 1/d^2 interactions.