🌌 Holography as a Subset of Similarity
🔎 Introduction
Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe is one of the most widely known attempts to connect science with metaphysics. Talbot drew on the physics of David Bohm and the neuroscience of Karl Pribram to argue that reality is holographic: each part contains the whole.
Similarity Theory agrees that Talbot’s insight is valuable, but takes it further. In this page, we present both a philosophical reflection and a scientific grounding to show how holography can be understood as a subset of Similarity Theory.
🌀 Philosophical Reflection
Talbot’s holographic model proposes that every part of reality contains the whole, much like a fragment of a hologram still contains the complete image. This vision leans toward monism: a single ultimate reality, or God, mirrored everywhere.
Similarity Theory offers a different view. The part does not contain the whole; rather, it contains an echo of the previous whole. A seashell spiral resembles a galaxy spiral, but it does not hold the galaxy’s complete information. Instead, both echo a deeper spiral pattern, each one a turn in the endless unfolding of existence.
This distinction prevents the collapse of reality into a single God or ultimate whole. In Similarity Theory, existence is infinite and hierarchical — spirals within spirals, gods beyond gods, higher and lower without end. The part resonates with the whole but never closes into it.
Thus, holography is not denied; it is simply one form of similarity. Holography expresses similarity through simultaneous redundancy, while spirals express similarity through sequential resonance. Both are true, but the spiral never ends, and the whole is never final.
🔬 Scientific Grounding
Talbot’s work builds on two key scientific inspirations:
David Bohm (1980): Proposed the implicate and explicate order in quantum physics. The explicate order (our visible reality) unfolds from the implicate order (a deeper, enfolded reality).
Karl Pribram (1991): Developed the holographic brain model, showing that memory is distributed across the brain like an interference pattern, not stored in one place.
From these models, Talbot argued that the universe is holographic — each fragment encodes the whole. Quantum nonlocality, where particles seem to share information instantly, is sometimes interpreted as evidence of this.
Similarity Theory acknowledges this, but reframes it using fractals and spirals.
Fractal Geometry (Mandelbrot, 1982): Structures repeat across scales, but do not contain the entire whole. They exhibit self-similarity.
Chaos Theory (Feigenbaum, 1978; Gleick, 1987): Shows how universal patterns emerge from simple iterative processes, resonating across systems.
Spiral Dynamics in Nature: Logarithmic spirals appear in galaxies, hurricanes, DNA helices, and seashells. These are not holograms but patterned echoes across scale.
In scientific terms:
Holography = Similarity by redundancy (the part mirrors the whole).
Fractals & Spirals = Similarity by resonance (the part echoes past forms without containing the future).
This grounding allows Similarity Theory to embrace holography as a special case of similarity, while expanding the framework to include fractals, spirals, and chaos as evidence of open-ended infinity.
Where Talbot’s holography suggests one ultimate whole, Similarity Theory shows a universe of endless patterned becoming, grounded in mathematics, physics, biology, and cosmology.
📚 References
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.
Feigenbaum, M. J. (1978). Quantitative universality for a class of nonlinear transformations. Journal of Statistical Physics, 19(1), 25–52.
Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a new science. Viking.
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1982). The fractal geometry of nature. W. H. Freeman.
Pribram, K. H. (1991). Brain and perception: Holonomy and structure in figural processing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stewart, I. (1990). Does God play dice? The mathematics of chaos. Penguin Books.
