Fractals, holograms and learning

Image from Pixabay

I'm intrigued by esoteric theories, and one is the simulated universe hypothesis - you know, the idea that we might all be living in a simulated universe, similar to the Matrix movies. As I was searching through web pages on the subject today, I found a text on Crystalinks and it is fascinating:

"A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. 

Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. 

"When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. 

"The 'whole in every part' nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes."

Shouldn't learning be the same as a hologram? Once I have understood a principle, I should be able to apply it across many similar contexts, because of its fractal, recursive nature. If I can't, what use is it to me? I want the whole of what I need to be present in what I learn, regardless of whether it is a fragment or the whole. Some might have issues with this, but bear with me. 

Meta-learning - learning how to learn is an example of the fractal nature of learning. If we learn something fully, we should be able to take any element of it and use it to understand other concepts. We should also be able to take a part of it and do the same thing. This is the beauty of learning - it grows and expands without losing any of its potential and power to transform. It can spread and propagate, because knowledge does not behave like tangible assets. We can give our knowledge away to others, but we still retain it in its entirety, and we may learn even more from the experience.

Fractals, holograms and learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's