https://gizmodo.com/you-arent-living-in-a-hologram-even-if-you-wish-you-we-1791793355

∞ Language is extremely dangerous and misleading stuff in general, but when the media attempts to talk about science, the factors that contribute to nonsense are nearly automatically hyperbolized.

Witness the recent examples of abject idiocy with people declaring ‘The Universe is a Hologram’. I will not bore you with lectures about why this is absurd, rather, I will simply state that we haven’t the slightest idea ‘what’ the universe ‘is’… as it is »that which is the superposition of all aspects of category and conception… and, indeed, generates them as reflections of itself in our minds. Furthermore, a hologram is an exceptionally limited artifact produced by humans armed with specific technologies.

What is actually going on is this: a paper suggests that holograms share a property with a model of the universe (which happens to involve string theory in this case). That property is peculiar indeed: it is as if the ‘dimensionalized interior’ of a spherical universe (idealized) is the ‘projection’ of features of character that exist in far fewer physical dimensions on its surface. In simpler terms, the universe ‘can be compared to’ a dimensionalized projection of a ‘2D skin’ on the outside of it.

This does not and cannot tell us ‘what’ the universe ‘is’. In fact, it is formally impossible to abstractly declare the nature of ‘the everything’ in language. What we can do, is create analogies of observed properties. It may be a deadly mistake for us to use »technological analogies, since those belong to a class of objects that may actually be in conflict with ‘nature’ in the sense that they are representational artifacts derived from observed processes…

This theory does not prove anything about the nature or properties of the universe, and string theory is little more than an elegant toy so far. It is radical, however, in a couple of ways. If it leads to a way to »use string theory to make and/or test predictions, that would be revolutionary.

But there is another rather shocking implication: that »intelligence as we understand it, the very minds with which we form and pursue these questions… are somehow »projections, and, perhaps biocognitive abstractions… of »some kind of universe that exists ‘before’ our own, and of which everything within our grasp and universe is a projection. What »kind of projection »is that? It sure as hell is no mere ‘hologram’, even if those crude analogs share this property with the universe.

Get the precedence straight. Holograms modestly resemble a property inherent in Nature. And, so does pretty much everything else…

The media:
https://gizmodo.com/you-arent-living-in-a-hologram-even-if-you-wish-you-we-1791793355

One of the actual papers:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5607