Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Broadcasting from the intersection of chaos and more chaos. The Last Show with David Cooper.
We've got very good evidence that everything you see and everything you experience is an illusion, a hologram. Are we living in a simulation? Well, this is what you might believe if you read an article in a popular magazine. But how did this article get its information? And what did the scientific papers that said these things actually say?
How do conspiracy theories arise from legitimate sources? That is what we're going to discuss here with Lee Koonla, a political science professor at Humber Polytechnic. It is Conspiracy Corner. And do check out Lee's upcoming book. It's called Uncover Up, How to Think Clearly in the Age of Conspiracy. That's available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
Lee, that was all a mouthful, but welcome to the show. Welcome to The Hologram.
Thank you for having me.
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Chapter 2: What evidence suggests we might be living in a simulation?
And yeah, I guess we're living in the simulation right now, right?
That's at least according to one magazine. I sometimes worry when I see these popular science headlines that if they were true would completely revolutionize the way we saw the world. Yeah. But then like no one else talks about it after that. Yeah. Except for people who are really into conspiracy theories.
Yeah, exactly.
Chapter 3: How do popular articles shape our understanding of scientific claims?
Well, exactly. And you're right in your setup to note how these ideas often begin in very rigorous, sort of evidence-based places. Now, I have to give you a bit of a caveat and a preamble, because as an interdisciplinary scholar looking at conspiracy theories, you ask you to be an expert in absolutely everything. And I just am not an expert in physics.
Yet, I'm going to have to wade into some physics here. I know we were talking before we went on air. We were both trying to figure out what this holographic principle thing is. And this is so far beyond my ken. I can't even do math, okay? No, really, I can't do it.
Chapter 4: What role do legitimate sources play in the rise of conspiracy theories?
So, I am a real novice here in terms of what the actual physics states. I did go, I went out to Wikipedia. Yeah, I'll admit it, right? I went out to Wikipedia to get some help And here's what apparently, okay, the holographic principle is. This is the first line in Wikipedia, which I will quote to you.
The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower dimensional boundary to the... Okay, what even is that? Well, Let me give you one example.
So have you ever gone to like a museum or a science fair and seen like a hologram where you look at this flat surface and then all of a sudden it looks like it's in 3D?
Yes.
Okay. I have seen that. There's just a bunch of math that says, yes, we experience life in 3D, but maybe somehow the universe is encoded in less dimensions than that. It's a purely mathematical theoretical thing. And it really has nothing to do with like holograms in the sense of like watching movies or everything isn't real or we're living in a simulation.
But it's almost an unfortunate case of they chose the word holographic to describe this mathematical physics paper. And then a bunch of people ran with it. And they're like, well, that means everything's a hologram. And that's not what these scientists are saying. They could have just as easily chosen a different word, called it a baba ganoush.
And then you wouldn't get people reporting based on this physics paper.
But we're living in an aubergine.
Yeah, we're living in an eggplant. The eggplant universe. But that's what can sometimes happen. Yeah. And that's what happened a few years ago when a bunch of theoretical physicists just proposed some math to say, this is how we can think of the universe. It has no practical implications. It's just a mathematical thing. And then people see the word holographic, you know, one...
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Chapter 5: How does the holographic principle relate to conspiracy theories?
Yeah, because who's going back to the original papers, right? And who's going... And also, look, you're right about the clickbait stuff. This is a bit of a different... Just something that I happened to come across was in a different area of media. The editors were asking their journalists, quote unquote, to put out eight articles a day. Eight articles a day. I mean, I've just been...
Because for the podcast, I'm researching Watergate, and there's that classic investigation by the Washington Post that took months to get to the bottom of it. That's not what a lot of the kind of journalism that I'm receiving is like. It's really like the kind of eight articles a day, and so you've got to get your hits in, and this is the stuff that does it, I think, right?
Are there other conspiracy theories rather than like living in a simulation where the origin is based on some scientific or archaeological paper that was done in earnest and then it got translated and the metaphors drifted and published in one source, another source, another source, another source, and then accepted as truth when the final claim is totally wild? Yeah, there is. That is Atlantis.
Ooh. Conspiracy theories that start from places that are kind of accurate. Maybe it's an ancient text. Maybe it's a scientific paper. Then one source reports on it. Another source reports on it. And when it finally gets to you, claims like we're living in a hologram or Atlantis was definitely real with aliens or humanoids that had advanced technology. This is how conspiracy theories arise.
We are here with Lee Koonla, a political science professor at Humber Polytechnic. Check out his upcoming book, Uncover Up, How to Think Clearly in the Age of Conspiracy, available for pre-order wherever books are sold. Lee, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me. And you do these great setups. I love it. And when you were talking, I swear this was a quote that somebody had said, but I looked it up and I couldn't find it. So maybe it's me. Maybe this is my quote, which is... Myth is history that has forgotten its origins. Wow.
But I think in terms of when we think of something like the simulation or the lost continent of Atlantis, some of what's going on is we've just lost the origin of it, or at least the origin is not known in popular culture.
Wasn't there like a group of flat earth people who were like all scientists who knew the earth wasn't flat and they met for like a joke and it was like a sort of like parody drinking club. But people then use that as evidence that the earth was flat. Or am I making that up?
Oh, that's so good. Oh, I'm totally that's going to be like you've just sent me down a rabbit hole for the rest of the day now that this is going to be great.
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