Ehh
Okay, uhm, what really tickles me is the fact that people are saying 'well you can't fit an entire universe on a hard drive, it's infinite X_X'. Think about that carefully. Why in the hell would you need to fit an entire universe on to a hard drive for a race of sentient beings that exists solely as data? And, to Kalgutha: never forget about religion ;D. Also, I want to know why this discussion kind of shifted towards the matrix (NOTE: sorry, I just read that dyserq said his friend, who is the originator of this entire theory, said that the holograms are in a matrix-like environment. I'm keeping this part of the message though, because I believe it relevant)? Sure, they're both similar in that we exist inside of a computer-realm, but in the matrix, it was real human beings whose minds were trapped within the matrix. With this 'hologram theory', we aren't even humans. We're holograms. Or we're on a hard drive, or some other variation of the fact that we only exist as computer data. That would mean that somebody would have had to create us, some non-human (or human) sentient race (or maybe just a single being) intent on creating a virtual world wherein they could observe the evolution of a planet (or some other reason for creating something this wondrously bizarre). To the questions of what would it change; well, let's assume that we are all really holograms and we all reside on this gigantic hard drive (or some other thing that resembles a computer), and that this vastly intelligent race of non-human beings created this hard drive. If we could somehow PROOVE that we are all holograms... does this not mean that we could send a message, or otherwise notify these superintelligent beings that we know of their existence, and their purpose in creating us? And then, what if they responded? Of course, this is all hypothetical, and is most probably a sequence of events that will never actually occur. I also want to point out that we would in fact all be controlled by an intricate programming. Think of it as the ultimate in artificial intelligence; the emotions and senses and such would be hard-wired into us as if it were real life, because it would be a real life simulator, something that would define how things work by a set of physical laws, involving electrons and quarks and gravity and other such things. I mean, that's how it works in real life, so it would work like that in a real life simulator too, wouldn't it? Lastly, I would like to point out that no theory can ever be truly proven to be true - they can only be proven false. There can be a mountainload of facts that support the theory, but they don't ever prove it right, whereas a single contradictory fact can make the entire theory come crashing down, so that we need to revise it or make an entirely new theory.
Now that I scroll up, I realise that I probably wrote too much x_X.
-Syrin, who now has two posts to his name, both of which are on this extremely interesting thread.