The holographic duality embodies the view that physical reality and the “fundamental” laws it obeys emerge from a confluence of basic building blocks and the way they are entangled. It creates a sort of closed loop of interdependencies that circles from reduction to emergence and back.

That possibility suggests that we are part of a much greater system of many realities, within realities, within other realities. In this system, our world could be considered a shadow or a projection of events that are happening in a deeper, underlying reality. What we see as our universe is really us—our individual and collective

Physicist Brian Greene sums it up well: “Common experience—mundane, ordinary, day-to-day activities” are “part of a classical charade, hiding the true nature of our quantum world.” Our everyday world is “nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing

To what extent could a virtual-reality generator be programmed to give the user the experience of past-directed time travel? We shall see that the answer to this question, like all questions about the scope of virtual reality, tells us about physical reality as well.