Biocentrism, The New Face Of The Cosmos

Five hundred years ago people used to think the earth was flat. Evidence to the contrary was dismissed as absurd: "If the world was really a ball of rock," some claimed "people at the bottom would fall off." And before Galileo, it seemed stupid to think that we were whirling around the sun at 67 thousand miles per hour. It would have blown the hair off our head, right? Once again, puzzles of science are forcing a rethink of the world that goes far beyond anything people think is possible. Biocentrism explains how life is not a mere accident of physics, but rather is essential to the existence of the universe.

A string of new scientific experiments suggest the universe is not the dreary play of billiard balls that we've been taught since grade school. For all intents and purposes, our view of the world is the same as a chipmunk or a squirrel. The squirrel opens his eyes and the acorn is just miraculously there - he grabs it and scurries up the tree without further thought. We humans aren't any different: we wake up in the morning and- and voilà! -the world is just magically there. We think there are all these atoms 'out there' just bouncing around whether we're looking at them or not.

However, experiments have routinely shown just the opposite: Particles don't have real properties if no one is observing. Consider the famous two-hole experiment. When scientists watch a particle pass through two holes in a barrier, the particle behaves like a bullet and goes through one hole or the other. But if you don't watch, it acts like a wave and can go through both holes at the same time.

Bizarre, right? But these are real experiments that have been carried out so many times that no physicist questions them. In fact, the results have been described as impossible to comprehend. Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, once said: "I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped." But biocentrism makes sense of it all for the first time.

Consider the color and brightness of everything you see 'out there.' On its own, light doesn't have any color or brightness at all. The unquestionable reality is that nothing remotely resembling what you see could be present without your consciousness. Consider the weather: We step outside and see a blue sky - but the cells in our brain could easily be changed so we 'see' red or green instead. We think it feels hot and humid, but to a tropical frog it would feel cold and dry. In any case, you get the point. This logic applies to virtually everything.

Consider space and time themselves. What are they? Wave your hand through the air. If you take everything away, what's left? The answer is nothing. So why do we pretend space is a thing? The same thing applies for time - you can't put it in a bottle like milk. Space and time are not objects. Look at anything - say the print on this page. You can't see it through the bone that surrounds your brain. No, everything you see and experience right now is an organized whirl of information occurring in your mind. It's all organized in your head in techicolor. That is, unless you're colorblind - then your brain weaves objects together without colors. In fact, with a little genetic engineering, you could probably make everything that's red vibrate or make a noise instead, or even make you want to have sex. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting everything together.

The structure of the universe itself is probably the best argument for biocentrism. It has a long list of traits that make it appear as if everything - from atoms to stars - was tailor-made just for us. For instance, if the Big Bang was just one part in a million more powerful, the cosmos would have blown outward too fast to allow stars and worlds to form. Result: No us. There are over 200 parameters so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random. Tweak any of them and you never existed. None of them are predicted by any theory -- they all seem carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. The only scientific explanation (the so-called 'Anthropic Principle') says that we must find these conditions, because if we're alive, what else could we find? Of course, this isn't really an explanation unless you claim that there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be in the lucky-one. But there is no evidence whatsoever for these other universes anymore than there is for the existence of the Easter Bunny. The only real explanation is biocentrism, which explains how the universe is created by life, not the other way around.

According to biocentrism, space and time are not hard, cold physical objects, but rather forms of animal sense perception. When we speak of time, we inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time. Consider Heisenberg's famous 'uncertainty principle.' If there was really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then you should be able to measure all their properties. But it turns out you can't - for instance, a particle's exact location and momentum cannot be known at the same time. They're like the man and the women in the cuckoo-clock - when one goes in the other comes out. This uncertainty is built in the fabric of the universe, but no one has a clue why. It only makes sense if we accept the fact that the universe is biocentric.

Consider a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots an arrow and the camera follows its trajectory. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame -- you stare at the image of an arrow in mid-flight. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but it's going nowhere; its velocity is no longer known. This is the fuzziness described by in the uncertainty principle: sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively being reconstructed inside our heads. Time is simply the summation of the 'frames' occurring inside the mind. But change doesn't mean there is an actual invisible matrix called "time" in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things.

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We can't pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is not a thing or object. It is part of our mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. We think of space as a vast container that has no walls. But this is false. Distances between objects change depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.

By treating space and time as fundamental and independent things, we pick a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world. In fact, new experiments are starting to confirm that quantum effects apply to the everyday world of human-scale objects.

Biocentrism unlocks the cage we have unwittingly confined ourselves. A new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within the existing paradigm. But allowing the observer into the equation opens new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death. Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of science as scientists have been attempting to do ever since Einstein. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to truly understand the world will remain a road to nowhere.

Adapted from Biocentrism by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books.

Comments

[fairwitness]

I'm sure you are aware of the Perennial Philosophy and the ancient idea that consciousness *precedes* matter and is, as it were, it's "ground"--and I read your theory to basically agree with this idea, using science to explore it in it's particulars, free of the very common unexamined materialist assumptions that most scientists carry into their work.

Alan Watts did a good job of distilling these ideas into a coherent, modern philosophy of consciousness as NOT an artifact of a preexisting universe but as THE essential Being of the Universe, with matter the artifact of consciousness. Along with the realization that all of Being is *obviously* one event seen from multiple and infinitely diverse viewpoints, there is sound and reasonable support for your Bio-centrism.

And the critical teachings are always about outgrowing the mind's inevitable cultural programming and so awakening the inherent human function of "presence"--to be present in time and space and perceive reality as it unfolds moment-to-moment. Not so much something that one "does" as something that "happens" when the mind relaxes--like the Universe itself. "The meal, rather than the menu."

[billjv]

I've read and seen so many articles both for and against the ideas of quantum effects and consciousness that I think I've fallen down the weirdness path to total disbelief of ANY theory of existence. In other words, none of this exists! ;)

Seriously tho, I'm no expert but didn't I see a recent paper that supposedly "proved" the multiple universes theory, or at least a significant aspect of that theory using the particle accelerator research from Sweden? Hmm, maybe that was in another universe. Guess I'll have to Google it.

The most frustrating thing about this entire debate on Quantum weirdness is that while physicists don't want to give credence to "new age" ideas about consciousness and reality, the results tell us over and over that at least collectively our consciousness absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, DOES affect "reality". The problem is that physicists (for good reason) don't want to be associated with that type of movement, because the new agers use the results to explain all kinds of kooky ideas. Physicists still like being able to back up their kooky theories with boring old math. Buzzkill, dudes.

So what's the right answer? Is, or is not, the universe kooky/spooky/weird? I guess we are really creme-filled rather than cake donuts in this crazy multiverse.... unless... we are the holes?

[Robert Lanza, M.D. - Huffpost Blogger]

I have no problem with "multiple universes." However, the purpose of science is to explain what's going on in OUR universe. Biocentrism furnishes answers to puzzles of science without the need for extra universes or dimensions. A lot of what's going on in 'science' reminds me of the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy, where they just kept adding more and more epicycles (circles within circles) until the system was nearly unworkable. And that's exactly where science is today .

[Hair ShirT]

This is the first Ive heard of Biocentrism. Not sure I'm buying it. I get the whole "we see things only through our eyes" thing but quantum mechanics and cosmology are based on mathematical theories to test. Our perception is really only limited to microscopes and telescopes of varying powers beyong that it is strictly theory. Our abilities to "see" the cosmos is highly limited. But, there are those who believe there are quite possibly many many more "universes". Wouldn't the multiverse theory fly in the face of biocentrism? Simply because although our scientific principles apply to this universe that doesn't necessarily mean those same priciples exist in the other "dimensions". Or are you saying until we "see" or experience those dimensions they simply don't exist?

[Joe Marsh]

Are not all "mathematical theories" constructs of mind? Sure they provide us with damn good interpretations of what's happening around us along with fun toys to play with, however, what is true without thought?

Wouldn't be nice if 80% of the time we could be in a state of presence with what is and the remaining 20% of the time "getting things done" with indescribable ease.

Utimately, it's all the same thing...du­alism/non-­jualism, zero/infinity, etc.

Check out adyashanti.org.

[HistoryBuff3]

I find all this fascinating. As has been pointed out, a paradigm shift is always a messy and chaotic process, and there is no reason to think this one is going to be any different. Here are a couple of excerpts from Loren Eiseley’s book “The Firmament of Time” that seem particularly relevant here:

“The simplistic idea that science marches undeviatingly down an ever broadening highway can scarcely be sustained by the historian of ideas. As in other human affairs, there may be prejudice, rigidity, timid evasion and sometimes inability to reorient oneself rapidly to drastic changes in world view. The student of scientific history soon learns that a given way of looking at things, a kind of unconscious conformity which exists even in a free society, may prevent a new contribution from being followed up, or its implications from being fully grasped.”

“The truth is better, if less appetizing. Like other members of the human race, scientists are capable of prejudice. They have occasionally persecuted other scientists, and they have not always been able to see that an old theory, given a hairsbreadth twist, might open an entirely new vista to the human reason….The man who learns how difficult it is to step outside the intellectual climate of his or any age, has taken the first step on the road to emancipation, to world citizenship of a high order.”

[Robert Lanza, M.D. - Huffpost Blogger]

Unfortunately, most critics of biocentrism are evaluating it from within the paradigm it is seeking to replace. Of course, this does not work, and inevitably leads to conclusions that are nonsensical and absurd.

[research]

It's not the consciousness noticing of a photon that resolves it's parameters, it's the physical MEASUREMENT of the photon.

Our universe is in our mind.

We could all be simulations in some supercomputer, but that line of thought goes nowhere.

I could be the only mind in the universe, but I don't believe that. I believe there is a physical universe outside my mind. I believe that science reveals that universe. I find that Science is very good at predicting how the universe works.

The universes's 200 parameters are from Human minds, they are OUR way of looking at the universe. Since this universe created us, it should come as no surprise that a change in any of it's fundamental parameters, as humans see them, would negate our existence.

Indeed, you are anthropomorphizing the evolution of the universe as the evolution of us. Are we the purpose of the universe?

We think so.

[NoSillyName]

Impressive bio, but I can't say I see anything I haven't read or heard before. Just a new moniker.

I'd be interested in reading more from Lanza.

[kwinter]

Excerpts from an article titled 'The Myth of Quantum Consciousness' by Victor Stenger:

"In an article in the November/December 1992 issue entitled “The Wise Silence,” Robert Lanza says that, according to the current quantum mechanical view of reality, “We are all the ephemeral forms of a consciousness greater than ourselves.” The mind of each human being on earth is instantaneously connected to each other - past, present and future - as “a part of every mind existing in space and time.”

"The world would be a far different place for all of us if it was just all in our heads - if we really could make our own reality as the New Agers believe. The fact that the world rarely is what we want it to be is the best evidence that we have little to say about it. The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world."

[Robert Lanza, M.D. - Huffpost Blogger]

This is a misunderstanding of biocentrism. Yes, reality is a process that involves our consciousness, but it doesn’t mean we can “make our own reality as the New Agers believe.” You can choose whether to have cornflakes or Captain Crunch for breakfast, but if you jump off the roof and try to fly, you’ll be sorely disappointed. However much you may want, you can’t violate the rules of spatiotemporial logic.

[kwinyan]

I found two major premises in the article to be questionable. One is that space and time are significantly relative to our perception. If that's the case, how is that reconciled with both as constants in the universe complementing each other? The other supports an intent or form of consciousness orchestrating the Big Bang, suggesting the only alternative explanation is a theory comprising an infinite number of universes. I'm a little familiar with the multiple universe theory and don't recall it invoking innumerable universes to explain the Big Bang.

[Vinay Soni]

There are schools of thought that say that life has always been there on earth. No beginning. Timeless.

There are also schools of thought in the eastern philosophy that say that there is no planet devoid of life.

Our consciousness is limited (from birth to death), doesn't mean it begins when we are born. It survives death - as per many religions.

So "life is not a mere accident of physics, but rather is essential to the existence of the universe" is not that hard to say. If there is no life, what would be the purpose of matter? Similarly, if there is no consciousness, what is the point in a body (human). It is dead.

[cayuse]

It is what it is!

Man can only study life after the chicken and the egg. Faith assumes a conscious beginning

Biocentrism does allow both to exist observing the same phenominia from different perspectives.

WHAT UP? WHAT IT IS!

[mmfiore]

We are a group that is challenging the current paradigm in physics which is Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. There is a new Theory of Everything Breakthrough. It exposes the flaws in both Quantum Theory and String Theory. Please Help us set the physics community back on the right course and prove that Einstein was right! Visit our site The Theory of Super Relativity: http://www.superrelativity.org

[elmerfude]

This doesn't make any sense to me. If the universe just exists because of our individual perception of it, that means we have several billion universes running around right now not to mention all the ones the animals create. This sounds like the new age argument that we create our own world just by thinking it. I rejected religion because it is so anthropocentric, arrogant and narcissistic; I am tempted to do the same thing here. The fact is the universe doesn't give a damn whether we exist or not. Just go to the museum and look at all the extinct fossils who probably thought they were special as well.

[LolaFontay]

I am aware of two primary definitions for the term biocentrism, copied from Wiki:

1. A scientific theory which posits the view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around. In this view, current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness.

2. A point of view which centers on the value of non-human species, ecosystems and processes in nature, as opposed to anthropocentrism, a point of view which centers on the value of humans.

If I understand this post, it is dealing with the first definition. Personally, I favor the second definition.

[Halter]

Flashback? Far out.

[PlaceboStudman]

This made absolutely no sense, and seems to come from someone trying to make a veiled attempt at explaining some kind of Intelligent Design theory.

For example, the author states:

"When scientists watch a particle pass through two holes in a barrier, the particle behaves like a bullet and goes through one hole or the other. But if you don't watch, it acts like a wave and can go through both holes at the same time."

if you're not watching something happen, how do you know it happens?? How do you know the particle acts like a wave or a straight line? Besides, we already know that EVERYTHING, every particle, every atom vibrates at a certain frequency, so it can't act like a bullet, exactly.

The author here is trying to make an argument that everything is perception, and while that is true, where is the mathematical equations to back that up? At least Einstein's theory of relativity which contends that matter and energy are interchangeable, has the mathematical equations to back up the theory

[arcanepsyche]

There would be no equation. Equations are part of perception.