Why in the world do we exist? What sustains us in and above the void of nothingness?
A series of experiments hold the answer. I recall an ordinary day that made this obvious. Everyone was already at the hospital making morning rounds. "It doesn't matter," I thought as I scraped a patch of ice crystals off the window. "I'm already late." Through the clear area I could see the underlying apparatus of the trees lining the road. The early morning sun slanted down, throwing into gleaming brightness the bare twigs. There was a feeling of mystery contained in that scene, a powerful feeling that something was veiled behind it that wasn't accounted for in the scientific journals.
I put on my lab coat and set on my way to the university. As I strolled toward the hospital I had a curious impulse to detour round the biology pond. Perhaps I preferred to avoid harsh-etched things before my eyes at morning: the sight of the stainless-steel machines perhaps, or the stark lights in the operating room. It was this that had brought me to pause at the edge of the pond, in undisturbed quiet and solitude. Thoreau would have approved. "Poetry and art," he wrote "and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour."
It was comforting to overlook the pond, and watch the photons dancing on its surface like so many notes from Mahler's Ninth Symphony. For an instant my body was beyond affection by the elements, and my mind merged with the whole of nature as much as it has ever been in my life. In that unassuming calm I saw nature, naked and unclothed, as she was for Eiseley and Thoreau. I headed back to the hospital, where morning rounds were nearly finished. A dying woman sat on the bed before me. Outside a songbird had its trill, sitting on a limb over the pond.
Later on, I thought of the secret denied me at dawn when I peeped through that little ice-crystal hole into the morning. "We are too content with our sense organs," Eiseley once said. "It's no longer enough to see as a man sees -− even to the ends of the universe." Our radiotelescopes and supercolliders merely extend the perceptions of our mind. We see the finished work only. We don't see how we are part of the whole, save for a space of perhaps five seconds on some glorious winter morning when all the senses are one.
We scientists have looked at the world for so long that we no longer challenge its reality. Here is the Universe: our sense organs perceive atoms and galaxies to some 14 billion light-years, although we can't see with the eye of reason, that the world is for us merely a bundle of sensations unified by laws which exist in our understanding. We can't see the laws that uphold the world; and that if they be removed, the trees and the mountains, indeed the whole Universe, would collapse to nothing.
According to biocentrism, time is the key. Physicists find that almost all models for reality from Newton's laws through Einstein's field equations, have no need for time. Time is a biocentric fabrication. To understand this, consider a movie of an archery tournament. If the projector stopped on a single frame, you'd know the position of the arrow with great accuracy −- its 20 feet just above the grandstand. But you've lost all information about its momentum. It's going nowhere − its velocity is no longer known. This is the fuzziness described by the uncertainty principle: sharpness in one parameter causes blurriness in the other.
Experiments show that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. This only makes sense from a biocentric perspective: Time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events -- the still frames of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor of a projector, weaving spatial states into the "current" of life. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes can't see through the cranium; everything you perceive -- even this page −- is being reconstructed inside your head.
At each moment we're at the edge of a paradox described by the Greek philosopher Zeno. Since an object can't occupy two places simultaneously, he contended an arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight, and motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time [motion] isn't a feature of the outer, spatial world, but is rather a conception of thought?
Experiments confirm that Zeno was right. Scientists proved what in the world of quantum physics is equivalent to demonstrating that a watched pot doesn't boil. This behavior -- the "quantum Zeno effect" −- turns out to be a function of observation. "It seems," said Peter Coveney, "that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing." Theoretically, by the tenets of the Zeno effect, if a nuclear bomb were watched intently enough, it wouldn't explode, that is, if you could keep checking its atoms every million trillionth of a second.
Bizarre? It's hard to believe the Zeno effect is real. The problem lies not in the experiments, but in our way of thinking, in our failure to accept the evidence. While it's true Zeno's paradox can be "explained" through the application of sophisticated mathematical concepts, mathematics is just a way to quantify phenomena and shouldn't be considered a replacement for it. The Zeno effect is a fact. The uncertainty principle is a fact. Biocentrism is the only humanly comprehensible way to explain them (quantum phenomena are only 'weird' in the context of the existing paradigm).
Time is the glue that holds the world together. Without rules to relate one frame (the "past") with the next frame (the 'present') there could be no motion -- indeed, life couldn't exist. When asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied "There must be something behind the energy." Indeed, that something is the mind. At the most irreducible level, space and time are defined by electromagnetic energy (E=mc2 tells us that all matter is made up of energy). The electric component generates a magnetic field, leapfrogging through space (at the speed of light) via a mathematical relationship that infuses temporal information into the bottom of the world.
This isn't, you understand, an illusion. Spinoza's genius sensed this back in the 17th century. To be conscious of space and time, he explained, is to transcend space and time. The mind transcends space and time in the sense that they are for it and it's not in them. This is why, in real experiments with entangled particles, it appears that things are instantaneously connected behind the physical world as if there's no space or time between them. This is also why, in yet other experiments, particles seem to spring into existence only when they're observed. However, this is -− the critics will charge -− on the one hand, old news; on the other, headline-simplified.
For myself, five seconds on a winter's morning is the most convincing evidence I should ever need. One can't but come closer to God or Heaven than to merge oneself with the universal order of things. To become, as it were, part of nature. As Thoreau said of Walden Pond:
"I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand...
Robert Lanza, MD has published extensively in leading scientific journals, and has over two dozen books, including 'Biocentrism,' which lays out the full scientific argument for his theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
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and all of it comes and goes --including what we call our individual body. If I understand him correctly
Lanza thinks that time is something we made up but the physical laws somehow are not such. Both clearly are man's.
And man's formulation of scientific physical concepts has arisen from the wider life---not life from the concepts. The world is in fact made up of what shows up: sense, thought, feeling, imagination and so on--
these are the world. Remove them and the world is removed. It is to me a complete idiocy to insist that the scientific physical concepts of the universe are all that the world reduces to and to exclude the rest of life from the universe. It is just a patent falsity to say that to know existence, to be familiar with the world, is to know a scientific physical concept.
The world is more simple, basic and obvious than science would ever like to admit---the world consists in what shows up to, and as, every person, every day. IN knowledge of this, the basic fundament of human existence , we are, every one of us--equal with any other. And science, no matter the expansiveness of its
physical conceptions, has no other resource than, and remains within the bounds of, these daily presences that make up all our lives and all the world.
Zeno either forgot, or never knew, about mass and momentum. Even if an observer's hypothetical viewpoint in time freezes events in place, the mass and momentum that accompany that event-stream continues to exist into the next moment, and the one beyond that, etc.
Zeno might have been extrapolating his prior mundane experience with things "in only one place" -- momentum then only "keeps" them "at rest." But with the addition of differential momentum, things change. Motion cannot be really be stopped, at the macro level, by using one's mind to conceive it, any more than an arrow could ever be separated from its momentum.
Zeno: it's only IN YOUR HEAD that the arrow is "at rest" -- in the world of your figments, of your suppositions. In the real world, it never stops moving. Whatever the cases are in particle physics, real arrows are either in motion, OR at rest; never both at once, unless you cheat by defining a "moving" frame.
Why have humans denied the mysteries of Earth or at least considered these mysteries evidence of visitations, not logical.
Having read ancient writings that predicted future events I have become to believe in energy is the source of our existance and that our energy is forever, black matter.
As we live here we prepare our energy and Christ was to be a method of showing humans that life exist after the shell is gone, now how would you describe that to a camel jockey 2,000 years ago when energy was not even known? How do you describe flying angels, fiery chariots in the sky, a wheel that lands?
Why can't the cloth of Turin be real and only the energy left on it from being transported up remains?
Is artificial insemination not possible?
Is not mental telepathy not possible?
Is hypnosis not possible?
Is reviving and healing today the miracles of 2,000 years ago?
We humans have a problem thinking beyond what is known, remember You Don't Know What You Don't Know
My 2 cents
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This is emblematic of the conceptual mistakes we humans so regularly make. We abstract to "increase" our understanding, and then, lo and behold, our understanding DECREASES by the same measure as we've abstracted reality. Perhaps we simply are not big enough to gain valid information this way.
"Experiments show that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality." -- But again, they only show these results when we abstract certain parts (such as time). Isn't it plain what's happening? If reality is left whole, it acts a certain way, but when we conceptually warp it, it "goes wrong" because things simply cannot be made to work in an incomplete state.
Time does exist. Any speculations about reality must take that into account. It can never be said to not exist, nor can it be reversed. We are creatures of time, and all of our activities and conceptions inescapably happen within a context of time. That must be the starting point of understanding.
The point here, is that our fundamental misunderstanding of the WAY in which phenomena occur, is completely obscured by our biocentric way of understanding the Universe, meaning that Time [motion] isn't a feature of the outer, spatial world, but is rather a conception of thought.
Everything is dependent upon our subjective observation of phenomena in time and space. Zeno's arrow (still or in motion) is utterly dependent on our perception of it. This is because, in order to be conscious of time and space, our minds have to transcend it. We cannot understand our current position in time without some reference to the past and the future.
But the past and the future dont ever really INHERENTLY exist at all, by their very nature. There is only now. Thats it.
That chair your sitting in didnt Exist 5 seconds ago, nor will it Exist. It only EXISTS right now, in that razor's edge of time we call the present moment. Everything else is a construct of our brains. Can you touch or see the chair from 5 seconds ago? No, because past chair doesnt Exist independently of your perception of it. This is because of our biocentric understanding of time and the Universe.
Past or future, and everything then in them, only exist NOW in our imagination/memory. Therefore, it is utterly impossible for past and future to exist independently of that perception.
I also agree with your views of time. If nothing, and absolutely nothing 'changes' then does time exist? How does one differentiate past from future?
Can we imagine some intelligent blind fish, come to the surface wearing a water suit? Would it come to sense the night sky? What would it make of it? Suppose porpoises are intelligent with a language of badly reproduced echo images, some as metaphors? When would we be able to communicate? We need more humility than the writer. If we only use poetry and not science (poetry verified) we run the risk of the Captain and crew mentioned by (http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/the-hunting-of-the-snark/chapter-02.html) Lewis Carroll -
"He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand. "