Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

by Robert Lanza

  But a solution lies within our grasp, a solution hinted at by the frequency with which, as the old model breaks down, we see an answer peeking out from under a corner. This is the underlying problem: we have ignored a critical component of the cosmos, shunted it out of the way because we didn’t know what to do with it. This component is consciousness.

  2

  IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS . . . WHAT?

  All things are one.

  —Heraclitus, On the Universe (540-480 BC)

  How can a man whose career revolves around stretching the scientific method to its outer bounds—stem cell research, animal cloning, reversing the aging process at the cellular level—bear witness to the limits of his profession?

  But there is more to life than can be explained by our science. I readily recall how everyday life makes this obvious.

  Just a short time ago, I crossed the causeway of the small island I call home. The pond was dark and still. I stopped and turned off my flashlight. Several strange glowing objects caught my attention on the side of the road. I thought they were some of those jack-o’lantern mushrooms, Clitocybe illudens, whose luminescent caps had just started to push up through the decaying leaves. I squatted down to observe one of them with my flashlight. It turned out to be a glowworm, the luminous larvae of the European beetle Lampyris noctiluca. There was a primitiveness in its little segmented oval body, like some trilobite that had just crawled out of the Cambrian sea 500 million years ago. There we were, the beetle and I, two living objects that had entered into each other’s worlds, and yet were fundamentally linked together all along. It ceased emitting its greenish light and I, for my part, turned off my flashlight.

  I wondered if our little interaction was any different from that of any other two objects in the universe. Was this primitive little grub just another collection of atoms—proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun? Could it be grasped by a mechanist’s logic?

  It is true that the laws of physics and chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the carbohydrates, lipids, and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this luminous little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understanding of life cannot be found only by looking at cells and molecules. Conversely, physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience.

  It seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere of physical reality just as I was the center of mine. We were connected not only by intertwined consciousness, nor simply by being alive at the same moment in Earth’s 3.9-billion-year biological history but by something both mysterious and suggestive—a pattern that is a template for the cosmos itself.

  Just as the mere existence of a postage stamp of Elvis would reveal to an alien visitor much more than a frozen snapshot of pop music history, the slug had a tale to tell that could illuminate even the depths of a wormhole—if we only had the right mindset to understand it.

  Although the beetle stayed quiescent there in the darkness, it had little walking legs, neatly lined up under its segmented body, and possessed sensory cells that transmitted messages to the cells in its brain. Perhaps the creature was too primitive to collect data and pinpoint my location in space. Maybe my existence in its universe was limited to some huge and hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight in the air. I do not know. But as I stood up and left, I no doubt dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the glowworm’s little world.

  Our science to date has failed to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are the bottom line in understanding the larger universe—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process.

  It is a vast mystery that I have pursued my entire life with a lot of help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the greatest and most lauded minds of the modern age. I have also come to conclusions that would shock the conventions of my predecessors, placing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything (or TOE) that has evaded other disciplines.

  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the first second of time after the Big Bang rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.

  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious awareness. As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

  George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named, came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he would say, “are our perceptions.”

  A biologist is at first glance perhaps an unlikely source for a new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and some cosmologists predict that a unifying theory of the universe may be discovered in the next two decades, it is perhaps inevitable that a biologist finally seeks to unify existing theories of the “physical world” with those of the “living world.” What other discipline can approach it? In that regard, biology should really be the first and last study of science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by the humanly created natural sciences used to understand the universe.

  A deep problem lurks, too: we have failed to protect science against speculative theories that have so entered mainstream thinking that they now masquerade as fact. The “ether” of the nineteenth century; the “space-time” of Einstein; the “string theory” of the new millennium with new dimensions blowing up in different realms, and not only strings but “bubbles” shimmering down the byways of the universe are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to one hundred in some theories) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled up like soda-straws at every point in space.

  Today’s preoccupation with unprovable physical “theories of everything” is a sacrilege to science itself, a strange detour from the purpose of the scientific method, whose bible has always decreed that we must question everything relentlessly and not worship what Bacon called “The Idols of the Mind.” Modern physics has become like Swift’s Kingdom of Laputa, flying precariously on an island above the Earth and indifferent to the world beneath. When science tries to resolve a theory’s conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, dimensions unknown to our senses and for which not a shred of observational or experimental evidence exists, we need to take a time-out and examine our dogmas. And when ideas are thrown around with no physical backing and no hope of experimental confirmation, one may wonder whether this can still be called science at all. “If you’re not observing,” says a relativity expert, Professor Tarun Biswas of the State University of New York, “There’s no point in coming up with theories.”

  But perhaps the cracks in the system are just the points that let the light shine more directly on the mystery of life.

  The root of this present waywardness is always the same—the attempt of physicists to overstep the legitimate boundaries of science. The questions they most lust to solve are actually bound up with the issues of life and consciousness. But it’s a Sisyp
husian task: physics can furnish no true answers for them.

  If the most primary questions of the universe have traditionally been tackled by physicists attempting to create grand unified theories—exciting and glamorous as they are—such theories remain an evasion, if not a reversal of the central mystery of knowledge: that the laws of the world somehow produced the observer in the first place! And this is one of the central themes of biocentrism and this book: that the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.

  This is not some minor tweak in worldview. Our entire education system in all disciplines, the construction of our language, and our socially accepted “givens”—those starting points in conversations—revolve around a bottom-line mindset that assumes a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived on a very temporary basis. It is further assumed that we accurately perceive this external pre-existing reality and play little or no role in its appearance.

  So the first step in constructing a credible alternative is to question the standard view that the universe would exist even if it were empty of life, and absent any consciousness or perception of it. Although overturning the widespread current mindset, ingrained as deeply as it has been, may require the remainder of this book and perusal of strong, current evidence from disparate sources, we can certainly begin with simple logic. Certainly, great earlier thinkers have insisted that logic alone is all that’s needed to see the universe in a fresh light, not complex equations or experimental data using $50 billion particle colliders. Indeed, a bit of thought will make it obvious that without perception, there can be no reality.

  Absent the act of seeing, thinking, hearing—in short, awareness in its myriad aspects—what have we got? We can believe and aver that there’s a universe out there even if all living creatures were nonexistent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a thinking organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really there? We’ll delve into this in much greater detail in the next chapter; for now, we can probably agree that such lines of inquiry start to smack of philosophy, and it is far better to avoid that murky swamp and answer this by science alone.

  For the moment, therefore, we’ll accept on a provisional level that what we’d clearly and unambiguously recognize as existence must begin with life and perception. Indeed, what could existence mean, absent consciousness of any kind?

  Take the seemingly undeniable logic that your kitchen is always there, its contents assuming all their familiar forms, shapes, and colors, whether or not you are in it. At night, you click off the light, walk through the door, and leave for the bedroom. Of course it’s there, unseen, all through the night. Right?

  But consider: the refrigerator, stove, and everything else are composed of a shimmering swarm of matter/energy. Quantum theory, to which we will devote two full chapters, tells us that not a single one of those subatomic particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather, they merely exist as a range of probabilities that are unmanifest. In the presence of an observer—that is, when you go back in to get a drink of water—each one’s wave function collapses and it assumes an actual position, a physical reality. Until then, it’s merely a swarm of possibilities. And wait, if that seems too far out, then forget quantum madness and stay with everyday science, which comes to a similar conclusion because the shapes, colors, and forms known as your kitchen are seen as they are solely because photons of light from the overhead bulb bounce off the various objects and then interact with your brain through a complex set of retinal and neural intermediaries. This is undeniable—it’s basic seventh-grade science. The problem is, light doesn’t have any color nor any visual characteristics at all, as we shall see in the next chapter. So while you may think that the kitchen as you remember it was “there” in your absence, the reality is that nothing remotely resembling what you can imagine could be present when a consciousness is not interacting. (If this seems impossible, stay tuned: this is one of the easiest, most demonstrable aspects of biocentrism.)

  Indeed, it is here that biocentrism arrives at a very different view of reality than that which has been generally embraced for the last several centuries. Most people, in and out of the sciences, imagine the external world to exist on its own, with an appearance that more or less resembles what we ourselves see. Human or animal eyes, according to this view, are mere windows that accurately let in the world. If our personal window ceases to exist, as in death, or is painted black and opaque, as in blindness, that doesn’t in any way alter the continued existence of the external reality or its supposed “actual” appearance. A tree is still there, the moon still shines, whether or not we are cognizing them. They have an independent existence. By this reasoning, the human eye and brain have been designed to let us cognize the actual visual appearance of things, and to alter nothing. True, a dog may see an autumn maple solely in shades of gray, and an eagle may perceive much greater detail among its leaves, but most creatures basically apprehend the same visually real object, which persists even if no eyes are upon it.

  Not so, says biocentrism.

  This “Is it really there?” issue is ancient, and of course predates biocentrism, which makes no pretense about being the first to take a stance about it. Biocentrism, however, explains why one view and not the other must be correct. The converse is equally true: once one fully understands that there is no independent external universe outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place.

  3

  THE SOUND OF A FALLING TREE

  Who hasn’t considered or at least heard the old question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a sound?”

  If we conduct a quick survey of friends and family, we shall find that the vast majority of people answer decisively in the affirmative. “Of course a falling tree makes a sound,” someone recently replied, with a touch of pique, as if this were a question too dumb to merit a moment’s contemplation. By taking this stance, what people are actually averring is their belief in an objective, independent reality. Obviously, the prevailing mindset is of a universe that exists just as well without us as with us. This fits in tidily with the Western view held at least since Biblical times, that “little me” is of small importance or consequence in the cosmos.

  Few consider (or perhaps have sufficient science background for) a realistic sonic appraisal of what actually occurs when that tree falls in the woods. What is the process that produces sound? So, if the reader will forgive a quick return to fifth-grade Earth Science, here’s a quick summary: sound is created by a disturbance in some medium, usually air, although sound travels even faster and more efficiently through denser materials such as water or steel. Limbs, branches, and trunks violently striking the ground create rapid pulses of air. A deaf person can readily feel some of these pulsations; they are particularly blatant on the skin when the pulses repeat with a frequency of five to thirty times a second. So, what we have in hand with the tumbling tree, in actuality, are rapid air-pressure variations, which spread out by traveling through the surrounding medium at around 750 mph. As they do so, they lose their coherency until the background evenness of the air is reestablished. This, according to simple science, is what occurs even when a brain-ear mechanism is absent—a series of greater and lesser air-pressure passages. Tiny, rapid, puffs of wind. There is no sound attached to them.

  Now, let’s lend an ear to the scene. If someone is nearby, the air puffs physically cause the ear’s tympanic membrane (eardrum) to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing between 20 and 20,000 times a second (with an upper limit more like 10,000 for people over forty, and even less for those of us whose misspent youth included earsplitting rock concerts). Air that puffs 15 times a second is not intrinsically different from air that pulses 30 times, yet the former will never result in a human perception of sound because of the design of our neural architecture. In any case, nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical signals to a sec
tion of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise. This experience, then, is inarguably symbiotic. The pulses of air by themselves do not constitute any sort of sound, which is obvious because 15-pulse air puffs remain silent no matter how many ears are present. Only when a specific range of pulses are present is the ear’s neural architecture designed to let human consciousness conjure the noise experience. In short, an observer, an ear, and a brain are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air pulses. The external world and consciousness are correlative. And a tree that falls in an empty forest creates only silent air pulses—tiny puffs of wind.

  When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.

  Now consider a lit candle placed on a table in that same empty forest. This is not an advisable setup, but let’s pretend Smokey the Bear is supervising the whole thing with an extinguisher at the ready, while we consider whether the flame has intrinsic brightness and a yellow color when no one’s watching.

  Even if we contradict quantum experiments and allow that electrons and all other particles have assumed actual positions in the absence of observers (much more on this later), the flame is still merely a hot gas. Like any source of light, it emits photons or tiny packets of waves of electromagnetic energy. Each consists of electrical and magnetic pulses. These momentary exhibitions of electricity and magnetism are the whole show, the nature of light itself.