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

by Robert Lanza

  It would be nice if the debate changed from the contentious one about exchanging evolution for religion, and switched to the more productive tack of asking whether science can explain why the universe appears to be built for life. Of course, the fact that the cosmos seems exactly balanced and designed for life is just an inescapable scientific observation—not an explanation for why.

  At the moment, there are only three explanations for this mystery. One is to say, “God did that,” which explains nothing even if it is true. The second is to invoke the Anthropic Principle’s reasoning, several versions of which strongly support biocentrism, which we shall now examine. The third option is biocentrism pure and simple, nothing else needed.

  No matter which logic one adopts, one has to come to terms with the fact that we are living in a very peculiar cosmos.

  By the late sixties, it had become clear that if the Big Bang had been 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. Even more coincidentally, the universe’s four forces and all of its constants are just perfectly set up for atomic interactions, the existence of atoms and elements, planets, liquid water, and life. Tweak any of them and you never existed.

  The constants (and their modern values) include:

  Values given below are from the CODATA 1998 recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States (NIST).

  Values contain the (uncertainty) in the last two decimal places given in brackets. Values that do not have this uncertainty listed are exact.

  For example:

  mu = 1.66053873(13) x 10-27 kg

  mu = 1.66053873 x 10-27 kg

  Uncertainty in mu = 0.00000013 x 10-27 kg

  Name Symbol Value

  Atomic Mass Unit mu 1.66053873(13) x 10-27 kg

  Avogadro’s Number NA 6.02214199(47) x 1023 mol-1

  Bohr Magneton µ B 9.27400899(37) x 10-24 J T-1

  Bohr Radius ao 0.5291772083(19) x 10-10 m

  Boltzmann’s Constant k 1.3806503(24) x 10-23 J K-1

  Compton Wavelength λc 2.426310215(18) x 10-12 m

  Deuteron Mass md 3.34358309(26) x 10-27 kg

  Electric Constant εo 8.854187817 x 10-12 F m-1

  Electron Mass me 9.10938188(72) x 10-31 kg

  Electron-Volt eV 1.602176462(63) x 10-19 J

  Elementary Charge e 1.602176462(63) x 10-19 C

  Faraday Constant F 9.64853415(39) x 104 C mol-1

  Fine Structure Constant α 7.297352533(27) x 10-3

  Hartree Energy Eh 4.35974381(34) x 10-18 J

  Hydrogen Ground State 13.6057 eV

  Josephson Constant Kj 4.83597898(19) x 1014 Hz V-1

  Magnetic Constant µ o 4π x 10-7

  Molar Gas Constant R 8.314472(15) J K-1 mol-1

  Natural Unit of Action ħ 1.054571596(82) x 10-34 J s

  Newtonian Constant of Gravitation G 6.673(10) x 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2

  Neutron Mass mn 1.67492716(13) x 10-27 kg

  Nuclear Magneton µ n 5.05078317(20) x 10-27 J T-1

  Planck Constant h .62606876(52) x 10-34 J s = 2πħ

  Planck Length lp 1.6160(12) x 10-35 m

  Planck Mass mp 2.1767(16) x 10-8 kg

  Planck Time tp 5.3906(40) x 10-44 s

  Proton Mass mP 1.67262158(13) x 10-27 kg

  Rydberg Constant RH 10 9.73731568549(83) x 105 m-1

  Stefan Boltzmann Constant σ 5.670400(40) x 10-8 W m-2 K-4

  Speed of Light in Vacuum c 2.99792458 x 108 m s-1

  Thompson Cross Section σe 0.665245854(15) x 10-28 m2

  Wien Displacement Law Constant b 2.8977686(51) x 10-3 m K

  Such life-friendly values of physics are built into the universe like the cotton and linen fibers woven into our currency. The gravitational constant is perhaps the most famous, but the fine structure constant is just as critical for life. Called alpha, if it were just 1.1x or more of its present value, fusion would no longer occur in stars. The fine-structure constant gets so much scrutiny because the Big Bang created almost pure hydrogen and helium and almost nothing else. Life needs oxygen and carbon (water alone requires oxygen) but this by itself is not so great a problem because oxygen is created in the cores of stars as an eventual product in nuclear fusion. Carbon is another story. So where did the carbon in our bodies come from? The answer was found a half-century ago, and, of course, involves those factories where all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are manufactured—in the centers of suns. When heavier stars later explode into supernovae, this material is released into their environments, where they are taken up, along with nebulous clouds of interstellar hydrogen, into the stuff that composes the next generation of stars and planets. When this happens in a newly formed generation of stars, these further enrich themselves with an even higher percentage of heavier elements, or metals, and the more massive of these eventually explode. The process repeats. In our own neck of the cosmic woods, our sun is a third-generation star, and its surrounding planets, including all materials comprising the living organisms on Earth, are composed of this nicely enriched, third-generation, complex-material inventory.

  For carbon in particular, the key to its existence lies in an odd quirk within the nuclear fusion process itself, the reactions that make the Sun and stars shine. Now, the most common nuclear reaction happens when two extremely fast-moving atomic nuclei or protons collide and fuse to form a heavier element that is usually helium, but can be even heavier, especially as the star ages. Carbon should not be capable of being manufactured by this process because all the intermediate steps from helium to carbon involve highly unstable nuclei. The only way for its creation would be for three helium nuclei to collide at the same time. But the likelihood of three helium nuclei colliding at the identical microsecond, even in the frenzied interiors of stars, are minuscule. It was Fred Hoyle—not of the card rules fame, but the one who championed the steady state theory of an eternal universe until that grand idea’s sad demise in the 1960s—who correctly figured out that something unusual and amazing must be at play in the interior of stars that could vastly increase the odds of this rare three-way collision, and give the universe the abundant carbon found in every living creature. The trick here was a kind of “resonance,” where disparate effects can come together to form something unexpected, the way the wind resonated with the structure of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge more than six decades ago, causing it to sway violently and collapse. Bingo: turns out, carbon has a resonant state at just the correct energy to let stars create it in significant quantities. The carbon resonance, in turn, directly depends on the value of the strong force, which is what glues together everything in each atomic nucleus out to the farthest villages of space-time.

  The strong force is still somewhat mysterious, yet is critical to the universe we know. Its influence only extends within the confines of an atom. Indeed, its strength falls off so quickly it’s already anemic at the edges of large atoms. This is why giant atoms such as uranium are so unstable. The outermost protons and neutrons in their nuclei lie at the fringes of the clump, where the strong force retains only a fragile hold, so occasionally one does overcome the otherwise iron-like grip of the strong force and falls off, changing the atom into something else.

  If the strong force and gravity are so amazingly tweaked, we can’t ignore the electromagnetic force that holds sway in the electrical and magnetic connections found in all atoms. Discussing it, the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said in his book The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton University Press, 1985): “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘han
d of God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.’ We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”

  It amounts to 1/137 when the units are filled in, and what it signifies is a constant of electromagnetism, another of the four fundamental forces, that helps facilitate the existence of atoms and allows the entire visible universe to exist. Any small change in its value and none of us are here.

  Such factual oddities powerfully influence modern cosmological thinking. After all, mustn’t cosmologists’ theories plausibly explain why we live in such a highly unlikely reality?

  “Not at all,” said Princeton physicist Robert Dicke in papers written in the sixties and elaborated upon by Brandon Carter in 1974. This perspective was dubbed “the Anthropic Principle.” Carter explained that what we can expect to observe “must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.” Put another way, if gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker, and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter, we couldn’t be here to think about it. Because we’re here, the universe has to be the way it is and therefore isn’t unlikely at all. Case closed.

  By this reasoning, there’s no need for cosmological gratitude. Our seemingly fortuitous, suspiciously specific locale, temperature range, chemical and physical milieus are just what’s needed to produce life. If we’re here, then this is what we must find around us.

  Such reasoning is now known as the “weak” version of the Anthropic Principle or WAP. The “strong” version, one that skirts the edges of philosophy even more closely but clearly supports biocentrism, says that the universe must have those properties that allow life to develop within it because it was obviously “designed” with the goal of generating and sustaining observers. But without biocentrism, the strong anthropic principle has no mechanism for explaining why the universe must have life-sustaining properties. Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the universe under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but provides a way of visualizing things.)

  If the universe is in a non-determined state until forced to resolve by an observer, and this non-determined state included the determination of the various fundamental constants, then the resolution would necessarily fall in such a way that allows for an observer, and therefore the constants would have to resolve in such a way as to allow life. Biocentrism therefore supports and builds upon John Wheeler’s conclusions about where quantum theory leads, and provides a solution to the anthropic problem that is unique and more reasonable than any alternative.

  While the latter two versions of the Anthropic Principle, needless to say, strongly support biocentrism, many in the astronomical community seem to embrace the simplest anthropic version, at least guardingly. “I like the weak anthropic principle,” said astronomer Alex Filippenko of the University of California, when one of the authors asked his opinion. “Used appropriately, it has some predictive value.” After all, he added, “Small changes to seemingly boring properties of the universe could have easily produced a universe in which nobody would have been around to be bored.”

  Ah, but the point is that it didn’t and couldn’t.

  To be honest and present all views, however, it should be noted that some critics wonder whether the Weak Anthropic Principle is no more than a piece of circular reasoning or a facile way of squirming out of explaining the enormous peculiarities of the physical universe. Philosopher John Leslie, in his 1989 book Universes (there is a 1996 reprint edition), says, “A man in front of a firing squad of one hundred riflemen is going to be pretty surprised if every bullet misses him. Sure he could say to himself, ‘Of course they all missed; that makes perfect sense, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to wonder why they all missed.’ But anyone in his or her right mind is going to want to know how such an unlikely event occurred.”

  But biocentrism provides the explanation for why all the shots missed. If the universe is created by life, then no universe that didn’t allow for life could possibly exist. This fits very neatly into quantum theory and John Wheeler’s participatory universe in which observers are required to bring the universe into existence. Because, if indeed there ever was such a time, the universe was in an undetermined probability state before the presence of observers (some probabilities—or most—not allowing for life), when observation began and the universe collapsed into a real state, it inevitably collapsed into a state that allowed for the observation that collapsed it. With biocentrism, the mystery of the Goldilocks universe goes away, and the critical role of life and consciousness in shaping the universe becomes clear.

  So you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric. Either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly.

  And if any of this seems too preposterous, just consider the alternative, which is what contemporary science asks us to believe: that the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped into existence out of absolute nothingness. Who in their right mind would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible suggestion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter from—zilch? Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become sentient—aware!—and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random process could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can anyone conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many supposed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops? Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and a loathing for macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life?

  Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos on its fundamental level?

  By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim processes and the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently ridiculous “explanations” for the nature of the cosmos as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.

  Unless one awards points for familiarity and repetition, a consciousness-based universe scarcely seems far-fetched when compared with the alternatives.

  We can now add another principle:

  First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

  Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same
coin and cannot be separated.

  Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

  Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

  Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The very structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The universe is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

  10

  NO TIME TO LOSE

  From wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space—Out of Time

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “Dreamland” (1845)

  Because quantum theory increasingly casts doubts about the existence of time as we know it, let’s head straight into this surprisingly ancient scientific issue. As irrelevant as it might first appear, the presence or absence of time is an important factor in any fundamental look into the nature of the cosmos.

  According to biocentrism, our sense of the forward motion of time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a world of infinite activities and outcomes that only seems to result in a smooth, continuous path.

  At each moment, we are at the edge of a paradox known as “The Arrow,” first described twenty-five hundred years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one location during any given instant of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must momentarily be at rest. The arrow must then be present somewhere, at some specific location, at every moment of its trajectory. Logically, then, motion per se is not what is really occurring. Rather, it is a series of separate events. This may be a first indication that the forward motion of time—of which the movement of the arrow is an embodiment—is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us, as we tie together things we are observing. By this reasoning, time is not an absolute reality but a feature of our minds.