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

by Robert Lanza

  Yes. Exactly. (Unless the cat’s consciousness counts as an observation, so that the initial wave-function collapses then and there, and needn’t wait for a human to open the box days later.) Anyway, all this is still believed by a great many physicists even today. Similarly, we can look at a universe that seems to have been started with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and yet that is only what we see now, what seems to have been an actual history. Quantum theory maintains that we can say only one thing for sure: the universe looks like it’s been there for many billions of years. According to quantum mechanics, there are major, irrevocable limits on the certainty of our knowledge.

  But if there were no observers, the cosmos wouldn’t merely look like nothing, which is stating the obvious. No, more than that, it wouldn’t exist in any way. Physicist Andrei Linde of Stanford University says, “The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness. I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.”

  Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.

  In 2002, Discover magazine sent Tim Folger to the coast of Maine to speak to John Wheeler firsthand. His opinions about the anthropic theory and such still carried a lot of weight in the community. He had been saying such provocative things that the magazine decided to title the article “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” based on the direction he’d been going in the tenth decade of his life. He told Folger that he was sure the universe was filled with “huge clouds of uncertainty” that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. In all these places, he believes, the cosmos is “a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past.”

  Because your head may now be spinning, let’s take a break and go back to my friend Barbara, sitting comfortably in her living room with her glass of water, certain of its existence and her own. Her house is as it has always been, with its artwork on the wall, the cast-iron stove, the old oak table. She putters between rooms. Nine decades of choices—dishes, bed sheets, art, machines and tools in the workshop, her career—define her life.

  Every morning, she opens her front door to bring in the Boston Globe or to work in her garden. She opens her back porch door to a lawn dotted with whirly-gigs, squeaking as they go round and round in the breeze. She thinks the world churns along whether she happens to open the door or not.

  It does not affect her in the least that the kitchen disappears when she’s in the bathroom. That the garden and whirly-gigs evaporate when she’s sleeping. That the shop and all its tools don’t exist while she is at the grocery store.

  When Barbara turns from one room to the next, when her animal senses no longer perceive the kitchen—the sounds of a dishwasher, the ticking clock, the groaning pipes, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into the primal energy-nothingness or waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around. Or, perhaps more graspably, there dwells an eternal correlativity of nature and consciousness.

  For each life, or if one prefers, the one life, there is a universe that involves “spheres of reality.” Shape and form are generated inside one’s head using all the sensory data collected through ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and skin. Our planet is composed of billions of spheres of reality, an internal/external confluence, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking.

  But can this really be? You wake each morning and your dresser is still across the room from your comfortable spot in the bed. You put on your same pair of jeans and favorite shirt and shuffle to the kitchen in slippers to make coffee. How can anyone in his right mind possibly suggest that the great world out there is constructed in our heads? This takes some additional analogies.

  To grasp a universe of still arrows and disappearing moons more fully, let’s turn to modern electronics and our animal-sense-perception tools. You know from experience that something in the black box of a DVD player turns an inanimate disc into a movie. The electronics in your DVD player convert and animate the information on the disc into a two-dimensional show. Likewise, your brain animates the universe. You can imagine the brain as being like the electronics in your DVD player.

  Explained another way, in the language of biology, the brain turns electrochemical impulses from our five senses into an order, a sequence, into a face, into this page, into a room, into an environment—into a unified three-dimensional whole. It transforms a stream of sensory input into something so real that few people ever ask how it happens. Our minds are so good at creating a three-dimensional universe that we rarely question whether the universe is anything other than we imagine it. Our brains sort, order, and interpret the sensations that we receive. Photons of light, for example, which arrive from the Sun carrying the electromagnetic force, by themselves look like nothing. They are bits of energy. As uncounted trillions bounce off the objects around us, and some are reflected our way, various combinations of wavelengths enter our eye from each and every object. Here, they deliver the force to trillions of atoms arranged into an exquisite design of several million cone-shaped cells that rapidly fire in permutations too vast for any computer to calculate. Then, in the brain, the world appears. Light, which as we saw in chapter 3 has no color by itself, is now a magical potpourri of shapes and hues. Further parallel processing snaking through neural networks at one-third of the speed of sound makes sense of it all—a necessary step because those who were blind for decades but whose sight was restored gaze confusedly and unsurely at the world, unable to see what we see or to process the newfound input usefully.

  Sights, tactile experiences, odors—all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are “out there” except by the convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said Wheeler, “exists until it is observed.”

  You can also think of your mind operating like the circuitry of an electronic calculating device. Say you bought a brand-new calculator and have just taken it out of the package. When you punch in 4 × 4, the number 16 pops up on the little display screen, even though these numbers have never been multiplied before on that particular device. The calculator follows a set of rules, like your mind. 16 will always pop up on a functioning calculator when given the input of 4 × 4, or 10 + 6, or 25 - 9. When you step outside, it’s like a new set of numbers has been punched that determines what will be on “display”—whether the Moon will be here or there, blocked by a cloud, crescent, or full.

  The i’s and the t’s of physical reality are not dotted and crossed until you actually look up into the sky. The Moon has a definite existence only after it has been pulled out of the realm of mathematical probability and into the observer’s web of consciousness. In any event, the space between its atoms is so huge, it is as correct to call the Moon empty space as to call it an object. There’s truly nothing solid about it at all, it’s just more brain-stuff.

  Perhaps you may find yourself trying to catch a quick glimpse of this haze of probability before it bursts into form, like a kid sneaking a peek at the cover of Playboy. The inclination is to dart your eyes or turn your head with lightning speed to catch a forbidden glance. But you can’t see someth
ing that doesn’t yet exist, so the game is futile.

  Perhaps some readers will dismiss this as nonsense, arguing that there’s no way the brain has the machinery actually to create physical reality. But remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatio-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now. As a medical doctor, I can attest to the fact that the visions and sounds schizophrenic patients “see” and “hear” are just as real to them as this page or the chair on which you now sit.

  It is here, at last, where we approach the imagined border of ourselves, the wooded boundary where, in the words of the old fairy tale, the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other. At sleep, we all know, consciousness is diminished, and so too, the continuity in the connection of times and places, the end to both space and time. Where, then, do we find ourselves? On rungs that can be intercalated anywhere, “like those,” as Emerson put it “that Hermes won with dice of the moon, that Osiris might be born.” It is true that consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the Earth, we know only the crust. Below the level of conscious thought, we can conceive unconscious neural states. But these mental faculties, in themselves, apart from their relation to our consciousness, cannot be said to exist in space and time, any more than does a rock or a tree.

  And as for its limits, its boundaries so to speak, do they exist in any imaginable way? Or is it even simpler than we can imagine? “There is,” wrote Thoreau, “always the possibility . . . of being all.”

  How can this be true? How is it managed, as in our actual experiments with electrons, that a single particle can be at two places at once? See the loon in the pond, the single mullein or dandelion in the field, the Moon, or the North Star? How deceptive is the space that separates them and makes them solitary? Are they not the subjects of the same reality that interested Bell, whose experiment answered once and for all whether what happens locally is affected by nonlocal events?

  The situation is not unlike the one in which Alice found herself in the Pool of Tears. We are sure we are not connected to the fish in the pond, for they have scales and fins and we don’t have any. Yet, “non-separability,” theorist Bernard d’Espagnat has said, “is now one of the most certain general concepts in physics.” This is not to say that our minds, like the particles in Bell’s experiment, are linked in any way that can violate the laws of causality. We may imagine two detectors situated on opposite sides of the universe, with photons from some central source flying off to each of them. If an experimenter changed the polarization of one beam, he might instantaneously influence events 10 billion light-years away. But no information can possibly be transmitted from point A to point B or from one experimenter to another through this process. It unfolds strictly on its own.

  In this same sense, there is a part of us that is intimately connected to the fish in the pond. We think there is an enclosing wall, a circumference to us. Yet, Bell’s experiment implies that there are cause-effect linkages that transcend our ordinary classical way of thinking. “Men esteem truth remote,” wrote Thoreau, “in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. . . . But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”

  19

  DEATH AND ETERNITY

  The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.

  —Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

  How does the biocentric conception of the world change our lives? How can it affect our emotions of love, fear, and grief? How, above all, does it enable us to cope with our apparent mortality and the relationship of the body and our consciousness?

  The attachment to life and consequent fear of death is a universal concern, and, in some, an obsession, as the replicants in Blade Runner made clear in their less-than-gentle way to all who would listen. Yet once we abandon the random, physical-centered cosmos and start to see things biocentrically, the verisimilitude of a finite life loosens its grip.

  Lucretius the Epicurean taught us two thousand years ago not to fear death. The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science lead to the same assertion—that the mind’s awareness is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Does it die, then, with the body?

  This is the point at which we leave science for a bit and contemplate what biocentrism suggests and allows, rather than what it can prove. The following is frankly speculative, yet it is more than mere philosophizing, as it follows logically and sensibly from a consciousness-based universe. Those who wish to stick strictly with “Just the facts, ma’am,” are under no compulsion to accept any of these rather provisional conclusions.

  As Emerson described it in The Over Soul, “The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.”

  I remember the day when I first realized this. From around the corner came the trolley car, scattering sparks above it. There was a grind of metal wheels, the tinkle of a few coins. With a jolt and a sailing glide, the gigantic electric machine was on its way to my past, back, block by block through the decades, through the metropolitan limits of Boston, until it came to Roxbury. Here, at the foot of the hill where, for me, the universe began, I hoped I might find a set of initials scratched into the sidewalk or a tree, or perhaps an old, half-rusted toy, which I might put away in a shoe box as evidence of my own immortality.

  But when I reached that place I found that the tractors had been there and left. The city, it seemed, had reclaimed some acres of slum; the old house I lived in, the houses next door where my friends played, and all the yards and trees of the years I grew up in—all those things were gone. And though they had been swept from the world, in my mind they still stood, bright and heliographing in the sun, superimposed on the current setting. I picked my way through the litter and the remains of some unidentifiable structure. That spring day—which some of my colleagues spent in the laboratory carrying out experiments, and others in contemplation of black holes and equations—I sat in a vacant city lot agonizing over the open-ended and perverse nature of time. Not that I had never seen the fall of leaf, nor a kind face grow old, but here, perchance, I might come across some hidden passageway that would take me beyond the nature that I knew, to some eternal reality behind the flux of things.

  The extent of the dilemma was realized both by Albert Einstein in the Annalen de Physik and by Ray Bradbury in his masterwork, Dandelion Wine.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice . . . .”

  “You’re joking with us,” giggled Jane. “You weren’t really ten ever, were you, Mrs. Bentley?”

  “You run on home!” the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. “I won’t have you laughing.”

  “And your name’s not really Helen?”

  “Of course it’s Helen!“

  “Good-by,” said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom following them slowly. “Thanks for the ice cream!”

  “Once I played hopscotch!” Mrs. Bentley cried after them, but they were gone.

  Standing in the rubble of my past, it seemed extraordinary that I, like Mrs. Bentley, was in the present, that my consciousness, like the breeze meandering across the lot, blowing leaves before it, was moving on the edge of time.

  “My dear,” said Mr. Bentley, “you never will understand time, will you? When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old, and always will be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in the young now and an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

  Mr.
Bentley’s observation is not so trivial a point. What sort of time is that which separates a man from his past—which separates one now from the next—and yet gives continuity to the thread of consciousness? Eighty is the last “now,” we say, but who knows that time and space—now seen as forms of intuition rather than immutable standalone entities—are not actually “always.” A cat, even when mortally ill, keeps those wide calm eyes focused on the ever-changing kaleidoscope of the here-and-now. There is no thought of death, and hence no fear of it. What comes, comes. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. Also, of course, because most of us strictly associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die, end of story.

  Religions may go on and on about the afterlife, but how do we know this is true? Physics may tell us that energy is never ever lost, and that our brains, minds, and hence the feeling of life operate by electrical energy, and therefore this energy like all others simply cannot vanish, period. And while this sounds very intellectually nice and hopeful, how can we be sure that we will still experience the sense of life—that mystery neuro-researchers pursue with such futility, like the dream hallway that stretches ever longer the farther along the corridor we run?

  The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-is-still-inescapably-life matrix.

  Scientists think that they can say where individuality begins and ends, and we generally reject the multiple universes of Stargate, Star Trek, The Matrix and such as fiction. But it turns out there is more than a morsel of scientific truth in this popular cultural genre. This can only accelerate during the coming shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong only to the living.