BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  years, though a disheartening 520 centuries elapse simultaneously

  back home. But from the traveler’s perspective, time has passed nor-

  mally but the distance to the center of the galaxy has changed to a

  single light-year. If one could travel at lightspeed, one would find oneself everywhere in the universe at once. This indeed is what a

  photon of light must experience if it were sentient.

  All these effects deal with relativity, the comparison of your time

  perceptions and measurements with someone else’s. It all means

  that, at minimum, time is incontrovertibly not a constant, and any

  such item that varies with changing circumstance cannot be funda-

  mental or part of the bedrock reality of the cosmos in the way that

  lightspeed, consciousness, or even the gravitational constant appear

  to be.

  The demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective

  experience, a fiction, or even social convention, is central to biocen-

  trism. Its ultimate unreality, except as an aid and mutually agreed-

  upon convenience in everyday life, is yet one more piece of evidence

  that calls into serious doubt the “external universe” mindset.

  Even as a convenience, a biological mechanism, one might take

  a step back and ask what is this controversial entity that is being

  sliced up and contemplated. Einstein used the concept of space-time

  to demonstrate how objects’ motions can make sense consistently,

  regardless of frame of reference, and regardless of the distortion of

  space and time induced by speed or gravity. In doing so, he found

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  that while light itself has a constant speed in a vacuum under all cir-

  cumstances and from all perspectives, things like distance, length,

  and time have no immutability.

  In our efforts to structure all things, sociologically and scientifi-

  cally, humans place events on a time and space continuum. The uni-

  verse is 13.7 billion years old; the Earth 4.6 billion. On our planet,

  Homo erectus appeared a few million years ago, but it took hundreds

  of thousands of years to invent agriculture. Four hundred years ago,

  Galileo supported Copernicus’s assertion that Earth revolves around

  the Sun. Darwin uncovered the truth of evolution in the mid-1800s

  in the Galapagos Islands. Einstein developed his theory of special

  relativity in a Swiss patent office in 1905.

  So time, in the mechanistic universe as described by Newton,

  Einstein, and Darwin, is a ledger in which events are recorded. We

  think of time as a forward-moving continuum, flowing always into

  the future, accumulating, because human beings and other ani-

  mals are constitutional materialists, hard-wired, designed, to think

  linearly. It’s the day-to-day keeping of one’s appointments and the

  watering of plants. The sofa my friend Barbara once shared with her

  husband Gene while he was alive—reading, watching television,

  cuddling when they were young—stands in the living room among

  bric-a-brac collected over the years.

  But instead of time having an absolute reality, imagine instead

  that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phono-

  graph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the

  needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we

  call the present. The music, before and after the song now being

  heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like man-

  ner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record

  does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the vinyl record) exist

  simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the

  record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Star-

  dust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.

  If Barbara could access all life—the entire vinyl record—she

  could experience it non-sequentially—she could know me, who she

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  notches on time’s arrow as fifty in the year 2006, as a toddler, a teen-

  ager, an old man—all now.

  In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (one of his old-

  est friends) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of

  me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinc-

  tion between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persis-

  tent illusion.”

  That time is a fixed arrow is a human construction. That we

  live on the edge of all time is a fantasy. That there is an irreversible,

  on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the

  Earth is an even greater fantasy. Space and time are forms of animal

  understanding—period. We carry them around with us like turtles

  with shells. So there simply is no absolute self-existing matrix out

  there in which physical events occur independent of life.

  But let’s back up to a more fundamental question. Barbara wants

  to know about the clock. “We have very sophisticated machines, like

  atomic clocks, to measure time. If we can measure time, doesn’t that

  prove it exists?”

  Barbara’s question is a good one. After all, we measure gasoline

  as occupying liters or gallons, and shell out cash for it on the basis of

  these quantifications. Would we ever be keeping this sort of meticu-

  lous track of something that was unreal?

  Einstein shrugged off that issue, simply saying that, “Time is

  what we measure with a clock. Space is what we measure with a

  measuring rod.” The emphasis for physicists is on the measur-

  ing. However, the emphasis could just as easily be on the we, the observer, as this book squarely places it.

  But if the clock thing seems like a stumper, consider whether the

  ability to measure time in any way supports its physical existence.

  Clocks are rhythmic things, meaning that they contain processes

  that are repetitive. Humans use the rhythms of some events, like the

  ticking of clocks, to time other events like the rotation of the Earth.

  But this is not time, but rather, a comparison of events. Specifically, over the ages, humans have observed rhythmic things in nature—

  the periodicities of the Moon or of the Sun, the flooding of the Nile,

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  to name a few—and we then created other rhythmic things to see

  how they interrelated, to accomplish the simple purpose of compari-

  son. The more regular and repetitious was the motion, the better

  for our purposes of measurement. It was noticed that a weight on

  a string some thirty-nine inches long will always make one return-

  trip swing in exactly one second; this length was in fact used as

  the first definition of a meter (whose very name means measure).

  Later came the useful tendency of quartz crystals to vibrate 32,768

  times a second when stimulated by a small bit of electricity—it is

  the basis for most wristwatches even today. We called these man-

  made rhythmic devices clocks because their repetitions were so con-

  sistently even, though repetitions can also be slow ones, such as

  those found on sundials, which compare
shadow lengths and posi-

  tions caused by the Sun to the Earth’s revolution. Going the other

  way, more sophisticated than ordinary mechanical clocks, with their

  dials and wheels that unfortunately change size with temperature,

  are atomic clocks in which the nucleus of cesium remains in a spe-

  cific spin state only when bathed in electromagnetic radiation with

  precisely 9,192,631,770 passing waves per second. Thus, a second

  can be defined ( is officially defined) as being the sum of that many

  “heartbeats” in the nucleus of cesium-133. In all such cases, humans

  use the rhythms of specific events to count off other specific events.

  But these are just events, not to be confused with time.

  Actually, all of nature’s reliably recurring events could be (and

  sometimes are) employed to keep track of time. Tides, the Sun’s rota-

  tion, the phases of the Moon are just some of nature’s most significant

  periodic occurrences. Even common, ordinary natural events could

  be employed to measure time, although not as precisely as clocks. Ice

  melting, a growing child, an apple rotting on the ground—almost

  anything would work.

  Manmade events can be used as well. For example, a top spins

  around for a while then stops. One could compare that to the melt-

  ing of a standard ice cube on a hot day and calculate the number of

  top spinnings to an ice cube melting, maybe twenty-four spinnings

  to one melting. We might then conclude that in every ice-melting

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  “day” there are twenty-four top spinning “hours,” and then devise a

  plan to meet Barbara for tea at two and a half ice melts or sixty top

  spins, depending on which “time piece” you each happen to have on

  hand. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that nothing is actually hap-

  pening outside of the changing events.

  People accept that time exists as a physical entity because we

  have invented those objects called clocks, which are simply more

  rhythmic and consistent than buds flowering or apples rotting. In

  reality, what’s really happening is motion, pure and simple—and

  this motion is ultimately confined to the here and now. Of course,

  we also retain time because a universally agreed-upon event (when

  all our individual timepieces say 8:00 p.m., for example) serves to

  alert us to another event, like the start of a favorite television show.

  We feel as if we live on the edge of time. That’s a psychologically

  comfortable place, really, because it means we are still among the

  living. On the edge of time, tomorrow hasn’t happened. Our future

  has not been played out. Most of our descendents haven’t yet been

  born. Everything to come is a big mystery, a vast void. Life stretches

  ahead of us. We’re out in front, strapped to the engine of the Time

  Train, which relentlessly travels forward into an unknown future.

  Everything behind us, so to speak, is the dining car, business class,

  the caboose, and miles of track we can’t retrace. Everything before

  this moment in time is part of the history of the universe. The vast

  majority of our ancestors, about whom we haven’t the foggiest idea,

  are dead and gone. Everything prior to this moment is the past, gone

  forever. But this subjective feeling of living on the forward edge of

  time is a persistent illusion, a trick of our attempts to create an intel-

  ligible organizational pattern for nature in which one calendar day

  follows upon another, that spring precedes summer, and that years

  pass. Time in a biocentric universe is not sequential—however much

  our habitual perceptions dictate that it is.

  If time is truly flowing forward into the future, is it not extraor-

  dinary that we are here, alive, for a split instant, on the edge of all

  time? Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the

  beginning of time. Now, stack time, like chairs, on top of each other,

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  and seat yourself on the very top, or—if you prefer speed—strap

  yourself once again to the front of the Time Train.

  Science has no real explanation for why we’re alive now, existing

  on the edge of time. According to the current physiocentric world-

  view, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that we are

  alive.

  The persistent human perception of time almost certainly stems

  from the chronic act of thinking, the one-word-at-a-time thought

  process by which ideas and events are visualized and anticipated.

  In rare moments of clarity and mental emptiness, or when danger or

  novel experience forces a one-pointed focus upon one’s conscious-

  ness, time vanishes, replaced by an ineffably enjoyable feeling of

  freedom, or the singular focus of escaping an immediate peril. Time

  is never cognized normally in such thought-less experiences: “I saw

  the whole accident unfolding in slow motion.”

  In sum, from a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in

  the universe independent of life that notices it, and really doesn’t

  truly exist within the context of life either. But let’s return to Bar-

  bara’s point: growing children, aging, and feeling most poignantly

  that time exists when our loved ones die constitute the human per-

  ceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into

  adults. We age. They age. We all grow old together. That to us is time.

  It belongs with us.

  This brings us to the sixth principle:

  First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a

  process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it

  existed, would—by definition—have to exist in space. But this is

  meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but

  rather tools of the human and animal mind.

  Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal per-

  ceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the

  same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

  Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic par-

  ticles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to

  the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious

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  observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability

  waves.

  Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “mat-

  ter” 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 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.

  Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real

  existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by

  which we perceive changes in the universe.

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  spAce out
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  Ye Gods! Annihilate but space and time,

  And make two lovers happy.

  —Alexander Pope (1728)

  How do our animal minds apprehend the world?

  We’ve all been taught that time and space exist, and their

  apparent reality is reinforced every day of our lives—every time

  we go from here to there, every time we reach for something. Most of

  us live without thinking abstractly about space. Like time, it’s such

  an integral part of our lives that its examination is as unnatural as

  scrutinizing walking or breathing.

  “Obviously space exists,” we might answer, “because we live

  in it. We move through it, drive through it, build in it. Miles, kilo-

  meters, cubic feet, linear meters—all are units we use to measure

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  it.” Humans schedule meetings at places like Broadway and Eighty-

  second on the second floor of Barnes & Noble in the café. We speak

  in clear terms of spatial dimensions, often associated with times. It’s

  the “when, what, where” of daily life.

  A theory of time and space as belonging strictly to animal-sense

  perception, as our source of comprehension and consciousness, is a

  new and perhaps abstract thing to grasp, and day-to-day experience

  has indicated nothing of this reality to us. Rather, life has seem-

  ingly taught that time and space are external—and perhaps eter-

  nal—realities. They appear to encompass and bind all experiences,

  and are fundamental rather than secondary to life. They seem to lie

  above and beyond human experience, the gridwork within which all

  adventures unfold.

  As animals, we are organized and wired to use places and time

  to specify our experiences to ourselves and to others. History defines

  the past by placing people and events in time and space. Scientific

  theories such as the Big Bang, the deep time of geology, and evolu-

  tion are steeped in their logic. Our physical experiences—of moving

  from point A to point B, of parallel parking, standing on the edge of

  a precipice—confirm the existence of space.

  When we reach for a glass of water on the coffee table, our sense

  of space is usually impeccable. The glass almost never spills due to

  a miscalculated reach. To place ourselves as the creator of time and space, not as the subject of it, goes against common sense, life experience, and education. It takes a radical shift of perspective for any of