by Robert Lanza
How did life arise?
Unknown.
How did consciousness arise?
Unknown.
What is the nature of consciousness?
Unknown.
What is the fate of the universe; for example, will it keep expanding?
Seemingly yes.
Why are the constants the way they are?
Unknown.
Why are there exactly four forces?
Unknown.
Is life further experienced after one’s body dies?
Unknown.
Which book provides the best answers?
There is no single book.
Okay, so what can science tell us? A lot—libraries full of knowl-
edge. All of it has to do with classifications and sub-classifications
of all manner of objects, living and non-living, and categorizations
of their properties, such as the ductility and strength of steel ver-
sus copper, and how processes work, such as how stars are born
and how viruses replicate. In short, science seeks to discover the
properties and processes within the cosmos. How to form metals into
bridges, how to build an airplane, how to perform reconstructive
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surgery—science is peerless at things we need to make everyday life
easier.
So those who ask science to provide the ultimate answers or
to explain the fundamentals of existence are looking in the wrong
place—it’s like asking particle physics to evaluate art. Scientists do
not admit to this, however. Branches of science such as cosmology
act as if science can indeed provide answers in the deepest bedrock
areas of inquiry, and its success in the established pantheon of other
endeavors have let all of us say, “Go ahead, give it a go.” But thus far,
it has had little or no success.
religion’s Take on the Cosmos
Needless to say, there are many religions, and we’re not about to get
into their endless distinctions. But two general schools exist, each
with billions of adherents. They are so oceanically distinct in out-
look and stated goals that they must be treated separately.
western religions (Christianity, Judaism, islam)
The universe is entirely a creation of God, who stands apart from it.
It had a distinct birth date and will have an end. Life was also cre-
ated by God. The most critical purposes of life are twofold: to have
faith in God and to be obedient to God’s rules, such as the Ten Com-
mandments and other rules as outlined in the Bible or the Koran,
which are generally regarded as the sole source of total truth. Chris-
tianity generally says that acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior is nec-
essary as well—all with the goal of experiencing heaven (or being
“saved,” as opposed to being damned) because the afterlife is what
ultimately matters. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipres-
ent, the creator and sustainer of the universe. He can be contacted
through prayer. No mention is made of other states of conscious-
ness, nor of consciousness itself, nor of direct personal experience
of finding an ultimate reality, except in mystical sects, where the
exalted state is generally termed “Union with God.”
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western religions’ answers to basic Questions
How did God arise?
Unknown.
Is God eternal?
Yes.
Basic science inquiries (For example, what came before the Big Bang?)
Not spiritually relevant; God created everything.
What is the nature of consciousness?
Never discussed; unknown.
Is life experienced after one’s body dies?
Yes.
eastern religions (buddhism and Hinduism)
All is fundamentally One. The true nature of reality is existence,
consciousness, and bliss. Appearance of individual separate forms
is illusory, called maya or samsara. The One is eternal, perfect, and operates effortlessly. One of its aspects is an all-knowing and
omnipotent God, accepted or central to most but not all branches of
Hinduism and Buddhism. Time is illusory. Life is eternal; most sects
believe this operates through reincarnation; but others (for example,
Advaita Veda¯nta) maintain that no birth and death actually occur.
The goal of life is to perceive cosmic truth by losing the false sense
of illusion and separateness, through direct ecstatic experience, vari-
ously called nirvana, enlightenment, or Realization.
eastern religions’ answers to basic Questions
What was the Big Bang?
Irrelevant. Time doesn’t exist; the universe is eternal.
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What is the nature of consciousness?
Unknowable through logic.
Does the experience of life persist after the body dies?
Yes.
biocentrism’s Take on the Cosmos
There is no separate physical universe outside of life and conscious-
ness. Nothing is real that is not perceived. There was never a time
when an external, dumb, physical universe existed, or that life sprang
randomly from it at a later date. Space and time exist only as constructs
of the mind, as tools of perception. Experiments in which the observer
influences the outcome are easily explainable by the interrelatedness
of consciousness and the physical universe. Neither nature nor mind
is unreal; both are correlative. No position is taken regarding God.
Consider again the seven principles we have established:
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as real-
ity 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 inter-
nal perceptions 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
particles—indeed all particles and objects—are inex-
tricably 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.
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Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness,
“matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probabil-
ity. Any universe that could have preceded conscious-
ness only existed in a probability state.
Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the uni-
verse is explainable only through biocentrism. The uni-
verse 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 uni
verse.
Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: Space, like time, is not
an object or a thing. Space is another form of our ani-
mal understanding and does not have an independent
reality. We carry space and time around with us like
turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-
existing matrix in which physical events occur inde-
pendent of life.
biocentrism’s answers to basic Questions
What created the Big Bang? A: No “dead” universe ever existed out-
side of Mind. “Nothingness” is a meaningless concept.
Which came first, rocks or life? A: Time is a form of animal-
sense perception.
What is this universe? A: An active, life-based process.
Our concepts about the universe are reminiscent of a common
classroom world globe, which is a tool allowing us to think about
Earth as a whole. However, the Grand Canyon or Taj Mahal are only
real when you go there. And having a globe doesn’t guarantee you
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can actually get to the North Pole or Antarctica. Likewise, the uni-
verse is a concept we use to represent everything that is theoretically
possible in experience in space and time. It’s like a CD—the music
only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs.
One issue that can arise with biocentrism is solipsism—the
notion that all is one, that a single consciousness pervades every-
thing, and that appearances of individuality are real only on a rela-
tive level but are not true fundamentally. The authors don’t insist
on this and allow that it may or may not be so. Certainly, there is
a strong appearance or verisimilitude of separate organisms, each
with its own consciousness. And the “many beings” viewpoint over-
whelmingly dominates public belief in all parts of the world. It may
seem mad to entertain any view to the contrary.
Still, nagging hints that “All Is One” peek from cracks in every
discipline—the universal applicability of numerous constants and
physical laws, the insistence of many people in all cultures and
throughout history of having had a “revelatory experience” that car-
ried “no doubt” that All is One. We can be sure of one thing only: our perceptions themselves—nothing else. Then, too, the connectedness
in quantum theory’s EPR correlations, where objects vastly far apart
remain intimately connected, make perfect sense if solipsism is true.
Thus, we have occasional subjective experience, reports of mystical
revelation, unity of physical constants and laws, entangled particle
phenomena, and a certain appealing esthetics (of the type that Ein-
stein put so much stock in) that serve as little hints of this poten-
tial Oneness. Indeed, it is the tacit engine behind physicists’ tireless
search for a Grand Unified Theory. In any case, it may be true; it may
not be. If it is, it clinches biocentrism. If it isn’t, it doesn’t matter.
Looking back over the various worldviews, it’s clear that bio-
centrism is distinct from previous models. It has commonality with
classical science in that studies of the brain, further efforts to under-
stand consciousness scientifically, and many of the efforts of experi-
mental neurobiology will help expand our grasp of the cosmos. On
the other hand, it has some similarities to some of the tenets of some Eastern religions as well.
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Biocentrism is perhaps most valuable in helping us decide what
not to waste time with—areas where biocentrism suggests our
efforts at attempting to better understand the universe as a whole
may be futile. “Theories of Everything” that do not account for life or
consciousness will certainly lead ultimately to dead-ends, and this
includes string theory. Models that are strictly time-based, such as
further work on understanding the Big Bang as the putative natal
event of the cosmos, will never deliver full satisfaction or closure.
Conversely, biocentrism is in no way anti-science; science dedicated
to processes or technological leaps create untold benefits within their
circumscribed fields of endeavor. But those that attempt to provide
deep or ultimate answers—to a population that remains hungry for
them—must ultimately turn to some form of biocentrism if they are
to succeed.
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scI-fI gets reAl
Offering a new way to conceive the cosmos always means bat-
tling the inertia of the existing cultural mindset. We all share
a way of thinking that has spread, virus-like, thanks to books,
television, and now, the Internet. Our general model of reality first
originated in cruder form a few centuries ago but reached its present
shape only in the middle of the twentieth century. Prior to that, it
seemed plausible that the universe had always existed more or less
the way it is now—meaning the cosmos is eternal. This steady-state
model had great philosophic appeal but had become shaky after
Edwin Hubble announced the expansion of the universe in 1930,
and then became untenable in 1965 with the discovery of the cos-
mic microwave background radiation—both of which strongly point
to a natal Big Bang.
A Big Bang means the universe was born, and that therefore it
must someday die, even if no one knows whether this is just one
of an endlessly repeating temporal cycle of Bangs, or even if other
universes exist concurrently. Thus, eternity cannot be disproved.
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Just prior to the current model, an even vaster change had been the
earlier replacement of the divine universe, one whose operation was
due solely to the Hand of God or the gods, with one made of stu-
pid stuff, and whose sole animating power is random action, like
pebbles cascading down a hillside.
Through it all, however, there was always some generally
accepted collective view of where the universe’s components were to
be found, the relation between the living and the non-living, and its
overall structure. For example, ever since the early nineteenth cen-
tury, scientists and the public alike envisioned life dwelling solely on
the surfaces of celestial bodies, even the Moon, and until the mid-
1800s, many scientists, including the eminent William Herschel,
thought it “likely” that human-like creatures even inhabited the sur-
face of the Sun, protected against its putative hot, luminous clouds
by a second, inner, insulating cloud layer. Science fiction writers
grabbed this nineteenth-century obsession with extraterrestrial life
and ran with it, producing a steady stream of invaders-from-Mars-
type novels, which eventually found their way into whatever new
entertainment medium became available, from books and magazine
serials to film and radio, and then television.
Such works of fiction are enormously powerful in shaping a cul-
ture’s mindset. Until Jules Verne and others wrote about humans
going to the Moon in the nineteenth century, it was too fantastic
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a notion to spread widely. By the 1960s, however, manned space
travel had become such a common sci-fi theme that it was an easy
sell to the public, who readily agreed to fork over taxpayer dollars
to turn it into a reality during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
administrations.
Science and sci-fi are thus often the primary means, rather than
religion or philosophy, by which much of the public envisions the
structure of the universe. By the start of the twenty-first century, few
people didn’t express confidence that everything began in a titanic
explosion long ago, that time and space are real, that galaxies and
stars are achingly distant, that the universe is essentially as dumb as
gravel, and that randomness rules. Even more solid is the idea that
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each person is an isolated lifeform who confronts an external reality,
and that there is no tangible interconnectedness between organisms.
These are the current mainstream models of reality.
In early, pre-1960 film, sci-fi almost always limited itself to such
existing mindsets. When presenting aliens—still one of the most
popular themes—they tended to hail from the surfaces of planets. In
appearance, the basics of drama require them to resemble human-
oids closely, for example, the Klingons of Star Trek, and preferably have language, and for that matter our language (and even our dialect) because excessive silence is anathema to holding cinematic
interest. If organisms are shown to be mere blobs of light, say, their
appearances will always be brief.
Several popular alien plot lines include the human who falls in
love with the nonhuman, as in the various gorgeous Cylons of Battle-
star Galactica or the old television show Mork & Mindy, and the lone hero or lovable misfit who is the only one who knows about an alien
invasion or is able to save the world from it.
Generally, sci-fi’s aliens have evil motives, rather than displaying
benign intentions such as saving humankind from our destructive
tendencies, such as frequent wars or futile chronic dieting. In the
last two decades, another now-tiresome plot has started to repeat
with no more than slight variations: humans battling our own run-
away machines. While anyone who has struggled with a balky, non-
starting lawnmower can relate to an anti-machine motif and proba-
bly already harbors some degree of loathing for various contraptions,
