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BIOCENTRISM

Page 19

by Robert Lanza


  such sentiments have now reached the cliché level in the Termina-

  tor series, in I, Robot, in the Matrix trilogy—and there’s no end in sight. As a consequence, everyone now has “robots—bad!” firmly

  implanted like a subliminal message, and it will be a real challenge

  for future designers of helpful machines to make them appear both

  obsequious and harmlessly moronic.

  Most of the remaining sci-fi plot lines could be counted on the

  fingers of one hand. There’s the “crew lost in space” business, the

  plague that might wipe out Earth, and the evil-U.S.-government

  theme, where whatever’s happening is due to some secret project

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  gone awry or else hatched by a breakaway spy or military agency

  performing perilous unauthorized experiments.

  What we had not seen in pre-1955 sci-fi was any treatment of

  reality itself nor, for that matter, anything truly original that might

  call into doubt the prevailing worldview. Aliens were organisms

  from a planet; they were never the planet itself or an energy field.

  The universe was portrayed as being external and vast rather than

  internal and interconnected. Life was always finite, time was always

  real, events unfolded solely from mechanistic accidents rather than

  any innate cosmic intelligence. And as for any quantum role where

  the observer influences the play of inanimate objects, forget it.

  Things began to shift around 1960, especially with Solaris (1961),

  in which the planet itself was alive. Then came the ultra-imagina-

  tive consequences of the psychedelic revolution of the ’60s and ’70s,

  and the public’s greater exposure to avant-garde sci-fi writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as a sudden if

  fringe interest in Eastern philosophy.

  This abandonment of the traditional mindset concerning the

  nature of the universe probably began with a renaissance of the old

  time-travel theme, which had always been a favorite sci-fi motif. Up

  to the 1960s, it had merely meant an excursion into a different period

  of American or British life (and this motif remains popular today), as

  we’ve seen in the Back to the Future series or, going the other way, the original and the remake of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Often,

  dramas involving time involved not travel but merely a story set in

  some future era, often combined with a societal theme, as we saw in

  Logan’s Run.

  But—getting back to biocentrism’s themes—films that ques-

  tion time’s very validity started to appear in the 1970s. In the movie

  made from Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, we’re treated to the relativistic delight of having time pass at an eye blink for the scientists running

  the experiment, while the traveler played by Jodie Foster simultane-

  ously experiences days of adventures on another world. Time as an

  iffy item was a major theme in movies like Peggy Sue Got Married, in which a childhood is relived by an adult. Such motifs have allowed

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  the concept of time as a suspiciously untrustworthy commodity to

  creep increasingly into the public brainpan.

  Also entering the sci-fi lexicon is the notion of reality being

  consciousness-based. Memento showed the protagonist dealing with

  multiple time-levels, as did Run, Lola, Run, which also incorporated quantum theory’s MWI explanation that all possibilities occur even

  if we are only aware of one of them, although the film’s sequen-

  tial outcomes were presented without explanation of their physics

  pedigree.

  So the table has been set in the public mind for biocentrism’s

  jump to the reality that it’s all only in the mind, that the universe exists nowhere else.

  Thus, despite a biocentric view being absent thus far in school-

  room science, religion, or in the common mindset, the gradual

  recent weaving of some of its tenets into sci-fi should make it seem

  less than totally alien or completely outside all familiar experience.

  It is said that popular jokes are self-replicating, like viruses, and that

  they spread among the community outside of any human effort or

  control. It’s almost as if they have a life of their own. Groundbreak-

  ing ideas are often like that, too. They are not just catchy, they are

  catching—contagious. So while Galileo was hugely exasperated at

  finding essentially no one willing even to look through his telescope

  to see for themselves that Earth was not the stationary center of all

  motion, the problem may at least partly have been due to the con-

  cept having not yet reached the “contagion” level where it could self-

  replicate.

  By contrast, thanks to sci-fi’s enormous popularization of many

  biocentric-sympathetic ideas, biocentrism’s time may be upon us

  very soon. When maverick sci-fi writers do hit upon the notion of

  exploiting the strange, newly established realities they have not yet

  really plumbed—whether it be entanglement, or the past mutating

  because of decisions made in the present, or biocentrism itself—the

  cycle will be complete with something truly fresh for sci-fi aficiona-

  dos. Success breeds success, and the new ideas may percolate rap-

  idly through the collective consciousness, just as space travel did not

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  so long ago. And, before you know it, we find ourselves in an era of

  fresh thinking.

  All because of our human attraction for both science and the

  universe of make-believe.

  mystery of

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  conscIousness

  To be conscious that we are perceiving . . . is to be

  conscious of our own existence.

  —Aristotle (384–322 bc)

  Consciousness poses the deepest problem for science, even

  as it resides as one of the key tenets of biocentrism. There is

  nothing more intimate than conscious experience, but there

  is nothing that is harder to explain. “All sorts of mental phenom-

  ena,” says consciousness researcher David Chalmers at the Austra-

  lian National University, “have yielded to scientific investigation in

  recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have

  tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of

  the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intrac-

  table, and that no good explanation can be given.”

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  Many books and articles about consciousness appear continu-

  ally, some with bold titles such as the popular 1991 Consciousness

  Explained, by Tufts researcher Daniel Dennett. Using what he calls the

  “heterophenomenological” method, which treats reports of introspec-

  tion not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as

  data to be explained, he argues that “the mind is a bubbling congeries

  of unsupervised parallel processing.” Unfortunately, while the brain

  does indeed appear to work by processing even straightforward jobs

  such as vision by employing simultaneous multiple pathways, Den-

  nett seems to come to no useful conclusion
s about the nature of con-

  sciousness itself, despite the book’s ambitious title. Near the end of

  his interminable volume, Dennett concedes almost as an afterthought

  that conscious experience is a complete mystery. No wonder other

  researchers have referred to the work as “Consciousness Ignored.”

  Dennett joins a long parade of researchers who ignored all the

  central mysteries of subjective experience and merely addressed the

  most superficial or easiest-to-tackle aspects of consciousness, those

  susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, which are

  explainable or potentially explainable with neural mechanisms and

  brain architecture.

  Chalmers, one of the Dennett detractors, himself characterizes

  the so-called easy problems of consciousness to include “those of

  explaining the following phenomena:

  • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environ-

  mental stimuli

  • the integration of information by a cognitive system

  • the reportability of mental states

  • the ability of a system to access its own internal states

  • the focus of attention

  • the deliberate control of behavior

  • the difference between wakefulness and sleep”

  In popular literature, some might superficially consider the

  aforementioned items to represent the totality of the issue. But while

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  all the above will perhaps eventually be solvable through neurobiol-

  ogy, none represent what biocentrism and many philosophers and

  neuro-researchers mean by consciousness.

  Recognizing this, Chalmers notes the obvious: “The really hard

  problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we

  think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but

  there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience.

  When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations . . . .

  Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental

  images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion,

  and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. It is undeniable

  that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of

  how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplex-

  ing . . . . It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical

  basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.

  Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It

  seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”

  What makes a consciousness problem easy or hard is that the

  former concern themselves solely with functionality, or the perfor-

  mance aspects, so that scientists need only discover which part of

  the brain controls which, and they can go away rightfully saying

  they have solved an area of cognitive function. In other words, the

  issue is the relatively simple one of finding mechanisms. Conversely,

  the deeper and infinitely more frustrating aspect of consciousness

  or experience is hard, as Chalmers points out, “precisely because

  it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The prob-

  lem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions

  are explained.” How neural information is discriminated, integrated,

  and reported still doesn’t explain how it is experienced.

  For any object—a machine or a computer—there is commonly

  no other explanatory or operating principle but physics and the

  chemistry of the atoms that compose it. We have already started

  down the long road of building machines with advanced technol-

  ogy and computer memory systems, with electrical microcircuits

  and solid-state devices that allow the performance of tasks with

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  increasing precision and flexibility. Perhaps one day we’ll even

  develop machines that can eat, reproduce, and evolve. But until we

  can understand the exact circuitry in the brain that establishes the

  logic of spatial–temporal relationships, we can’t create a conscious

  machine such as Data in Star Trek or David, the boy in A.I.

  My interest in the importance of animal cognition—and how

  we see the world—led me to Harvard University in the early 1980s

  to work with psychologist B.F. (Fred) Skinner. The semester glided

  away pleasantly enough, partly in exchanging opinions with Skin-

  ner and partly in experiments in the laboratory. Skinner hadn’t

  done any research in the laboratory in nearly two decades, when he

  taught pigeons to dance with each other and even to play Ping-Pong.

  Our experiments eventually succeeded, and a couple of our papers

  appeared in Science. The newspapers and magazines made a happy

  use of them with headlines such as “Pigeon Talk: A Triumph for Bird

  Brains” ( Time), “Ape-Talk: Two Ways to Skinner Bird” ( Science News),

  “Birds Talk to B.F. Skinner” ( Smithsonian), and “Behavior Scientists

  ‘Talk’ With Pigeons” ( Sarasota Herald-Tribune). They were fun experiments, Fred explained on the Today show. It was the best semester I

  had in medical school.

  It was also a very auspicious beginning. These experiments

  correlated well with Skinner’s belief that the self is “a repertoire of

  behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.” However, in

  the years that have passed, I have come to believe that the questions

  cannot all be solved by a science of behavior. What is consciousness?

  Why does it exist? Leaving these unanswered is almost like building

  and launching a rocket to nowhere—full of noise and real accom-

  plishment, but exposing a vacuum right smack in its raison d’être.

  There is a kind of blasphemy asking these questions, a kind of per-

  sonal betrayal to the memory of that gentle yet proud old man who

  took me into his confidence so many years ago. Yet the issues hang in

  the air, as tangible, if nonverbal, as the dragonfly, or the glowworm,

  there along the causeway, emitting its greenish light. Or maybe it

  was the futile attempts of neuroscience to explain consciousness

  using phenomena such as explicit neuronal representation.

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  The implication of those early experiments was, of course,

  that the problem of consciousness might someday be solved once

  we understand all the synaptic connections in the brain. Yet pes-

  simism always lurked, unspoken. “The tools of neuroscience,” writes

  Chalmers, “cannot provide a full account of conscious experience,

  although they have much to offer. [Perhaps] consciousness might

  be explained by a new kind of theory.” Indeed, in a 1983 National

  Academy Report, the Research Briefing Panel on Cognitive Science

  and Artificial Intelligence stated that the questions with which it

  concerned itself “reflect a single underlying great scientific mystery,

  on par with understanding the evolution of the universe, the origin

  of life, or the nature of elementary particles . . .”

  The mystery is plain
. The neuroscientists have developed theo-

  ries that might help to explain how separate pieces of information

  are integrated in the brain, and thus apparently succeed in elucidat-

  ing how different attributes of a single perceived object—such as

  the shape, color and smell of a flower—are merged into a coher-

  ent whole. For example, some scientists, like Stuart Hameroff, argue

  that this process occurs so bedrock-deeply that it involves a quan-

  tum physical mechanism. Other scientists, like Crick and Koch,

  believe that the process occurs through the synchronization of cells

  in the brain. That there is major disagreement about something

  so basic is sufficient testament to the Niagara of the task that lies

  ahead, if even we are destined to succeed at grasping the mechanics

  of consciousness.

  As theories, the work of the past quarter-century reflects some

  of the important progress that is occurring in the fields of neurosci-

  ence and psychology. The bad news is that they are solely theories

  of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the per-

  formance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious expe-

  rience. And yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies

  precisely here, in this gap, in understanding how a subjective expe-

  rience emerges from a physical process at all. Even the Nobel Laure-

  ate physicist Steven Weinberg concedes that there is a problem with

  consciousness, and that although it may have a neural correlate,

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  its existence does not seem to be derivable from physical laws. As

  Emerson has said, it contradicts all experience:

  Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical spec-

  ulation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily

  and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world,

  there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity

  into Variety.

  What Weinberg and others who have pondered the issue com-

  plain about is that, given all the chemistry and physics we know,

  given the brain’s neurological structure and complex architecture,

  and its constant trickle-current, it is nothing short of astonishing

  that the result is—this! The world in all its manifold sights and

  smells and emotions. A subjective feeling of being, of aliveness, that we all carry so unrelentingly that few give it a moment’s thought.

 

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