BIOCENTRISM
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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.