BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  There is no principle of science—in any discipline—that hints or

  explains how on Earth we get this from that.

  Many physicists claim that a “Theory of Everything” is hovering

  right around the corner. Yet they’ll readily admit they have no idea

  about how to elucidate what Paul Hoffman, the former publisher of

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, called “the greatest mystery of all”—the

  existence of consciousness. To whatever small incremental degree

  its secrets get revealed, however, the discipline that has and will

  continue to accomplish this is biology. Physics has tried in this area

  and has decided it is in over its head. It can furnish no answers.

  The problem for today’s science—as consciousness researchers are

  continually discovering—is finding hooks or hints, leads to follow,

  when all roads thus far lead only to neural architecture and what

  sections of the brain are responsible for what. Knowing which parts

  of the brain control smell, for example, is not helpful in uncovering

  the subjective experience of smell— why a wood fire has its telltale scent. It is, for current science, such an extremely frustrating predicament that few bother taking any first steps. It must feel like the

  nature of the sun did to the ancient Greeks. Every day a ball of fire

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  crosses the sky. How would one begin to ascertain its composition

  and nature? What possible steps could one take when the invention

  and principles of the spectroscope lay two millennia in the future?

  “Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all

  nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest

  dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”

  If only the physicists had respected the limits of their science

  as Skinner did his. As the founder of modern behaviorism, Skinner

  did not attempt to understand the processes occurring within the

  individual; he had the reserve and prudence to consider the mind

  a “black box.” Once, in one of our conversations about the nature

  of the universe, about space and time, Skinner said, “I don’t know

  how you can think like that. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to

  think about the nature of space and time.“ His humility revealed his

  epistemological wisdom. However, I also saw in the softness of his

  glance the helplessness that the topic occasioned.

  Clearly, it is not solely atoms and proteins that hold the answer to

  the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses

  entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together auto-

  matically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

  Our thoughts and perceptions have an order, not of themselves,

  but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships

  involved in every experience. Even taking cognition to the next step

  by fabricating a sense of meaning to things necessitates the creation

  of spatio-temporal relationships, the inner and outer forms of our

  sensuous intuition. We can never have any experience that does not

  conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of interpre-

  tation and understanding—the mental logic that molds sensations

  into 3D objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the

  mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing

  in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a

  spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing

  a CD. The CD itself contains only information, yet when the player

  is turned on, the information leaps into fully dimensional sound. In

  that way, and in that way only, does the music exist.

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  Let Emerson’s words suffice, that “the mind is One, and that

  nature is its correlative.” Indeed, existence itself consists in the logic

  of this relationship. Consciousness has nothing to do with physical

  structure or function per se. It is like the stem of the ground pine,

  there reaching through the earth at a hundred places, drawing its

  existence from the temporal reality of perceptions in space.

  And what of that favorite sci-fi theme, of machines developing

  minds of their own? “Can we help but wonder,“ asked Isaac Asi-

  mov, “whether computers and robots may not eventually replace any

  human ability?“ At Skinner’s eightieth birthday party, I was seated

  next to one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence.

  During our conversation, he turned to me and asked, “You’ve worked

  very closely with Fred. Do you think that we’ll ever be able to dupli-

  cate the mind of one of your pigeons?“

  “The sensory-motor functions? Yes,” I replied. “But not con-

  sciousness. This is an impossibility.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  But Skinner had just gone up to the podium, and the organizers

  had asked him to give a little talk. It was Fred’s party after all, and it

  hardly seemed the proper occasion for one of his former students to

  go into a diatribe about consciousness. But now, I do not hesitate to

  say that until we understand the nature of consciousness, a machine

  can never be made to duplicate the mind of a man, or a pigeon, or

  even of a dragonfly. For an object—a machine, a computer—there

  is no other principle but physics. In fact, it is only in the conscious-

  ness of the observer that they exist at all in space and time. Unlike

  a man or a pigeon, they do not have the unitary sense experience

  necessary for perception and self-awareness, for this must occur

  before the understanding generates the spatio-temporal relationships

  involved in every sense experience, before the relationship between

  consciousness and the spatial world is established.

  The difficulty of imparting consciousness to a machine should

  be obvious to anyone who has attended a birth, when a new being

  with consciousness enters the world. How does it arise? Hindus

  believe that consciousness or sentience enters the fetus in the third

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  month of pregnancy. In reality, when we are scientifically honest, we

  must admit we have no idea how awareness can ever arise—not in

  an individual, not collectively, and certainly not from molecules and

  electromagnetism. Indeed, does consciousness arise at all? It’s widely

  repeated that each cell in our body is part of a continuous string of

  cells that started dividing billions of years ago—a single unbroken

  chain of life. But what about consciousness? This more than any-

  thing else must be unbroken. Although most people like to imagine

  a universe existing without it, we have seen that this makes no sense

  if one gives the matter sufficient thought. How does consciousness

  ever begin? How could that possibly occur? And is that question any

  less enigmatic than trying to figure how it might arise at a later date?

  Is consciousness synonymous with everything?

  The deep thinkers of the past and present are right: it is the big-


  gest mystery, next to which all else pales.

  Lest the reader think this to be idle talk or philosophy, remem-

  ber that observer-dependent arguments have been raging at high-

  level ordinary physics circles for three-quarters of a century. Debates

  about the role and importance of observers in the physical universe

  are nothing new. Recall, for example, Austrian quantum expert

  Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, which attempted

  to show how preposterous were the prevailing alleged consequences

  of mating mind with matter in quantum experiments.

  Imagine a closed box, he said, in which we have a bit of radioac-

  tive material that might or might not release a particle. Both possibil-

  ities exist and, according to Copenhagen, these potential outcomes

  do not become real until they are observed. Only then does what

  later was called the wave-function collapse, and the particle mani-

  fests itself . . . or not. Well, fair enough so far. But now place a Geiger

  counter in the box that can detect the particle’s appearance (if that

  possibility is the one that materializes). If the Geiger counter feels

  the particle, it triggers the release of a falling, swiveling hammer that

  breaks the glass in a vial of cyanide gas.

  A cat also constrained in the box would then be killed. Now,

  according to Copenhagen, the quantum radioactive release of the

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  particle, the detector, the falling hammer, and the cat all have now

  been unified into a single quantum system. But only when some-

  one opens the box is an observation made, which forces the entire

  sequence of events to go from a possibility to a reality.

  But what could this mean? asked Schrödinger. Are we to believe,

  if we find a dead, rotting cat, that the animal had been suspended

  in an anything’s-possible state until a moment ago when the box

  was opened? That it only appears as if it’s been dead for days? That the cat really was both dead and alive, as Copenhagen would insist,

  until someone opened the box and therefore established the entire

  sequence of past events?

  Yes. Exactly. (Unless the cat’s consciousness counts as an obser-

  vation, 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. Simi-

  larly, 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 Uni-

  versity says, “The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot

  imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores conscious-

  ness. I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the uni-

  verse 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 appear-

  ing 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

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  determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The

  past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quan-

  tum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observa-

  tion 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 contain-

  ing 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 Bos-

  ton 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 evapo-

  rate 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 ani-

  mal senses no longer perceive the kitchen—the sounds of a dish-

  washer, the ticking clock, the groaning pipes, the smell of a chicken

  roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into

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  the primal energy-nothingness or waves of probability. The universe

  bursts into existence from life, not the other way around. Or, per-

  haps 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

&nb
sp; 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 informa-

  tion 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 envi-

  ronment—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 uni-

  verse 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

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  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 tril-

  lions 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 expe-

  rienced inside the mind alone. None are “out there” except by the

  convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interac-