Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (25 page)

The implications of this recently hit home with the death of my sister Christine. I was text messaging with an Associated Press reporter as one of the biggest frauds in scientific history started to unfold.

Sat 12/10/05 1:40 PM From Reporter:
Bob: it’s all very fishy. The edges of Hwang’s cloning paper are falling away and there’s a growing feeling that the center can’t hold either. I simply don’t know what to make of Hwang’s hospitalization . . . overly dramatic or the weight of a fraud soon to be exposed weighing heavily? . . . how is this thing gonna bottom out?

Sat 12/10/05 4:24 PM From Robert Lanza:
Life is nuts! My sister was just in an auto accident, and has been rushed into surgery with major internal bleeding. I just spoke with one of the doctors—they don’t think there’s much chance she’s going to make it. All this seems so distant and absurd right now. I’m off to the hospital. Bob

Sat 12/10/05 5:40 PM From Reporter:
My God, Bob.

But my sister didn’t make it. After viewing Christine’s body, I went out to speak with several of the family members who had assembled at the hospital. As I entered the room, Christine’s husband—Ed—started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I had one foot in the present surrounded by tears, and one foot back in the glory of nature, turning my face toward the radiance of the Sun.
Again, as during the aftermath of Dennis’s accident
, I thought about the little
episode with the glowworm, and how every creature consists of multiple spheres of physical reality that pass through space and time like ghosts through doors. I thought too about the two-slit experiment, with the electron going through both holes at the same time. I could not doubt the conclusions of these experiments: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time, yet here in my reality I would have to deal with this outcome and no other.

Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man who she loved very much. My younger sister couldn’t make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn’t make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine’s life. Because no one from our side of the family showed up except for me, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away.

Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a bank of snow.

“Ed,” she had said, “I can’t feel my leg.”

She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half and blood was rushing into her peritoneum.

Soon after the death of his son, Emerson wrote, “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” By striving to see through the veil of our ordinary perceptions, we can come closer to understanding our profound relationship to all created things—all possibilities and potentialities—past and present, great and small.

Christine had recently lost more than a hundred pounds, and Ed had bought her a pair of diamond earrings as a surprise. It’s going to be hard to wait—I have to admit—but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her . . . in whatever form she and I and this amazing play of consciousness assume.

B
iocentrism is a scientific change in worldview that invites incorporation into existing areas of research. It offers short-term and longer-term opportunities, both to demonstrate biocentrism’s own truth, and to use it as a springboard to make sense of aspects of biological and physical science that are currently insensible.

The most immediate evidence of biocentrism will arrive with the never-ending creation of new and cleverer quantum theory experiments, as they expand into the macrocosmic. Already, QT experiments have intruded into the visible, as we have described in an earlier chapter. As such demonstrations increasingly grow into the macroscopic realm, it will be untenable to “look the other way” when it comes to observer-influenced outcomes. In short, QT will, on its own, require an explanation for its strange results—and the most logical will be biocentrism.

In 2008, in an article in the journal
Progress in Physics
, Elmira A. Isaeva said, “The problem of quantum physics, as a choice of one alternative at quantum measurement and a problem of philosophy as to how consciousness functions, is deeply connected with relations
between these two. It is quite possible that in solving these two problems, it is likely that experiments in the quantum mechanics will include workings of a brain and consciousness, and it will then be possible to present a new basis for the theory of consciousness.” This—in a physics journal!

The article then goes on to discuss the “dependence of physical experiment on the state of consciousness.” Such mainstream acknowledgments of the role of consciousness and the living in previously assumed to be physics-alone areas will continue to multiply until they become the established paradigm rather than a bothersome offshoot.

Toward this end, the proposed scaled-up superposition experiment will see whether the weird quantum effects observed at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels apply just as strongly in truly large macroscopic structures—at the levels of tables and chairs. It would be interesting to confirm or deny that macroscopic objects literally exist in more than one state or place simultaneously until perturbed in some way, after which they collapse out of “superposition“ to just one outcome. There are many reasons why this might not happen experimentally, chief among them the noise (interference from light, organisms, etc.), but whatever outcome occurs, it should be revelatory.

The second, allied area of biocentric research is of course in the realm of brain architecture, neuroscience, and specifically consciousness itself. Here, the authors are hopeful but not optimistic about short-term progress, for the reasons outlined in chapter 19.

A third area is the ongoing research into artificial intelligence, which is still in its infancy. Few doubt, however, that this century, in which computer power and capabilities keep expanding geometrically, will eventually bring researchers to confront the problem in a serious, practical, useful way. When that happens, it will become clear that a “thinking device” will need the same kind of algorithms for employing time and developing a sense of space that we enjoy. The development of such sophisticated circuitry will reveal—
probably faster than human brain research can—the realities and modalities of time and space as being entirely observer-dependent.

It will also be interesting to keep an eye on the ongoing experiments into free will. Biocentrism neither demands there be individual free will, nor rejects it—though the former seems more compatible with an over-arching, consciousness-based universe. In 2008, experiments by Benjamin Liber and others, building on their earlier work alluded to previously, demonstrated that the brain, operating on its own, makes which-hand-to-raise choices that are detectible by observers watching brain-scan monitors up to ten seconds before the subject has “decided” which arm to hold up.

Finally, one must consider the endless ongoing attempts at creating GUTs—grand unified theories. Currently, such efforts in physics have been maddeningly lengthy—stretching typically for decades—without much success except as a way of financially facilitating the careers of theoreticians and grad students. Nor have they even “felt right.” Incorporating the living universe, or consciousness, or allowing the observer into the equation, as John Wheeler insists is necessary, would at minimum produce a fascinating amalgam of the living and non-living in a way that might make everything work better.

Currently, the disciplines of biology, physics, cosmology, and all their sub-branches are generally practiced by those with little knowledge of the others. It may take a multidisciplinary approach to achieve tangible results that incorporate biocentrism. The authors are optimistic that this will happen in time.

And what, after all, is time?

One of the most famous formulas in science came from the dazzling mind of Hendrik Lorentz, near the end of the nineteenth century. It forms the backbone of relativity, and shows us the fickle nature of space, distance, and time. It may seem complicated, but it is not:

We’ve expressed this for computing the change in the perceived passage of
time
. It is actually much simpler than it appears. Delta or Δ means
change
so ΔT is the change in your passage of time—what you yourself perceive. Small t represents the time passing for those you left behind on Earth, let’s say one year—so what we’re after is how much time passes for you (T) while one year elapses for everyone back in Brooklyn. This simple “one year” of t (in this example) should be multiplied by the meat-and-potatoes of the Lorentz transformation, which is the square root of 1, from which we subtract the following fraction: v
²
, which is your speed multiplied by itself, divided by c
²
, which is the speed of light multiplied by itself. If all
speeds are expressed in matching units, this equation will tell you how your time slows down.

Here’s an example: If you travel twice the speed of a bullet, or one mile a second, then v
²
is 1 × 1 or 1, which is divided by the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, yielding 35,000,000,000 and yielding a fraction so small it’s essentially nothing at all. When this nothingness is subtracted from the initial 1 in the equation, it’s still essentially 1 and because the square root of 1 is still 1, and remains 1 when multiplied by the one year that passed back on Earth, the answer naturally remains 1. That means that traveling at twice the speed of a bullet, or one mile a second, while it may seem fast, is actually too small to change the passage of time relativistically.

Now consider a fast speed. If you’ve managed to travel at lightspeed, the fraction v
²
/c
²
becomes 1/1 or 1. The expression inside the square root sign is then 1-1, which is 0. The square root of 0 is 0, so now you multiply 0 by the time experienced back on Earth, and the answer is 0. No time. Time has been frozen for you if you move at lightspeed. Thus, you can insert any number for “v” and the formula will yield how much time passes for a traveling astronaut while a given time passes on Earth. This same formula also calculates the decrease in length for a traveler, if one substitutes L (length) instead of V (speed). It will also work to compute mass increase the same way, except at the conclusion one must divide the result into 1 (find the reciprocal) because unlike time and length, which decreases, mass increases with greater velocity.

The “space” that plays one of central roles in Einstein’s relativity can be easily derived scientifically to be replaced as a standalone entity, leaving the practical conclusions of relativity intact and still functioning. What follows is a physics-based explanation for this, with most math eliminated. Nonetheless, it is rather dry, and we recommend it mainly for occasions when unexpectedly stuck in a bus terminal for more than two or three hours.

If we supplement the propositions of Euclidean geometry by the single proposition that two points on a practically rigid body always correspond to the same distance (line-interval), independently of any changes in position to which we may subject the body, the propositions of Euclidean geometry then resolve themselves into propositions on the relative positions of practically rigid bodies. (
Relativity
)

One may find fault with this definition of space. From a practical standpoint, this founds the common conception of space on an unphysical idealization: the perfectly rigid body. The fact that one specifies
practically rigid
bodies does not protect one’s theory from
the consequences of this idealization. To Einstein, space is something you measure with physical objects, and his objective mathematical definition of space relies on perfectly rigid measuring rods.

One might claim that these rods can be made arbitrarily small (the smaller, the more rigid), but we now know that sufficiently microscopic measuring rods become
less
rigid, not more. The idea of measuring space by lining up individual atoms or electrons is absurd. The best distance measurement that Einstein’s construction of special relativity can hope to achieve is a consistent statistical average. Even this ideal is compromised by the theory itself, however, which recognizes that these measurements depend on the relative state of motion between the observer and the bodies being measured.

From a philosophical standpoint, Einstein follows a grand tradition of physicists by assuming that his own sensory phenomena correspond to an objective external reality. However, the concept of objective mathematically idealized space has outlived its usefulness. We propose that space is more appropriately described as an
emergent
property of external reality, one that is fundamentally dependent on consciousness.

As a first step to this goal, let us consider the theory of special relativity in detail and ask whether it can be constructed sensibly without relying on rigid measuring rods or even physical bodies. Let’s look at Einstein’s two assumptions:

The concept of
speed
, which implies objective space, is integral to both assumptions. It is hard to get away from this idea because one of the simplest and easiest things we can measure about the objects of our experience is their spatial characteristics. If we abandon the
a priori
assumption of objective space, however, where does that leave us?