by Robert Lanza
Even as a convenience, a biological mechanism, one might take a step back and ask what is this controversial entity that is being sliced up and contemplated. Einstein used the concept of space-time to demonstrate how objects’ motions can make sense consistently, regardless of frame of reference, and regardless of the distortion of space and time induced by speed or gravity. In doing so, he found that while light itself has a constant speed in a vacuum under all circumstances and from all perspectives, things like distance, length, and time have no immutability.
In our efforts to structure all things, sociologically and scientifically, humans place events on a time and space continuum. The universe is 13.7 billion years old; the Earth 4.6 billion. On our planet, Homo erectus appeared a few million years ago, but it took hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture. Four hundred years ago, Galileo supported Copernicus’s assertion that Earth revolves around the Sun. Darwin uncovered the truth of evolution in the mid-1800s in the Galapagos Islands. Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in a Swiss patent office in 1905.
So time, in the mechanistic universe as described by Newton, Einstein, and Darwin, is a ledger in which events are recorded. We think of time as a forward-moving continuum, flowing always into the future, accumulating, because human beings and other animals are constitutional materialists, hard-wired, designed, to think linearly. It’s the day-to-day keeping of one’s appointments and the watering of plants. The sofa my friend Barbara once shared with her husband Gene while he was alive—reading, watching television, cuddling when they were young—stands in the living room among bric-a-brac collected over the years.
But instead of time having an absolute reality, imagine instead that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the vinyl record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.
If Barbara could access all life—the entire vinyl record—she could experience it non-sequentially—she could know me, who she notches on time’s arrow as fifty in the year 2006, as a toddler, a teenager, an old man—all now.
In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (one of his oldest friends) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
That time is a fixed arrow is a human construction. That we live on the edge of all time is a fantasy. That there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the Earth is an even greater fantasy. Space and time are forms of animal understanding—period. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. So there simply is no absolute self-existing matrix out there in which physical events occur independent of life.
But let’s back up to a more fundamental question. Barbara wants to know about the clock. “We have very sophisticated machines, like atomic clocks, to measure time. If we can measure time, doesn’t that prove it exists?”
Barbara’s question is a good one. After all, we measure gasoline as occupying liters or gallons, and shell out cash for it on the basis of these quantifications. Would we ever be keeping this sort of meticulous track of something that was unreal?
Einstein shrugged off that issue, simply saying that, “Time is what we measure with a clock. Space is what we measure with a measuring rod.” The emphasis for physicists is on the measuring . However, the emphasis could just as easily be on the we, the observer, as this book squarely places it.
But if the clock thing seems like a stumper, consider whether the ability to measure time in any way supports its physical existence.
Clocks are rhythmic things, meaning that they contain processes that are repetitive. Humans use the rhythms of some events, like the ticking of clocks, to time other events like the rotation of the Earth. But this is not time, but rather, a comparison of events. Specifically, over the ages, humans have observed rhythmic things in nature—the periodicities of the Moon or of the Sun, the flooding of the Nile, to name a few—and we then created other rhythmic things to see how they interrelated, to accomplish the simple purpose of comparison. The more regular and repetitious was the motion, the better for our purposes of measurement. It was noticed that a weight on a string some thirty-nine inches long will always make one return-trip swing in exactly one second; this length was in fact used as the first definition of a meter (whose very name means measure). Later came the useful tendency of quartz crystals to vibrate 32,768 times a second when stimulated by a small bit of electricity—it is the basis for most wristwatches even today. We called these manmade rhythmic devices clocks because their repetitions were so consistently even, though repetitions can also be slow ones, such as those found on sundials, which compare shadow lengths and positions caused by the Sun to the Earth’s revolution. Going the other way, more sophisticated than ordinary mechanical clocks, with their dials and wheels that unfortunately change size with temperature, are atomic clocks in which the nucleus of cesium remains in a specific spin state only when bathed in electromagnetic radiation with precisely 9,192,631,770 passing waves per second. Thus, a second can be defined (is officially defined) as being the sum of that many “heartbeats” in the nucleus of cesium-133. In all such cases, humans use the rhythms of specific events to count off other specific events. But these are just events, not to be confused with time.
Actually, all of nature’s reliably recurring events could be (and sometimes are) employed to keep track of time. Tides, the Sun’s rotation, the phases of the Moon are just some of nature’s most significant periodic occurrences. Even common, ordinary natural events could be employed to measure time, although not as precisely as clocks. Ice melting, a growing child, an apple rotting on the ground—almost anything would work.
Manmade events can be used as well. For example, a top spins around for a while then stops. One could compare that to the melting of a standard ice cube on a hot day and calculate the number of top spinnings to an ice cube melting, maybe twenty-four spinnings to one melting. We might then conclude that in every ice-melting “day” there are twenty-four top spinning “hours,” and then devise a plan to meet Barbara for tea at two and a half ice melts or sixty top spins, depending on which “time piece” you each happen to have on hand. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that nothing is actually happening outside of the changing events.
People accept that time exists as a physical entity because we have invented those objects called clocks, which are simply more rhythmic and consistent than buds flowering or apples rotting. In reality, what’s really happening is motion, pure and simple—and this motion is ultimately confined to the here and now. Of course, we also retain time because a universally agreed-upon event (when all our individual timepieces say 8:00 p.m., for example) serves to alert us to another event, like the start of a favorite television show.
We feel as if we live on the edge of time. That’s a psychologically comfortable place, really, because it means we are still among the living. On the edge of time, tomorrow hasn’t happened. Our future has not been played out. Most of our descendents haven’t yet been born. Everything to come is a big mystery, a vast void. Life stretches ahead of us. We’re out in front, strapped to the engine of the Time Train, which relentlessly travels forward into an unknown future. Everything behind us, so to speak, is the dining car, business class, the caboose, and miles of track we can’t retrace. Everything before this moment in time is part of the history of the universe. The vast majority of our ancestors, about whom we haven’t t
he foggiest idea, are dead and gone. Everything prior to this moment is the past, gone forever. But this subjective feeling of living on the forward edge of time is a persistent illusion, a trick of our attempts to create an intelligible organizational pattern for nature in which one calendar day follows upon another, that spring precedes summer, and that years pass. Time in a biocentric universe is not sequential—however much our habitual perceptions dictate that it is.
If time is truly flowing forward into the future, is it not extraordinary that we are here, alive, for a split instant, on the edge of all time? Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the beginning of time. Now, stack time, like chairs, on top of each other, and seat yourself on the very top, or—if you prefer speed—strap yourself once again to the front of the Time Train.
Science has no real explanation for why we’re alive now, existing on the edge of time. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that we are alive.
The persistent human perception of time almost certainly stems from the chronic act of thinking, the one-word-at-a-time thought process by which ideas and events are visualized and anticipated. In rare moments of clarity and mental emptiness, or when danger or novel experience forces a one-pointed focus upon one’s consciousness, time vanishes, replaced by an ineffably enjoyable feeling of freedom, or the singular focus of escaping an immediate peril. Time is never cognized normally in such thought-less experiences: “I saw the whole accident unfolding in slow motion.”
In sum, from a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in the universe independent of life that notices it, and really doesn’t truly exist within the context of life either. But let’s return to Barbara’s point: growing children, aging, and feeling most poignantly that time exists when our loved ones die constitute the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. They age. We all grow old together. That to us is time. It belongs with us.
This brings us to the sixth principle:
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality 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 internal 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—is inextricably 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.
Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe 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 universe.
11
SPACE OUT
Ye Gods! Annihilate but space and time, And make two lovers happy.
—Alexander Pope (1728)
How do our animal minds apprehend the world?
We’ve all been taught that time and space exist, and their apparent reality is reinforced every day of our lives—every time we go from here to there, every time we reach for something. Most of us live without thinking abstractly about space. Like time, it’s such an integral part of our lives that its examination is as unnatural as scrutinizing walking or breathing.
“Obviously space exists,” we might answer, “because we live in it. We move through it, drive through it, build in it. Miles, kilometers, cubic feet, linear meters—all are units we use to measure it.” Humans schedule meetings at places like Broadway and Eighty-second on the second floor of Barnes & Noble in the café. We speak in clear terms of spatial dimensions, often associated with times. It’s the “when, what, where” of daily life.
A theory of time and space as belonging strictly to animal-sense perception, as our source of comprehension and consciousness, is a new and perhaps abstract thing to grasp, and day-to-day experience has indicated nothing of this reality to us. Rather, life has seemingly taught that time and space are external—and perhaps eternal—realities. They appear to encompass and bind all experiences, and are fundamental rather than secondary to life. They seem to lie above and beyond human experience, the gridwork within which all adventures unfold.
As animals, we are organized and wired to use places and time to specify our experiences to ourselves and to others. History defines the past by placing people and events in time and space. Scientific theories such as the Big Bang, the deep time of geology, and evolution are steeped in their logic. Our physical experiences—of moving from point A to point B, of parallel parking, standing on the edge of a precipice—confirm the existence of space.
When we reach for a glass of water on the coffee table, our sense of space is usually impeccable. The glass almost never spills due to a miscalculated reach. To place ourselves as the creator of time and space, not as the subject of it, goes against common sense, life experience, and education. It takes a radical shift of perspective for any of us to intuit that space and time belong solely to animal-sense perception, because the implications are so startling.
Yet we all instinctively know that space and time are not things—the kind of objects that we can see, feel, taste, touch, or smell. There is a peculiar intangibility about them. We cannot pick them up and put them on a shelf, like shells or stones found at the shore. A physicist cannot bring back space or time to the laboratory in a vial, like an entomologist collects insects to be examined and classified. There is something oddly different about them. And that is because space and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding. They are part of the mental logic of the animal organism, the software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
Along with time, space is the other human construct, as if every conceivable object is displayed within a vast container that has no walls. Unfortunately, the actual tangible perception of no-space is often confined to experiments that produce “changes of consciousness,” where the subject reports all separate objects to lose their reality as individual, separate items.
For the moment, confined to logic alone, we still should be able to see that the appearance of a myriad of separate objects existing within a matrix of space requires that each item first be learned and identified as separate, and the pattern imprinted on the mind.
When we gaze upon known objects, say a set of dishes and silverware on a table, we cognize each as individual, and separated by empty space—it is a long-standing mental habit to do so. No particular joy or transcendent experience occurs; the forks and spoons are not marvelous in any way. These are items blocked out by the thinking mind, within boundaries of color, shape, or utility. The fork’s tines are seen as specific separate items solely because they have been named. By contrast, the fork’s curved section between handle and tine has no name, and therefore exists as no real separate cognized entity for us.
Consider those rarer occasions when the logical mind is left behind by a wholly new visual experience that catches it off guard, so to speak, such as the riotously changing patterns of the Northern Lights, as seen from one of the great aurora places of the world, central Alaska. Now everyone gapes and gasps with delight. The patterns have
no individual names, and at any rate keep mutating. None are perceived as separate entities because they exist outside our normal boxy system of categorization. In cognizing the phenomenon, space, too, vanishes—because an object and its surroundings go together. The entire kaleidoscopic show is a wondrous new entity where space does not play any defining role. Such an all-encompassing perception is therefore not unknown in the non-psychedelically-drugged world; it merely requires a more direct perception rather than cognition employing habitual conceptions that are decidedly learned and not inherent.
Because human language and ideation decides where the boundaries of one object end and another begins, we’ll occasionally take complex visual phenomena or events with multiple colors and patterns—a sunset, say—and, unable to break it further into parts, brand one’s entire field of vision with a single label. A sparrow or an enlightened person may be swept away by the ineffable grandeur of this ever-mutating crepuscular play of shape and color, while the intellectual will simply brand it with a word—and then perhaps continue with a stream of mind-babble about other sunsets or what poets say about them or whatever. Another example might be the tirelessly changing patterns in a summer cloud or the countless rivulets and clusters of moving drops in a raging waterfall. There’s plenty of space there, but we have not been conditioned to observe a waterfall closely and separate the various watery components, and name or identify the liquidy streams, drops, or other elements and conceive of the space between them, even as they rapidly change. Too much work. So, instead, the entire phenomenon gets a single label of cloud or waterfall and the normal mental categorization of objects separated by spaces is “given a bye.” As a result, we tend to view it cleanly, staring at what we’re seeing rather than cognizing a flow of mental symbols. The Niagara experience, which would probably be fun no matter what, gains an extra notch of exhilaration simply because our habitual mental cages are now temporarily built of less dense material. Helping things along in this case is the sound track of undifferentiated “roar,” which doesn’t lend itself to a lot of ideation, either.