by Robert Lanza
i N T H e b e g i N N i N g T H e r e w a s . . . w H a T ?
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your brain through a complex set of retinal and neural intermediar-
ies. This is undeniable—it’s basic seventh-grade science. The prob-
lem is, light doesn’t have any color nor any visual characteristics at all, as we shall see in the next chapter. So while you may think that
the kitchen as you remember it was “there” in your absence, the real-
ity is that nothing remotely resembling what you can imagine could
be present when a consciousness is not interacting. (If this seems
impossible, stay tuned: this is one of the easiest, most demonstrable
aspects of biocentrism.)
Indeed, it is here that biocentrism arrives at a very different view
of reality than that which has been generally embraced for the last
several centuries. Most people, in and out of the sciences, imag-
ine the external world to exist on its own, with an appearance that
more or less resembles what we ourselves see. Human or animal
eyes, according to this view, are mere windows that accurately let
in the world. If our personal window ceases to exist, as in death,
or is painted black and opaque, as in blindness, that doesn’t in any
way alter the continued existence of the external reality or its sup-
posed “actual” appearance. A tree is still there, the moon still shines,
whether or not we are cognizing them. They have an independent
existence. By this reasoning, the human eye and brain have been
designed to let us cognize the actual visual appearance of things,
and to alter nothing. True, a dog may see an autumn maple solely in
shades of gray, and an eagle may perceive much greater detail among
its leaves, but most creatures basically apprehend the same visually
real object, which persists even if no eyes are upon it.
Not so, says biocentrism.
This “Is it really there?” issue is ancient, and of course predates
biocentrism, which makes no pretense about being the first to take
a stance about it. Biocentrism, however, explains why one view and
not the other must be correct. The converse is equally true: once
one fully understands that there is no independent external universe
outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place.
the sound
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of A fAllIng tree
Who hasn’t considered or at least heard the old question, “If a
tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a
sound?”
If we conduct a quick survey of friends and family, we shall find
that the vast majority of people answer decisively in the affirmative.
“Of course a falling tree makes a sound,” someone recently replied,
with a touch of pique, as if this were a question too dumb to merit
a moment’s contemplation. By taking this stance, what people are
actually averring is their belief in an objective, independent reality.
Obviously, the prevailing mindset is of a universe that exists just as
well without us as with us. This fits in tidily with the Western view
held at least since Biblical times, that “little me” is of small impor-
tance or consequence in the cosmos.
Few consider (or perhaps have sufficient science background
for) a realistic sonic appraisal of what actually occurs when that
tree falls in the woods. What is the process that produces sound?
So, if the reader will forgive a quick return to fifth-grade Earth Sci-
ence, here’s a quick summary: sound is created by a disturbance
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in some medium, usually air, although sound travels even faster
and more efficiently through denser materials such as water or
steel. Limbs, branches, and trunks violently striking the ground
create rapid pulses of air. A deaf person can readily feel some of
these pulsations; they are particularly blatant on the skin when
the pulses repeat with a frequency of five to thirty times a second.
So, what we have in hand with the tumbling tree, in actuality, are
rapid air-pressure variations, which spread out by traveling through
the surrounding medium at around 750 mph. As they do so, they
lose their coherency until the background evenness of the air is re-
established. This, according to simple science, is what occurs even
when a brain-ear mechanism is absent—a series of greater and
lesser air-pressure passages. Tiny, rapid, puffs of wind. There is no
sound attached to them.
Now, let’s lend an ear to the scene. If someone is nearby, the
air puffs physically cause the ear’s tympanic membrane (eardrum)
to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing
between 20 and 20,000 times a second (with an upper limit more
like 10,000 for people over forty, and even less for those of us whose
misspent youth included earsplitting rock concerts). Air that puffs
15 times a second is not intrinsically different from air that pulses
30 times, yet the former will never result in a human perception
of sound because of the design of our neural architecture. In any
case, nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical sig-
nals to a section of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise.
This experience, then, is inarguably symbiotic. The pulses of air by
themselves do not constitute any sort of sound, which is obvious
because 15-pulse air puffs remain silent no matter how many ears
are present. Only when a specific range of pulses are present is the
ear’s neural architecture designed to let human consciousness con-
jure the noise experience. In short, an observer, an ear, and a brain
are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air
pulses. The external world and consciousness are correlative. And a
tree that falls in an empty forest creates only silent air pulses—tiny
puffs of wind.
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When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes
a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their
inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too
difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow con-
tinue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.
Now consider a lit candle placed on a table in that same empty
forest. This is not an advisable setup, but let’s pretend Smokey the
Bear is supervising the whole thing with an extinguisher at the
ready, while we consider whether the flame has intrinsic brightness
and a yellow color when no one’s watching.
Even if we contradict quantum experiments and allow that elec-
trons and all other particles have assumed actual positions in the
absence of observers (much more on this later), the flame is still
merely a hot gas. Like any source of light, it emits photons or tiny
packets of waves of electromagnetic energy. Each consists of electri-
cal and magnetic pulses. These momentary exhibitions of electricity
and magnetism are the whole show, the nature of light itself.
It is easy
to recall from everyday experience that neither elec-
tricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it’s not
hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright
or colored about that candle flame. Now let these same invisible
electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the
waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in
length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver
a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in
turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the
line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipi-
tal lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading
complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjec-
tively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a
place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.” Other
creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something
altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an
entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn’t a “bright yel-
low” light “out there” at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of
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electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we’d call a yellow flame. Again, it’s correlative.
What about if you touch something? Isn’t it solid? Push on the
trunk of the fallen tree and you feel pressure. But this too is a sensa-
tion strictly inside your brain and only “projected” to your fingers,
whose existence also lies within the mind. Moreover, that sensation
of pressure is caused not by any contact with a solid, but by the fact
that every atom has negatively charged electrons in its outer shells.
As we all know, charges of the same type repel each other, so the
bark’s electrons repel yours, and you feel this electrical repulsive force stopping your fingers from penetrating any further. Nothing solid
ever meets any other solids when you push on a tree. The atoms in
your fingers are each as empty as a vacant football stadium in which
a single fly sits on the fifty-yard line. If we needed solids to stop us
(rather than energy fields) , our fingers could easily penetrate the tree as if we were swiping at fog.
Consider an even more intuitive example—rainbows. The sud-
den appearance of those prismatic colors juxtaposed between moun-
tains can take our breath away. But the truth is we are absolutely
necessary for the rainbow’s existence. When nobody’s there, there
simply is no rainbow.
Not that again, you might be thinking, but hang in there—this
time it’s more obvious than ever. Three components are necessary
for a rainbow. There must be sun, there must be raindrops, and
there must be a conscious eye (or its surrogate, film) at the correct
geometric location. If your eyes look directly opposite the sun (that
is, at the antisolar point, which is always marked by the shadow of
your head), the sunlit water droplets will produce a rainbow that
surrounds that precise spot at a distance of forty-two degrees. But
your eyes must be located at that spot where the refracted light from
the sunlit droplets converges to complete the required geometry. A
person next to you will complete his or her own geometry, and will
be at the apex of a cone for an entirely different set of droplets, and
will therefore see a separate rainbow. Their rainbow is very likely to
look like yours, but it needn’t be so. The droplets their eyes intercept
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may be of a different size, and larger droplets make for a more vivid
rainbow while at the same time robbing it of blue.
Then, too, if the sunlit droplets are very nearby, as from a lawn
sprinkler, the person nearby may not see a rainbow at all. Your rain-
bow is yours alone. But now we get to our point: what if no one’s
there? Answer: no rainbow. An eye–brain system (or its surrogate,
a camera, whose results will only be viewed later by a conscious
observer) must be present to complete the geometry. As real as the
rainbow looks, it requires your presence just as much as it requires
sun and rain.
In the absence of anyone or any animal, it is easy to see that no
rainbow is present. Or, if you prefer, there are countless trillions of
potential bows, each one blurrily offset from the next by the minut-
est margin. None of this is speculative or philosophical. It’s the basic
science that would be encountered in any grade-school Earth Sci-
ence class.
Few would dispute the subjective nature of rainbows, which fig-
ure so prominently in fairytales that they seem only marginally to
belong to our world in the first place. It is when we fully grasp that
the sight of a skyscraper is just as dependent on the observer that we
have made the first required leap to the true nature of things.
This leads us to the first principle of biocentrism:
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is
a process that involves our consciousness.
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lIghts And ActIon!
Long before medical school, long before my research into the life
of cells and cloning human embryos, I was fascinated by the
complex and elusive wonder of the natural world. Some of these
early experiences led to the development of my biocentric view-
point: from my boyhood exploring nature and my adventures with
a tiny primate I ordered for $18.95 from an ad at the back of Field
and Stream magazine to my genetic experiments with chickens as a
young teenager, which resulted in me being taken under the wing of
Stephen Kuffler, a renowned neurobiologist at Harvard.
My road to Kuffler began, appropriately enough, with science
fairs, which for me were an antidote against those who looked down
on me because of my family’s circumstances. Once, after my sister
was suspended from school, the principal told my mother she was
not fit to be a parent. By trying earnestly, I thought I could improve
my situation. I had a vision of accepting an award someday in front
of all those teachers and classmates who laughed when I said I was
going to enter the science fair. I applied myself to a new project,
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an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens
and make them black. My biology teacher told me it was impossible,
and my parents thought I was just trying to hatch chicken eggs and
refused to drive me to the farm to get them.
I persuaded myself to make a journey by bus and trolley car
from my house in Stoughton to Harvard Medical School, one of the
world’s most prestigious institutions of medical science. I mounted
the stairs that led up to the front doors; the huge granite slabs were
worn by past generations. Once inside, I hoped the men of science
would receive me kindly and aid in my efforts. This was science,
wasn’t it, an
d shouldn’t that have been enough? As it turned out, I
never got past the guard.
I felt like Dorothy at Emerald City when the palace guard
said, “Go away!” I found some breathing space at the back of the
building to figure out my next move. The doors were all locked. I
stood by the dumpster for perhaps half an hour. Then I saw a man
approaching me, no taller than I was, clad in a T-shirt and khaki
work pants—the janitor, I supposed, coming in the back door and
all. Thinking that, I realized for the first time how I was going to
get inside.
In another moment, we were standing face to face inside. “He
doesn’t know or care that I’m here,” I thought. “He just cleans the
floors.”
“Can I help you?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I have to ask a Harvard professor a question.”
“Are you looking for any professor in particular?”
“Well, actually, no—it’s about DNA and nucleoprotein. I’m try-
ing to induce melanin synthesis in albino chickens,” I said. My words
met with a stare of surprise. Seeing the impact they were having, I
went on, though I was certain he didn’t know what DNA was. “You
see, albinism is an autosomal recessive disease . . .”
As we got to talking, I told him how I worked in the school
cafeteria myself, and how I was good friends with Mr. Chapman,
the janitor who lived up the street. He asked me if my father was a
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doctor. I laughed. “No, he’s a professional gambler. He plays poker.”
It was at that moment, I think, we became friends. After all, we were
both, I assumed, from the same underprivileged class.
Of course, what I didn’t know was that he was Dr. Stephen Kuf-
fler, the world-famous neurobiologist who had been nominated for
the Nobel Prize. Had he told me so, I would have rushed off. At the
time, however, I felt like a schoolmaster lecturing to a pupil. I told
him about the experiment I had performed in my basement—how I
altered the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black.
“Your parents must be proud of you,” he said.
“They don’t know what I do,” I said. “I stay out of their way. They
just think I’m trying to hatch chicken eggs.”
“They didn’t drive you here?”