BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  happens when two extremely fast-moving atomic nuclei or protons

  collide and fuse to form a heavier element that is usually helium, but

  can be even heavier, especially as the star ages. Carbon should not

  be capable of being manufactured by this process because all the

  intermediate steps from helium to carbon involve highly unstable

  nuclei. The only way for its creation would be for three helium nuclei to collide at the same time. But the likelihood of three helium nuclei

  8 8

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  colliding at the identical microsecond, even in the frenzied interiors

  of stars, are minuscule. It was Fred Hoyle—not of the card rules

  fame, but the one who championed the steady state theory of an eter-

  nal universe until that grand idea’s sad demise in the 1960s—who

  correctly figured out that something unusual and amazing must be at

  play in the interior of stars that could vastly increase the odds of this

  rare three-way collision, and give the universe the abundant carbon

  found in every living creature. The trick here was a kind of “reso-

  nance,” where disparate effects can come together to form something

  unexpected, the way the wind resonated with the structure of the

  original Tacoma Narrows Bridge more than six decades ago, causing

  it to sway violently and collapse. Bingo: turns out, carbon has a reso-

  nant state at just the correct energy to let stars create it in significant

  quantities. The carbon resonance, in turn, directly depends on the

  value of the strong force, which is what glues together everything in

  each atomic nucleus out to the farthest villages of space-time.

  The strong force is still somewhat mysterious, yet is critical to

  the universe we know. Its influence only extends within the con-

  fines of an atom. Indeed, its strength falls off so quickly it’s already

  anemic at the edges of large atoms. This is why giant atoms such as

  uranium are so unstable. The outermost protons and neutrons in

  their nuclei lie at the fringes of the clump, where the strong force

  retains only a fragile hold, so occasionally one does overcome the

  otherwise iron-like grip of the strong force and falls off, changing

  the atom into something else.

  If the strong force and gravity are so amazingly tweaked, we

  can’t ignore the electromagnetic force that holds sway in the electri-

  cal and magnetic connections found in all atoms. Discussing it, the

  great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said in his book The

  Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton University Press, 1985):

  “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty

  years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on

  their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know

  where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or

  perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of

  g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e

  8 9

  the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes

  to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of

  God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his

  pencil.’ We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to mea-

  sure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of

  dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, with-

  out putting it in secretly!”

  It amounts to 1/137 when the units are filled in, and what it sig-

  nifies is a constant of electromagnetism, another of the four funda-

  mental forces, that helps facilitate the existence of atoms and allows

  the entire visible universe to exist. Any small change in its value and

  none of us are here.

  Such factual oddities powerfully influence modern cosmological

  thinking. After all, mustn’t cosmologists’ theories plausibly explain

  why we live in such a highly unlikely reality?

  “Not at all,” said Princeton physicist Robert Dicke in papers

  written in the sixties and elaborated upon by Brandon Carter in

  1974. This perspective was dubbed “the Anthropic Principle.” Carter

  explained that what we can expect to observe “must be restricted by

  the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.” Put another

  way, if gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker,

  and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter, we couldn’t be here to think about it. Because we’re here, the universe has to be the way it is and therefore isn’t unlikely at all. Case closed.

  By this reasoning, there’s no need for cosmological gratitude.

  Our seemingly fortuitous, suspiciously specific locale, temperature

  range, chemical and physical milieus are just what’s needed to pro-

  duce life. If we’re here, then this is what we must find around us.

  Such reasoning is now known as the “weak” version of the

  Anthropic Principle or WAP. The “strong” version, one that skirts

  the edges of philosophy even more closely but clearly supports bio-

  centrism, says that the universe must have those properties that

  allow life to develop within it because it was obviously “designed”

  with the goal of generating and sustaining observers. But without

  biocentrism, the strong anthropic principle has no mechanism for

  9 0

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  explaining why the universe must have life-sustaining properties.

  Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911–2008),

  who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called

  the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required

  to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any

  pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like

  Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the uni-

  verse under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a

  state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-

  life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see

  shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but

  provides a way of visualizing things.)

  If the universe is in a non-determined state until forced to resolve

  by an observer, and this non-determined state included the deter-

  mination of the various fundamental constants, then the resolution

  would necessarily fall in such a way that allows for an observer, and

  therefore the constants would have to resolve in such a way as to

  allow life. Biocentrism therefore supports and builds upon John

  Wheeler’s conclusions about where quantum theory leads, and pro-

  vides a solution to the anthropic problem that is unique and more

  reasonable than any alternative.

  While the latter two versions of the Anthropic Principle, need-

  less to say, strongly support biocentrism, many in the astronomi-

  cal community seem to embrace the simplest anthropic version, at

  least guardingly. “I like the weak anthropic principle,” said astrono-

  mer Alex Filippenko of the University of California, when one of the


  authors asked his opinion. “Used appropriately, it has some predic-

  tive value.” After all, he added, “Small changes to seemingly boring

  properties of the universe could have easily produced a universe in

  which nobody would have been around to be bored.”

  Ah, but the point is that it didn’t and couldn’t.

  To be honest and present all views, however, it should be noted

  that some critics wonder whether the Weak Anthropic Principle is no

  more than a piece of circular reasoning or a facile way of squirming

  g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e

  9 1

  out of explaining the enormous peculiarities of the physical uni-

  verse. Philosopher John Leslie, in his 1989 book Universes (there is a 1996 reprint edition), says, “A man in front of a firing squad of

  one hundred riflemen is going to be pretty surprised if every bullet

  misses him. Sure he could say to himself, ‘Of course they all missed;

  that makes perfect sense, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to wonder

  why they all missed.’ But anyone in his or her right mind is going to

  want to know how such an unlikely event occurred.”

  But biocentrism provides the explanation for why all the shots

  missed. If the universe is created by life, then no universe that didn’t

  allow for life could possibly exist. This fits very neatly into quantum

  theory and John Wheeler’s participatory universe in which observers

  are required to bring the universe into existence. Because, if indeed there ever was such a time, the universe was in an undetermined

  probability state before the presence of observers (some probabili-

  ties—or most—not allowing for life), when observation began and

  the universe collapsed into a real state, it inevitably collapsed into

  a state that allowed for the observation that collapsed it. With bio-

  centrism, the mystery of the Goldilocks universe goes away, and

  the critical role of life and consciousness in shaping the universe

  becomes clear.

  So you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence

  revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have

  any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life

  or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is

  biocentric. Either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos

  that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but

  instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impos-

  sible enough to seem downright silly.

  And if any of this seems too preposterous, just consider the alter-

  native, which is what contemporary science asks us to believe: that

  the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped

  into existence out of absolute nothingness. Who in their right mind

  would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible sugges-

  tion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred

  9 2

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter

  from—zilch? Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen,

  and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become

  sentient—aware!—and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste

  for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random pro-

  cess could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years

  so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can any-

  one conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles

  still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many sup-

  posed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the

  cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops?

  Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves

  so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and a loathing for

  macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and

  constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life?

  Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos

  on its fundamental level?

  By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim

  processes and the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous

  new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently

  ridiculous “explanations” for the nature of the cosmos as a whole.

  If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it

  wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the

  old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.

  Unless one awards points for familiarity and repetition, a con-

  sciousness-based universe scarcely seems far-fetched when com-

  pared with the alternatives.

  We can now add another principle:

  First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a

  process that involves our consciousness.

  Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal per-

  ceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the

  same coin and cannot be separated.

  Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic par-

  ticles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to

  g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e

  9 3

  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, “mat-

  ter” 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 very structure of the uni-

  verse 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.

  10

  no tIme to lose

  From wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

  Out of Space—Out of Time

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “Dreamland” (1845)

  Because quantum theory increasingly casts doubts about the

  existence of time as we know it, let’s head straight into this sur-

  prisingly ancient scientific issue. As irrelevant as it might first

  appear, the presence or absence of time is an important factor in any

  fundamental look into the nature of the cosmos.

  According to biocentrism, our sense of the forward motion of

  time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a

  world of infinite activities and outcomes that only seems to result in a smooth, continuous path.

  9 5

  9 6

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  At each moment, we are at the edge of a paradox known as “The

  Arrow,” first described twenty-five hundred years ago by the philos-

  opher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing

  can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in

  one location during any given instant of its flight. But if it is in only

  one place, it must momentarily
be at rest. The arrow must then be

  present somewhere, at some specific location, at every moment of its

  trajectory. Logically, then, motion per se is not what is really occur-

  ring. Rather, it is a series of separate events. This may be a first indi-

  cation that the forward motion of time—of which the movement of

  the arrow is an embodiment—is not a feature of the external world

  but a projection of something within us , as we tie together things we

  are observing. By this reasoning, time is not an absolute reality but a feature of our minds.

  In truth, the reality of time has long been questioned by an odd

  alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the

  past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are solely

  neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment.

  Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more

  than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts.

  Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time?

  Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are

  no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description

  of motion and events? In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt

  on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that

  includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream.

  Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for real-

  ity—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through

  quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-

  symmetrical. Time is a concept looking for a function—except when

  we’re speaking about a change, as in acceleration, but change (usu-

  ally symbolized by the Greek capital letter delta or Δ) is not the same

  thing as time, as we shall see.

  Popularly speaking, time is often called “the fourth dimension.”

  This usually throws people for a loop because time in daily life bears

  N o T i m e T o L o s e

  9 7

  no resemblance to the three spatial realms, which, to review basic

  geometry, are:

  Lines, which are one-dimensional. except in string theory, which

  offers an exception to one-dimensional lines: its threads of energy/

  particles are so thin they’re stretched-out points that do not quite

  constitute an actual coordinate. The ratio of their negligible thick-