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-