BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  tion of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly

  exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as

  a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said Wheeler, “exists until it is

  observed.”

  You can also think of your mind operating like the circuitry of

  an electronic calculating device. Say you bought a brand-new calcu-

  lator and have just taken it out of the package. When you punch in 4

  × 4, the number 16 pops up on the little display screen, even though

  these numbers have never been multiplied before on that particular

  device. The calculator follows a set of rules, like your mind. 16 will

  always pop up on a functioning calculator when given the input of

  4 × 4, or 10 + 6, or 25 – 9. When you step outside, it’s like a new

  set of numbers has been punched that determines what will be on

  “display”—whether the Moon will be here or there, blocked by a

  cloud, crescent, or full.

  The i’s and the t’s of physical reality are not dotted and crossed

  until you actually look up into the sky. The Moon has a definite exis-

  tence only after it has been pulled out of the realm of mathemati-

  cal probability and into the observer’s web of consciousness. In any

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  event, the space between its atoms is so huge, it is as correct to call

  the Moon empty space as to call it an object. There’s truly nothing

  solid about it at all, it’s just more brain-stuff.

  Perhaps you may find yourself trying to catch a quick glimpse of

  this haze of probability before it bursts into form, like a kid sneaking

  a peek at the cover of Playboy. The inclination is to dart your eyes or turn your head with lightning speed to catch a forbidden glance. But

  you can’t see something that doesn’t yet exist, so the game is futile.

  Perhaps some readers will dismiss this as nonsense, arguing that

  there’s no way the brain has the machinery actually to create physi-

  cal reality. But remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider

  the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to con-

  struct a spatio-temporal reality as real as the one you are experienc-

  ing now. As a medical doctor, I can attest to the fact that the visions

  and sounds schizophrenic patients “see” and “hear” are just as real

  to them as this page or the chair on which you now sit.

  It is here, at last, where we approach the imagined border of our-

  selves, the wooded boundary where, in the words of the old fairy

  tale, the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other. At sleep, we

  all know, consciousness is diminished, and so too, the continuity in

  the connection of times and places, the end to both space and time.

  Where, then, do we find ourselves? On rungs that can be interca-

  lated anywhere, “like those,” as Emerson put it “that Hermes won

  with dice of the moon, that Osiris might be born.” It is true that

  consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the

  Earth, we know only the crust. Below the level of conscious thought,

  we can conceive unconscious neural states. But these mental facul-

  ties, in themselves, apart from their relation to our consciousness,

  cannot be said to exist in space and time, any more than does a rock

  or a tree.

  And as for its limits, its boundaries so to speak, do they exist

  in any imaginable way? Or is it even simpler than we can imagine?

  “There is,” wrote Thoreau, “always the possibility . . . of being all.”

  How can this be true? How is it managed, as in our actual exper-

  iments with electrons, that a single particle can be at two places at

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  once? See the loon in the pond, the single mullein or dandelion in

  the field, the Moon, or the North Star? How deceptive is the space

  that separates them and makes them solitary? Are they not the

  subjects of the same reality that interested Bell, whose experiment

  answered once and for all whether what happens locally is affected

  by nonlocal events?

  The situation is not unlike the one in which Alice found her-

  self in the Pool of Tears. We are sure we are not connected to the

  fish in the pond, for they have scales and fins and we don’t have

  any. Yet, “non-separability,” theorist Bernard d’Espagnat has said, “is

  now one of the most certain general concepts in physics.” This is

  not to say that our minds, like the particles in Bell’s experiment,

  are linked in any way that can violate the laws of causality. We may

  imagine two detectors situated on opposite sides of the universe,

  with photons from some central source flying off to each of them.

  If an experimenter changed the polarization of one beam, he might

  instantaneously influence events 10 billion light-years away. But no

  information can possibly be transmitted from point A to point B or

  from one experimenter to another through this process. It unfolds

  strictly on its own.

  In this same sense, there is a part of us that is intimately con-

  nected to the fish in the pond. We think there is an enclosing wall,

  a circumference to us. Yet, Bell’s experiment implies that there are

  cause–effect linkages that transcend our ordinary classical way of

  thinking. “Men esteem truth remote,” wrote Thoreau, “in the out-

  skirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after

  the last man. . . . But all these times and places and occasions are

  now and here.”

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  deAth And eternIty

  The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with

  the human body, but there is some part of it which

  remains eternal.

  —Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

  How does the biocentric conception of the world change our

  lives? How can it affect our emotions of love, fear, and grief?

  How, above all, does it enable us to cope with our apparent

  mortality and the relationship of the body and our consciousness?

  The attachment to life and consequent fear of death is a univer-

  sal concern, and, in some, an obsession, as the replicants in Blade

  Runner made clear in their less-than-gentle way to all who would

  listen. Yet once we abandon the random, physical-centered cosmos

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  and start to see things biocentrically, the verisimilitude of a finite life

  loosens its grip.

  Lucretius the Epicurean taught us two thousand years ago not to

  fear death. The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern

  science lead to the same assertion—that the mind’s awareness is the

  ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Does it die, then, with the

  body?

  This is the point at which we leave science for a bit and contemplate

  what biocentrism suggests and allows, rather than what it can prove.

  The following is frankly speculative, yet it is more than mere philos-

  ophizing, as it follows logically and sensibly from a consciousness-

  based universe. Those who wish to stick strictly with “Just the facts,

&
nbsp; ma’am,” are under no compulsion to accept any of these rather pro-

  visional conclusions.

  As Emerson described it in The Over Soul, “The influences of the

  senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that

  the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insur-

  mountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is

  the sign of insanity.”

  I remember the day when I first realized this. From around the

  corner came the trolley car, scattering sparks above it. There was a

  grind of metal wheels, the tinkle of a few coins. With a jolt and a

  sailing glide, the gigantic electric machine was on its way to my past,

  back, block by block through the decades, through the metropolitan

  limits of Boston, until it came to Roxbury. Here, at the foot of the

  hill where, for me, the universe began, I hoped I might find a set of

  initials scratched into the sidewalk or a tree, or perhaps an old, half-

  rusted toy, which I might put away in a shoe box as evidence of my

  own immortality.

  But when I reached that place I found that the tractors had been

  there and left. The city, it seemed, had reclaimed some acres of slum;

  the old house I lived in, the houses next door where my friends

  played, and all the yards and trees of the years I grew up in—all those

  things were gone. And though they had been swept from the world,

  in my mind they still stood, bright and heliographing in the sun,

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  superimposed on the current setting. I picked my way through the

  litter and the remains of some unidentifiable structure. That spring

  day—which some of my colleagues spent in the laboratory carry-

  ing out experiments, and others in contemplation of black holes and

  equations—I sat in a vacant city lot agonizing over the open-ended

  and perverse nature of time. Not that I had never seen the fall of leaf,

  nor a kind face grow old, but here, perchance, I might come across

  some hidden passageway that would take me beyond the nature that

  I knew, to some eternal reality behind the flux of things.

  The extent of the dilemma was realized both by Albert Einstein

  in the Annalen de Physik and by Ray Bradbury in his masterwork,

  Dandelion Wine.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Once I was a pretty little

  girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice . . . .”

  “You’re joking with us,” giggled Jane. “You weren’t

  really ten ever, were you, Mrs. Bentley?”

  “You run on home!” the woman cried suddenly,

  for she could not stand their eyes. “I won’t have you

  laughing.”

  “And your name’s not really Helen?”

  “Of course it’s Helen!“

  “Good-by,” said the two girls, giggling away across

  the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom following them

  slowly. “Thanks for the ice cream!”

  “Once I played hopscotch!” Mrs. Bentley cried after

  them, but they were gone.

  Standing in the rubble of my past, it seemed extraordinary that

  I, like Mrs. Bentley, was in the present, that my consciousness, like

  the breeze meandering across the lot, blowing leaves before it, was

  moving on the edge of time.

  “My dear,” said Mr. Bentley, “you never will understand

  time, will you? When you’re nine, you think you’ve

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  always been nine years old, and always will be. When

  you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced

  there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when

  you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy.

  You’re in the present, you’re trapped in the young now

  and an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

  Mr. Bentley’s observation is not so trivial a point. What sort of

  time is that which separates a man from his past—which separates

  one now from the next—and yet gives continuity to the thread of

  consciousness? Eighty is the last “now,” we say, but who knows that

  time and space—now seen as forms of intuition rather than immu-

  table standalone entities—are not actually “always.” A cat, even

  when mortally ill, keeps those wide calm eyes focused on the ever-

  changing kaleidoscope of the here-and-now. There is no thought

  of death, and hence no fear of it. What comes, comes. We believe

  in death because we have been told we will die. Also, of course,

  because most of us strictly associate ourselves with the body, and we

  know that bodies die, end of story.

  Religions may go on and on about the afterlife, but how do we

  know this is true? Physics may tell us that energy is never ever lost,

  and that our brains, minds, and hence the feeling of life operate

  by electrical energy, and therefore this energy like all others sim-

  ply cannot vanish, period. And while this sounds very intellectually

  nice and hopeful, how can we be sure that we will still experience

  the sense of life—that mystery neuro-researchers pursue with such

  futility, like the dream hallway that stretches ever longer the farther

  along the corridor we run?

  The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of con-

  sciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body

  dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-

  is-still-inescapably-life matrix.

  Scientists think that they can say where individuality begins and

  ends, and we generally reject the multiple universes of Stargate, Star Trek, The Matrix and such as fiction. But it turns out there is more

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  than a morsel of scientific truth in this popular cultural genre. This

  can only accelerate during the coming shift in worldview, from the

  belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which

  time and space belong only to the living.

  Our current scientific worldview offers no escape for those afraid

  of death. But why are you here now, perched seemingly by chance

  on the cutting edge of all infinity? The answer is simple—the door

  is never closed! The mathematical possibility of your consciousness

  ending is zero.

  Logical, everyday experience puts us in a milieu where defined

  objects come and go, and everything has a natal moment. Whether

  pencil or kitten, we see items entering the world and others dissolv-

  ing or vanishing. Logic is a fabric woven of such beginnings and end-

  ings. Conversely, those entities that are timeless by nature, such as

  love, beauty, consciousness, or the universe as a whole, have always

  dwelt outside the cold grasp of limitation. So the Great Everything,

  which we now know to be synonymous with consciousness, could

  hardly fit within the ephemeral category. Instinct joins with what

  science we can employ here, to affirm that it is so, even if no argu-

  ment, alas, can demonstrate immortality to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Our inability to remember infinite time is meaningless because

  memory is a particularly limited and selective circuit within the neu-

&n
bsp; ral network. Nor by definition could we recall a time of nothingness:

  no help there either.

  Eternity is a fascinating concept, one that doesn’t indicate a per-

  petual existence in time without end. Eternity doesn’t mean a limit-

  less temporal sequence. Rather, it resides outside of time altogether.

  The Eastern religions have of course argued for millennia that birth

  and death are equally illusory. (Or at least, their core teachings have

  done so. For the masses in every religion, there are more periph-

  eral notions; in Eastern sects these include reincarnation.) Because

  consciousness transcends the body, because internal and external are fundamentally distinctions of language and practicality alone,

  we’re left with Being or consciousness as the bedrock components

  of existence.

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  The problem many face when pondering such things is not just

  that language is dualistic by nature and therefore poorly suited for

  such inquiries, but that there are onion layers of “truth” depend-

  ing on the level of understanding. Science, philosophy, religion, and

  metaphysics all deal with the challenges of addressing a wide audi-

  ence with a huge spectrum of comprehension, education, inclina-

  tion, and bias.

  When a skilled science speaker steps up to a lectern, he already

  knows who his particular audience is for that day. A physicist giving

  a popular lecture, especially to youngsters, will avoid all equations,

  lest the audience’s eyes start to glaze. Terms such as electron will need to be briefly defined. If, on the other hand, the audience has a good

  science background—let’s say it’s a talk for secondary school science

  teachers—then statements like “electrons orbit an atom’s nucleus”

  and “Jupiter revolves around the sun” involve already-familiar terms,

  and no one would be left behind. Yet if the audience is even more

  sophisticated, composed of physicists and astronomers, both state-

  ments would now be false. An electron doesn’t really orbit; it shim-

  mers at a likely distance from the center in a state of probability

  alone, its position and motion undefined until an observer forces

  its wave-function to collapse. And Jupiter orbits not the sun but the

  barycenter, the vacant point in space outside the sun’s surface where

  the two bodies’ gravities balance like a seesaw. What is correct in