Biocentrism--Life created the universe..

[Magical Realist]

Praise for Robert Lanza’s essay “A New Theory of the Universe,” on which Biocentrism is based:

"Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. Almost every society of mankind has explained the mystery of our surroundings and being by invoking a god or group of gods. Scientists work to acquire objective answers from the infinity of space or the inner machinery of the atom. Lanza proposes a biocentrist theory which ascribes the answer to the observer rather than the observed. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole. The book will appeal to an audience of many different disciplines because it is a new way of looking at the old problem of our existence. Most importantly, it makes you think.” —E. Donnall Thomas, 1990 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine

“It is genuinely an exciting piece of work…. The idea that consciousness creates reality has quantum support … and also coheres with some of the things biology and neuroscience are telling us about the structures of our being. Just as we now know that the sun doesn’t really move but we do (we are the active agents), so [it is] suggesting that we are the entities that give meaning to the particular configuration of all possible outcomes we call reality.” —Ronald Green, director of Dartmouth College’s Ethics Institute

“Robert Lanza, a world-renowned scientist who has spanned many fields from drug delivery to stem cells to preventing animal extinction, and clearly one of the most brilliant minds of our times, has done it again. ‘A New Theory of the Universe’ takes into account all the knowledge we have gained over the last few centuries … placing in perspective our biologic limitations that have impeded our understanding of greater truths surrounding our existence and the universe around us. This new theory is certain to revolutionize our concepts of the laws of nature for centuries to come.” —Anthony Atala, internationally recognized scientist and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

From the Paperback

“An extraordinary mind . . . Having interviewed some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific world, I found Dr. Robert Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting. His theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient traditions of the world which say that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence.” —Deepak Chopra, Bestselling Author (heralded by Time magazine as one of the top heroes and icons of the century).

“This is a brave new book. Instead of placing life as an accidental byproduct, the authors place life at the apex of universal existence and purpose. It is a very thrilling and disturbing read. While the proposals made in Biocentrism seem radical and counter-intuitive at first, a bit of reflection will soon make the images clearer and place us on the pathway to a better and more commonsensical mindset” —Michael Gooch, Author of Wingtips and Spurs

“. . . both interesting and worth the effort of reading it . . . From the way Lanza chooses to present his arguments, it’ss clear he has a solid grasp on esoteric disciplines . . . His style is conversational and his sense of wonder is as infectious as it is delightful.” —Midwest Book Review

From Other Scientists

“It’s a masterpiece — truly a magnificent essay. Bob Lanza is to be congratulated for a fresh and highly erudite look at the question of how perception and consciousness shape reality and common experience. His monograph combines a deep understanding and broad insight into 20th century physics and modern biological science; in so doing, he forces a reappraisal of this hoary epistemological dilemma. Not all will agree with the proposition he advances, but most will find his writing eminently readable and his arguments both convincing and challenging. Bravo” —Michael Lysaght, Professor of Medical Science and Engineering, Brown University and Director of Brown’s Center for Biomedical Engineering

“As an astrophysicist, I focus my attention on objects that are very large and very far away, ignoring the whole issue of consciousness as a critical part of the Universe. Reading Robert Lanza’s work is a wake-up call to all of us that even on the grandest scale we still depend on our minds to experience reality. Issues of “quantum weirdness” do have a place in the macroscopic world. Time and space do depend on perception. We can go about our daily lives and continue to study the physical Universe as if it exists as an objective reality (because the probabilities allow that degree of confidence), but we do so with a better awareness of an underlying biological component, thanks to Dr. Lanza.” —David Thompson, Astrophysicist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Biomedical researcher Robert Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he’s well-acclimated to controversy. But his book Biocentrism is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos. ‘By treating space and time as physical things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world,’ Lanza declares. Any claim that space and time aren’t cold, hard, physical things has to raise an eyebrow. . .Other physicists point out that Lanza’s view is fully in line with the perspective from quantum mechanics that the observer plays a huge role in how reality is observed.” —Alan Boyle, Science Editor, MSNBC

“So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do not say it—or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private—furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!’” —Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University

“One of the most interesting books to cross my desk this summer was Biocentrism, written by Dr. Robert Lanza, who is probably best known for his groundbreaking work with stem cells. The book is an out-and-out challenge to modern physics. I found the attack on physics to be pretty compelling” —Eric Berger, Science Editor, Houston Chronicle

“Now that I have spent a fair amount of time the last few months doing a bit of writing, reading and thinking about this, and enjoying it and watching it come into better focus, And as I go deeper into my Zen practice, And as I am about half way through re-reading Biocentrism, My conclusion about the book Biocentrism is: Holy shit, that’s a really great book!" —Ralph Levinson, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles.

https://robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-...-universe/

[C C]

He's essentially channeling Kant in a contemporary biological context. The similar conception of "space and time are thought forms for organizing data into perceptions", rather than space/time being the concrete structure or order of an external or mind-independent manner of existence. (Since part of what cognition is about is discrimination or discerning individual things and events as distinct from each other, space and time were also the means for providing separation in such conscious representations.)

A New Theory of the Universe (his 2007 essay)
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-the...-universe/

EXCERPTS: Einstein was frustrated by the threat of quantum uncertainty to the hypothesis he called spacetime, and spacetime turns out to be incompatible with the world discovered by quantum physics. When Einstein showed that there is no universal now, it followed that observers could slice up reality into past, present, and, future, in different ways, all with equal reality. But what, exactly, is being sliced up?

Space and time are not stuff that can be brought back to the laboratory in a marmalade jar for analysis. In fact, space and time fall into the province of biology—of animal sense perception—not of physics. They are properties of the mind, of the language by which we human beings and animals represent things to ourselves. Physicists venture beyond the scope of their science—beyond the limits of material phenomena and law—when they try to assign physical, mathematical, or other qualities to space and time.

Return to the revelation that we are thinking animals and that the material world is the elusive substratum of our conscious activity continually defining and redefining the real. We must become skeptical of the hard reality of our most cherished conceptions of space and time, and of the very notion of an external reality, in order to recognize that it is the activity of consciousness itself, born of our biological selves, which in some sense creates the world.

[...] All of this makes sense from a biocentric perspective: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures into an order, into the “current” of life. Motion is created in our minds by running “film cells” together. Remember that everything you perceive, even this page, is being reconstructed inside your head. It’s happening to you right now. All of experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain.

[...] Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location in space) belongs to the outer world, and momentum (which involves the temporal) belongs to the inner world. By penetrating to the bottom of matter, scientists have reduced the universe to its most basic logic. Time is not a feature of the external spatial world...

[...] Twenty-five hundred years later, the Zeno arrow paradox finally makes sense. The Eleatic school of philosophy, which Zeno brilliantly defended, was right. So was Heisenberg when he said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.

[...] One of the main reasons most people reject the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is that it leads to the dreaded doctrine of solipsism. The late Heinz Pagels once commented: “If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it, then you end up with solipsism—the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” Indeed, I once had one of my articles challenged by a reader who took this exact position. “I would like to ask Robert Lanza,” he wrote, “whether he feels the world will continue to exist after the death of his consciousness. If not, it’ll be hard luck for all of us should we outlive him” (New Scientist, 1991).

What I would question, with respect to solipsism, is the assumption that our individual separateness is an absolute reality. Bell’s experiment implies the existence of linkages that transcend our ordinary way of thinking. An old Hindu poem says, “Know in thyself and all one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole.”

If time is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, as we have seen, then the same can be said about space. The distinction between here and there is also not an absolute reality.

Without consciousness, we can take any person as our new frame of reference. It is not my consciousness or yours alone, but ours. That’s the new solipsism the experiments mandate.

The theorist Bernard d’Espagnat, a collaborator of Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi, has said that “non-separability 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.

In this same sense, there is a part of us connected to the glowworm by the pond near my house. It is the part that experiences consciousness, not in our external embodiments but in our inner being. We can only imagine and recollect things while in the body; this is for sure, because sensations and memories are molded into thought and knowledge in the brain. And although we identify ourselves with our thoughts and affections, it is an essential feature of reality that we experience the world piece by piece.

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Criticism: . . . Former Arizona State University physicist and antitheist activist Lawrence Krauss stated: "There are no scientific breakthroughs about anything, as far as I can see. It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science." In USA Today Online, astrophysicist and science writer David Lindley asserted that Lanza's concept was a "...vague, inarticulate metaphor..." and stated that "...I certainly don't see how thinking his way would lead you into any new sort of scientific or philosophical insight. That's all very nice, I would say to Lanza, but now what?" Daniel Dennett, a Tufts University philosopher and eliminative materialist, said he did not think the concept meets the standard of a philosophical theory. "It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn't explain how [consciousness] happens at all. He's stopping where the fun begins."

[Magical Realist]

"Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally."---Immanuel Kant (Ak 2: 403)

Space then as a fundamental and automatic algorithm of the mind for representing the world. We don't "experience" space as we do the objective world. We experience the objective world because space projects it as extended and voluminous. In reality space is not "there" as the world is. It is the possibility of thereness in itself learned from infancy thru eye/movement coordination resulting in a mental model of a world that is infinitely external and exclusive to us on all sides as an absolutely vaccuous exteriority or dimensionalization of our bodily absence. The algorithm of space is not exactly learned or inferred so much as intuited from the mind's own a priori operating concepts.

[Zinjanthropos]

MR….Is there two different things here? One being life and the other a life form. If there’s anything mysterious enough right now to be classified as some invisible, exquisite, unworldly entity then it might be life. The life form is merely a vessel, carrying perhaps the most precious cargo of all….. life, such a mystifying property as to confound that which possesses it.

Unfortunately it appears there is no form that can carry life forever, or so it seems. Surprisingly once life takes a form, it requires death in order to continue. In an ever changing environment, life cannot exist without death. If you want to talk about some type of shared intelligence/ consciousness then what life has done to survive may be the closest thing to direct evidence of it…… evolution of the life forms by means of reproduction, it’s pure genius if you want to describe it that way, assuming life itself didn’t evolve from something.

Maybe if you want a god so much then life is the best choice. Of course should some scientist suddenly make a living cell from scratch one day then none of the previous may matter.

[Kornee]

Out of idle curiosity, decided to start reading what I instinctively knew would be high sounding drivel. Post #1 is just general gaseous praise, but in #2: Didn't take long to come to a howler worth quoting:

"Space and time are not stuff that can be brought back to the laboratory in a marmalade jar for analysis. In fact, space and time fall into the province of biology—of animal sense perception—not of physics. They are properties of the mind, of the language by which we human beings and animals represent things to ourselves. Physicists venture beyond the scope of their science—beyond the limits of material phenomena and law—when they try to assign physical, mathematical, or other qualities to space and time."

If you believe that nonsense then I can't even say good luck with trying to make sense of the rest - you won't deserve any.

[Secular Sanity]

It’s old woo. I’m surprised that MR hasn’t seen it before.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8DGgvE6hLAU

[Magical Realist]

I'm open to anything at this point. Afterlife, nothingness, reincarnation, universal Mind, senseless chaos, dimensions of spirits, nihilistic wasteland. Believing one way blocks us from all the manifold experiences reality has to offer. Better to live in the ambiguity. It is what it is.

[C C]

I'm open to anything at this point. Afterlife, nothingness, reincarnation, universal Mind, senseless chaos, dimensions of spirits, nihilistic wasteland. Believing one way blocks us from all the manifold experiences reality has to offer. Better to live in the ambiguity. It is what it is.

Donald Hoffman perhaps espouses a similar view to Lanza's. Though if both were strictly a priori philosophy (concerning what makes Nature possible) -- rather than incongruously(?) appearing in science magazines -- the conceptions wouldn't be anything much new apart from the updated settings or analogies.

In terms of scientific realism proposals, one of those would be that "what exists outside the head and its mental representations" is particle excitations occurring in 24 quantum fields. Obviously that sort of bizarre or alien-like manner of existence and eviction of the mind's furniture (skies, trees, flowers rocks, tables, chairs) would not qualify for the original or routine idea of "reality" as humans experientially encounter it.

That's an illustration of the justification for these either "completely alien" or alternatively metaphysically "unknown" ways of existing as not actually deserving the "reality" label to begin with (such as "ultimate reality"). Ergo, Hoffman's "conscious realism" or Kant's "empirical realism" as a kind of denial that an ultimate existence (crouched in either Platonism or scientific realism) would degrade the status of our represented/mediated form of it.

Accordingly, the title below would have things backward, with "reality" instead being the familiar phenomenal representations of images, sounds, sensations exhibited in the mind rather than absence of them in a supposed objective, non-mental type of be-ing.

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality (interview with David Hoffman, excerpt at bottom of this post)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolu...-20160421/

In contrast, Anil Seth's "controlled hallucination" view would be a less radically expressed middle ground, being a form of indirect realism.

Anil Seth: “Reality is a controlled hallucination”
https://lab.cccb.org/en/anil-seth-realit...ucination/

In order to make himself understood with his characteristic effectiveness, Anil Seth speaks of reality as “controlled hallucination”: “our experiences are the content that the brain predicts from the inside out, anticipating what is in the world, and the information from the senses ties us with what exists in the world in a way that’s useful for our organism”.

Therefore, this hallucination is not a false perception or a perception of something that does not exist, but a perception modelled by our body and controlled by the brain, which applies a kind of prior template to give meaning to what we feel. In this way, each new experience is of use to us as we move through the world to which we belong.

An example of this controlled hallucination is colours: “we already know that colours don’t exist in nature, but evolution has made us interpret the world in colour because it was more useful for our survival”.

The opposite of the above -- direct or naive realism and some forms of externalism -- could arguably be construed as versions of panpsychism, since direct realists are projecting everything manifested and cognitively made distinct in brain-associated consciousness on to what is supposed to be a mind-independent domain (including the secondary properties or qualia that have been banished from the physical sciences since Galileo).

I wouldn't agree with the quasi-relativism that Hoffman seems to be allowing (at least with respect to people whose perceptions aren't compromised by medical conditions like color-blindness). Even Leibniz had the perceptions of his monads brutely coordinated by a non-subjective scheme or system (as if the monads really were relationally and lawfully interconnected via a space/time medium). How we "understand and interpret" the Moon can certainly differ from person to person (especially distributed across different eras of history), but as long as one's visual system is the norm, I believe we're representing or manifesting it pretty much the same way in our everyday observations (it's not presented as a triangle or square or hypercube for some individuals).

QUESTION: The world is just other conscious agents?

HOFFMAN: I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.

Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent.

And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.

QUESTION: If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.

HOFFMAN: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go.

Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects [in the classic or immutable material sense]. So what’s going on?

Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.