A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4S9hAkGbyY
(Edit - I talk about this more a couple of months later in The Biocentric Universe Part 2)
above image is from the Discover article "The Biocentric Universe", credited to NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI) Two blogs ago, we talked about "Evolution's Fast Lane". Last blog we discussed "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". This time let's tie those ideas together.
My friend Chuck Salyers has been encouraging me to learn more about Dr. Bruce Lipton, so I'm now waiting for my order to arrive from Amazon: an audio book called Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and How to Get There From Here. Bruce Lipton's body of work, including his popular book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles seems to be saying many of the same things I have about our role as quantum observers, the new science of epigenetics, and understanding that we have much more control over our reality than we've been led to believe: which is not to say that I can use my free will to make my skin dark and not have to worry about sunburns, but it is to say that there is not just one inevitable path that each of us and the entire universe are moving upon.
Here's what Dr. Lipton's website says about his work:
The new sciences quantum physics and epigenetics are revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter, challenging established scientific theories and prompting a complete re-evaluation of life as we have known it.But wait, you might be thinking, isn't epigenetics only about how an individual can better manage the genetic hand of cards they've been dealt? What does that have to do with evolution? Here's the answer, found in an article published last week in Science News, which talks about the concept of epigenetic inheritance. Not only can modifying your lifestyle change how your own genes are expressed, this can also change what genes you pass on to your offspring!One of the shining lights to emerge from these new sciences is cellular biologist and best selling author, Bruce Lipton PhD, whose book, The Biology of Belief, was awarded 2006’s Best Science Book of the Year.
Lipton maintains that pivotal to this shift in thinking within the scientific community has been groundbreaking insight into the function of genes.
Where does all this lead us? There was an article published in Discover Magazine this month that takes the question of "how much control do we have over our reality" to a fantastic conclusion: here's a link to the article called "The Biocentric Universe Theory: How Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos." Let me quote from the article, which was written by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman:
I've talked about similar ideas with my project, with entries like The Flipbook Universe, The Past is an Illusion, Google and the Group Mind, and The Big Bang and the Big Pie: if we are to accept the idea of "reverse fine-tuning" of past conditions (and many quantum physicists do), this requires us to adopt a timeless perspective, which means that as we visualize the multiverse we are "outside" of space-time, in a place where "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless" (one of Einstein's often-quoted phrases). Biocentrism takes these ideas to an extreme, but if physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger are correct when they say that Information Equals Reality, then what are we really talking about here? Each of us is navigating through a data set that already exists, as we just discussed in "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". In entries like Your Fifth-Dimensional Self and in my book, I've talked about how this means there is already a "best possible you" that exists within the multiverse, and recognizing how you are already connected to that version of you is a way to help yourself get there. This will also be the subject of my next entry, "Now vs. the Future".Biocentrism holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.
Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.
According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. 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 neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.
One of my most popular videos over at YouTube shows another way of visualizing the data that we're moving through, one planck length at a time as we select from our fifth dimensional probability space. As Brian Greene says in the New Scientist article we discussed last time, How to Map the Multiverse, ultimately what we are talking about is like a landscape of different universes that are all just as real as the one we find ourselves to be in. Here's that YouTube video, it's called "Imagining the Omniverse".
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
Next: Top Ten Blogs, May '09 Report
Posts
5 comments:
Mind-expanding as usual Rob! I need to start adding your literary recommendations to my Amazon wish-list, where your book is already, btw... ;-)
I haven't ordered it yet because buying stuff over the internet from here (Venezuela) isn't as easy and cheap as it used to be. But the "time" will come. :-)
Great informative video(first time I watch it):
Intresting what you say in the video about 0 being the equilibrium about matter and anti matter and also being all
I also like the idea that "something unlikely" does not longer exists and The distintion between past present and future is imposible.
I was wondering what is your thoughts about whether things evolve towards harmony or toward chaos either in the omniverse and in our universe?
Excuse me cause I am just starting to incorporate deeokt this ideas, so some things might sound obvious.
Txs
Mariana
I've been having a debate with a friend(he has a cognitive science degree and I'm from the philosophy department), and I've hit a roadblock with him in our rudimentary discussions on quantum physics on how normal processes can go on without observers present. I believe the basic question is, how did inflation occur after the big bang if particularity is bound by observation? before I had heard of the two-slit experiment, or the biocentric universe theory, I was convinced that matter was inextricably bound to consciousness from my own experiences of different states of consciousness.
as I learned more about quantum entanglement and how all matter and energy from our universe was created at the same time in the big bang, it seemed to fit that our minds were what gave the universe its matter. but then there posed the problem that we haven't been around but for a blip of the universe's existence, so for all the cooling processes and galaxy forming to occur after the big bang, Bohr's statement that nothing can be counted as existing until it is observed seemed to inhere that a form of consciousness must have been present at the time. otherwise, the universe itself only exists as an ocean of waves of probability until our measuring devices detect it. that would mean that the whole of the universe outside of what we call the observable universe still exists in that cloudy wavy state.
how can earth have had its substance in matter before complex enough neural networks developed in its creatures unless there was another consciousness there to observe it? on a slippery slope, doesn't this mean that consciousness is older than our universe? philosopher and Bishop George Berkeley seemed to say something akin to this a long time before mathematicians or physicists did, when he said that essence is substantiated by perception, it just didn't sit well with me to say that the tree that falls in the forest w/no one around makes a sound for God's ears(exactly why I entitled my paper on him and Spinoza, 'The Flying Spaghetti Monster', when I studied them in Modern Philosophy).
It is only today that I find your blog videos in spite of the fact that I saw the original ITD video when the site went up. But now I wonder... did all these blog posts and comments really exist before I noticed them?
It is not that the universe did not exist before there was someone there to notice it... as american as I may sound, I think it is correct that the universe, the civilizations and everything else, including this blog did not exist until MY consciousness picked it up. Before that it was a mere possibility (although I acknowledge that you may think it exists because of you, not me.)
But this BEFORE, is not actually the same word we use when we talk about time, it is a before that implies a fifth dimension, one of alternate histories, where there was total emptiness until a switch to a history with a biology filled universe with me in it became my reality.
So yes, the possibility of a whole past filled with tangible facts and an infinity of detail can suddenly become real, possibly on that brief moment when it became inevitable that a little spermatozoid and an ovule got together to become you. My question now is... if an entire past collapsed at that point, did the future collapse as well? It would make sense to say "not entirely" (as far as QM tells us). The future is always diverting into an infinite of possibilities that can only be limited buy the fact that they begin at a point in my space and time that I call present. The past must also be always diverting into an infinite of possibilities that share only one thing in common, they must end at my present point in space time.
I believe that also, the possibilities can only divert so much as they don't change what I know to be my past and what I also know to be my future. Past and future are mental constructs, one made of memories (which are permanently reinterpreted) and of possibilities (which are also constantly reinterpreted). If I am falling off a cliff, all possibilities in the future must include me somehow arriving at the floor down there, if I remember having lived in Costa Rica my whole life, all past possibilities must include that fact too. It rings true that the future possibilities must be more diverse than those in the past, but given that both share one same point in time, and that they must be a very very large number, it can be safe to say that probably they are both equally large.
I have been reading lately that for cosmology, some physicists are beginning to realize that trying to make theories which consider the universe as seen from outside is a big mistake (look in New Scientist for articles about the Holographic Universe). It seems that you can get rid of a lot of incongruences (aka infinities) if you make a theory for the whole universe that considers it as seen from a point inside of it, literally by an observer (even if it is calculated as a point).
Consider the case of an astronaut falling into a black hole, current theory predicts that the astronaut would perceive things happening very differently from an observer watching the astronaut fall. In the former, the astronaut does not notice he is falling into a black hole, while the observer in orbit sees the astronaut fall and die. This incongruence happens because we are assuming that there is a third position where you can see both things at the same time and hence they are paradoxical and an error in the theory, but if you actually consider only one point of view, both possibilities become mutually exclusive and only one happens, hence reality stays logical. It seems that subjectivity is written all over the universe. I wonder what more amazing things will they start to discover under this new paradigm.
Regards from the land of peace and nature!
Oliver.
It is only today that I find your blog videos in spite of the fact that I saw the original ITD video when the site went up. But now I wonder... did all these blog posts and comments really exist before I noticed them?
It is not that the universe did not exist before there was someone there to notice it... as american as I may sound, I think it is correct that the universe, the civilizations and everything else, including this blog did not exist until MY consciousness picked it up. Before that it was a mere possibility (although I acknowledge that you may think it exists because of you, not me.)
But this BEFORE, is not actually the same word we use when we talk about time, it is a before that implies a fifth dimension, one of alternate histories, where there was total emptiness until a switch to a history with a biology filled universe with me in it became my reality.
So yes, the possibility of a whole past filled with tangible facts and an infinity of detail can suddenly become real, possibly on that brief moment when it became inevitable that a little spermatozoid and an ovule got together to become you. My question now is... if an entire past collapsed at that point, did the future collapse as well? It would make sense to say "not entirely" (as far as QM tells us). The future is always diverting into an infinite of possibilities that can only be limited buy the fact that they begin at a point in my space and time that I call present. The past must also be always diverting into an infinite of possibilities that share only one thing in common, they must end at my present point in space time.
I believe that also, the possibilities can only divert so much as they don't change what I know to be my past and what I also know to be my future. Past and future are mental constructs, one made of memories (which are permanently reinterpreted) and of possibilities (which are also constantly reinterpreted). If I am falling off a cliff, all possibilities in the future must include me somehow arriving at the floor down there, if I remember having lived in Costa Rica my whole life, all past possibilities must include that fact too. It rings true that the future possibilities must be more diverse than those in the past, but given that both share one same point in time, and that they must be a very very large number, it can be safe to say that probably they are both equally large.
I have been reading lately that for cosmology, some physicists are beginning to realize that trying to make theories which consider the universe as seen from outside is a big mistake (look in New Scientist for articles about the Holographic Universe). It seems that you can get rid of a lot of incongruences (aka infinities) if you make a theory for the whole universe that considers it as seen from a point inside of it, literally by an observer (even if it is calculated as a point).
Consider the case of an astronaut falling into a black hole, current theory predicts that the astronaut would perceive things happening very differently from an observer watching the astronaut fall. In the former, the astronaut does not notice he is falling into a black hole, while the observer in orbit sees the astronaut fall and die. This incongruence happens because we are assuming that there is a third position where you can see both things at the same time and hence they are paradoxical and an error in the theory, but if you actually consider only one point of view, both possibilities become mutually exclusive and only one happens, hence reality stays logical. It seems that subjectivity is written all over the universe. I wonder what more amazing things will they start to discover under this new paradigm.
Regards from the land of peace and nature!
Oliver.
Post a Comment