Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Biocentric Universe Part 2


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZWVai-4DUU

In The Biocentric Universe, we discussed a mind-blowing theory from Robert Lanza and Bob Berman which states that without life, there is no space or time, no cosmos. We linked to an article in Discover magazine, which is based on Lanza and Berman's new book called "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe". There is so much about their approach that aligns with the things I've been saying with my project that I am strongly tempted to quote the entire article, but after all, that's why I'm giving you the link. Here's just a few more paragraphs from that Discover article:

SEEKING SPACE AND TIME
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.

To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.

All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind.

I'd like to thank one of our Tenth Dimension Forum members who goes by the name "skand1nsky" for providing me with the following seven principles which also come from Lanza and Berman's Biocentric theory:
1. A First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. A Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the universe 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.
6. Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.
Critics of such theories say this is like a return to the ancient beliefs that the heavens revolve around the earth. As I said not long ago in Where Are You?, what we are talking about here allows us to finally see how each of us really is
right at the very center of our own version of the universe, and this has nothing to do with thinking that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around our planet. In order for us to accept this vision, though, we also have to see that each of us is not all alone. Instead, this means we are all connected to every other living thing, and to everything else in the universe, as the Biocentric Universe theory makes clear: and as more and more people realize that this is really how our reality is constructed, the world becomes a better place.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Here's another article about Lanza and Berman's new book, this one is from MSNBC's science editor Alan Boyle.

Next: The Long Undulating Snake

1 comments:

Marcel Lamothe said...

Fascinating stuff - I just ordered my copy from Amazon - can't wait to read it!

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