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

2 comments:

Marcel Lamothe said...

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

Josh said...

Rob, I am uncomfortable with the idea of biocentrism, and I think it's somewhat dangerous to embrace. It borderlines on solipsism, and though it does have themes in common with your way of visualizing the dimensions, it has little to do with science, more like a rejection of it.

Biocentrism presents all space, time, and by default all 10 dimensions as not objective realities acting on our senses, not of the various ways matter expresses itself which is reflected in the human mind, and not of essential conditions of existence like string theory and science asserts. Rather, it presents them as "tools" for the human mind, organizing forms of experience, nothing but an idea. It follows that matter also is not real, but just a "complex of sensations".

So then what is real? What is a sensation, what is experience, what is the mind? Did the earth exist at a time when there was no humans, no mind or sensations, or not? Does a world exist independently of our perceptions of it, even if there are some aspects hidden from view, and some things dependent on the position in the dimensions? If it isn't matter -- the world that exist beyond the mind and of our ideas, that is acting upon our sense organs, than what is? This three dimensional world is being reflected, like a mirror, by our three dimensional minds. Our minds are reflection, and what is being reflected besides the world which exists outside it?

These are just some of many inconsistencies with this theory. Of course, there are certain things which are dependent on the mind. Time for example is just our unique experience of the fourth dimension, experiencing only a small three dimensional cross section of a long undulating snake. That long 4 dimensional snake is not a tool of the mind, it is not a unique form of experience, it is an objectively existing reality which we only experience a small part of. "Time" is just a measurement of the rate at which we are changing and moving through the fourth dimension..

I see no problem consolidating materialism, (the view that the mind is a product of the external world, that we are dependent on matter and nature for our existence, and not the other way around), with your way of visualizing the dimensions. There is some interaction between mind and matter, and we see this daily, but ultimately the mind is a product of matter being expressed in a certain way. The world would function just fine if there was no biological life, and in some universes there is no biological life. Those other universes are just as real as the one we're experiencing.

Biocentrism traces its origins back to those idealist philosophers, and while some of them were physicists, rejected the foundations of science. They were hostile above all to Marxists, and politically it led them to taking right-wing positions. That is where I have a problem with it. If you take follow this idea logically to the end, you end up taking reactionary politically positions. I am certain that you will not entertain this path.

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