Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting
life into the equation
By Robert Lanz
While I was sitting one night with a poet friend
watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my
arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia
moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He
doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien
universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t
see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”
—Loren Eiseley
The world is not, on the whole, the place we have
learned about in our school books. This point was hammered home one recent
night as I crossed the causeway of the small island where I live. The pond was
dark and still. Several strange glowing objects caught my attention on the side
of the road, and I squatted down to observe one of them with my flashlight. The
creature turned out to be a glowworm, the luminous larva of the European beetle
Lampyris noctiluca. Its segmented little oval body was primitive—like
some trilobite that had just crawled out of the Cambrian Sea 500 million years
ago. There we were, the beetle and I, two living objects that had entered into
each others’ world. It ceased emitting its greenish light, and I, for my part,
turned off my flashlight.
I wondered if our interaction was different from
that of any other two objects in the universe. Was this primitive little grub
just another collection of atoms—proteins and molecules spinning away like the
planets round the sun? Had science reduced life to the level of a mechanist’s
logic, or was this wingless beetle, by virtue of being a living creature,
creating its own physical reality?
The laws of physics and chemistry can explain the
biology of living systems, and I can recite in detail the chemical foundations
and cellular organization of animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism,
all the carbohydrates and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this
luminous little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full
understanding of life cannot be found by looking at cells and molecules through
a microscope. We have yet to learn that physical existence cannot be divorced
from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and
experience. Indeed, it seems likely that this creature was the center of its
own sphere of reality just as I was the center of mine.
Although the beetle did not move, it had sensory
cells that transmitted messages to the cells in its brain. Perhaps the creature
was too primitive to collect data and pinpoint my location in space. Or maybe
my existence in its universe was limited to the perception of some huge and
hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight in the air. I don’t know. But as I stood
up and left, I am sure that I dispersed into the haze of probability
surrounding the glowworm’s little world.
Our science fails to recognize those special
properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of
the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we
call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one
that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology
above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest
puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for
the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one
umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or
reality.
We need a revolution in our understanding of
science and of the world. Living in an age dominated by science, we have come
more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching
a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the
announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are
close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness.
But we’re fooling ourselves.
Most of these comprehensive theories are no more
than stories that fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating
them. It is the biological creature that makes observations, names what it
observes, and creates stories. Science has not succeeded in confronting the
element of existence that is at once most familiar and most
mysterious—conscious experience. As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay
that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not
see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these
colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their
errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no
objects.”
Biology is at first glance an unlikely source for a
new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have
discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and when
cosmologists like Stephen Hawking predict that a unifying theory of the
universe may be discovered in the next two decades, shouldn’t biology seek to
unify existing theories of the physical world and the living world? What other
discipline can approach it? Biology should be the first and last study of
science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by means of the humanly created
natural sciences used to understand the universe. Ever since the remotest of
times philosophers have acknowledged the primacy of consciousness—that all
truths and principles of being must begin with the individual mind and self.
Thus Descartes’s adage: “Cogito, ergo sum.” (I think, therefore I am.) In
addition to Descartes, who brought philosophy into its modern era, there were
many other philosophers who argued along these lines: Kant, Leibniz, Bishop
Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson, to name a few.
We have failed to protect science against
speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and
mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in
nature. The ether of the 19th century, the “spacetime” of Einstein, and the
string theory of recent decades, which posits new dimensions showing up in
different realms, and not only in strings but in bubbles shimmering down the
byways of the universe—all these are examples of this speculation. Indeed,
unseen dimensions (up to a hundred in some theories) are now envisioned
everywhere, some curled up like soda straws at every point in space.
Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of
everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science—to question all
things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa,
flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is
beneath. When science tries to resolve its conflicts by adding and subtracting
dimensions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, we need to look at
our dogmas and recognize that the cracks in the system are just the points that
let the light shine more directly on the mystery of life.
The urgent and primary questions of the universe
have been undertaken by those physicists who are trying to explain the origins
of everything with grand unified theories. But as exciting and glamorous as
these theories are, they are an evasion, if not a reversal, of the central
mystery of knowledge: that the laws of the world were somehow created to
produce the observer. And more important than this, that the observer in a
significant sense creates reality and not the other way around. Recognition of
this insight leads to a single theory that unifies our understanding of the
world.
Modern science cannot explain why the laws of
physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. For example, if the big
bang had been one-part-in-a billion more powerful, it would have rushed out too
fast for the galaxies to form and for life to begin. If the strong nuclear
force were decreased by two percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together.
Hydrogen would be the only atom in the universe. If the gravitational force
were decreased, stars (including the sun) would not ignite. These are just
three of more than 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe
so exact that they cannot be random. Indeed, the lack of a scientific
explanation has allowed these facts to be hijacked as a defense of intelligent
design.
Without perception, there is in effect no reality.
Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and
how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not
exempted from biocentrism. Our sense of the forward motion of time is really
the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a
smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as
The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea.
Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once,
he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its
flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then
be at rest at every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But
is motion impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion
of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something
within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
This paradox lies at the heart of one of the great
revolutions of 20th-century physics, a revolution that has yet to take hold of
our understanding of the world and of the decisive role that consciousness
plays in determining the nature of reality. The uncertainty principle in
quantum physics is more profound than its name suggests. It means that we make
choices at every moment in what we can determine about the world. We cannot
know with complete accuracy a quantum particle’s motion and its position at the
same time—we have to choose one or the other. Thus the consciousness of the
observer is decisive in determining what a particle does at any given moment.
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.
Despite such things as the development of
superconducting supercolliders containing enough niobium-titanium wire to
circle the earth 16 times, we understand the universe no better than the first
humans with sufficient consciousness to think. Where did it all come from? Why
does the universe exist? Why are we here? In one age, we believe that the world
is a great ball resting on the back of a turtle; in the next, that a fairy universe
appeared out of nowhere and is expanding into nothingness. In one age, angels
push and pummel the planets about; in another age, everything is a meaningless
accident. We exchange a world-bearing turtle for a big bang.
We are like Loren Eiseley’s moth, blundering from
light to light, unable to discern the great play that blazes under the opera
tent. Turn now to the experimental findings of modern science, which require us
to recognize—at last—our role in the creation of reality from moment to moment.
Consciousness cannot exist without a living, biological creature to
embody its perceptive powers of creation. Therefore we must turn to the logic
of life, to biologic, if we are to understand the world around us.
Space and time are the two concepts we take most
for granted in our lives. We have been taught that they are measurable. They
exist. They’re real. And that reality has been reinforced every day of
our lives.
Most of us live without thinking abstractly about
time and space. They are such an integral part of our lives that examination of
them is as unnatural as an examination of walking or breathing. In fact, many
people feel silly talking about time and space in an abstract, analytical way.
The question “Does time exist?” can seem like so much philosophical babble.
After all, the clock ticks, the years pass, we age and die. Isn’t time the only
thing we can be certain of? Equally inconsonant is the question of whether or
not space exists. “Obviously space exists,” we might answer, “because we live
in it. We move through it, drive through it, build in it, measure it.”
Time and space are easy to talk and think about.
Find yourself short of either or both—late for work, standing in a stalled
subway car packed with riders—and issues of time and space are obvious: “It’s
crowded and I’m uncomfortable and my boss is going to kill me for being late.”
But time and space as our source of comprehension and consciousness is an
abstraction. Our day-to-day experiences indicate nothing of this reality to us.
Rather, life has taught us that time and space are external and eternal
realities. They bound all experiences and are more fundamental than life
itself. They are above and beyond human experience.
As animals, we are organized, wired, to think this
way. We use dates and places to define our experiences to ourselves and to
others. History describes the past by placing people and events in time and
space. Scientific theories of the big bang, geology, and evolution are steeped
in the logic of time and space. They are essential to our every movement and
moment. To place ourselves as the creators of time and space, not as the
subjects of it, goes against our common sense, life experience, and education.
It takes a radical shift of perspective for any of us to entertain the idea
that space and time are animal sense perceptions, because the implications are
so startling.
Yet
we all know that space and time are not things—objects that you can see, feel,
taste, touch, or smell. They are intangible, like gravity. In fact they are
modes of interpretation and understanding, part of the animal logic that molds
sensations into multidimensional objects.
We
live on the edge of time, where tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. Everything before
this moment is part of the history of the universe, gone forever.
Or
so we believe.
Think
for a minute about time flowing forward into the future and how extraordinary
it is that we are here, alive on the edge of all time. Imagine all the days and
hours that have passed since the beginning of time. Now stack them like chairs
on top of each other, and seat yourself on the very top. Science has no real
explanation for why we’re here, for why we exist now. According to the current
physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that
I am here and that you are there. The statistical probability of being on top
of time or infinity is so small as to be meaningless. Yet this is generally how
the human mind conceives time.
In
classical science, humans place all things in time and space on a continuum.
The universe is 15 to 20 billion years old; the earth five or six. Homo
erectus appeared four million years ago, but he took three-and-a-half
million years to discover fire, and another 490,000 to invent agriculture. And
so forth. Time in a mechanistic universe (as described by Newton and Einstein
and Darwin) is an arrow upon which events are notched. But imagine, instead,
that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t
alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear
a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before
and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future.
Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always.
The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist
simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece
by piece. If we could access all life—the whole record—we could experience it
non-sequentially. We could know our children as toddlers, as teenagers, as
senior citizens—all now. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now [Besso—one of
his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between
past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” That there
is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns
and the earth is a fantasy.
It’s
important here to address a fundamental question. We have clocks that can
measure time. If we can measure time, doesn’t that prove it exists? Einstein
sidestepped the question by simply defining time as “what we measure with a
clock.” The emphasis for physicists is on the measuring. However, the
emphasis should be on the we, the observers. Measuring time doesn’t
prove its physical existence. Clocks are rhythmic things. Humans use the
rhythms of some events (like the ticking of clocks) to time other events (like
the rotation of the earth). This is not time, but rather, a comparison
of events. Specifically, over the ages, humans have observed rhythmic events in
nature: the periodicities of the moon, the sun, the flooding of the Nile. We
then created other rhythmic things to measure nature’s rhythms: a pendulum, a
mechanical spring, an electronic device. We called these manmade rhythmic
devices “clocks.” We use the rhythms of specific events to time other specific
events. But these are just events, not to be confused with time.
Quantum mechanics describes the
tiny world of the atom and its constituents with stunning accuracy. It is used
to design and build much of the technology that drives modern
society—transistors, lasers, and even wireless communication. But quantum
mechanics in many ways threatens not only our essential and absolute notions of
space and time, but indeed, all Newtonian-Darwinian conceptions of order and
secure prediction.
“I
think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics,” said Nobel
physicist Richard Feynman. “Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly
avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’
into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” The reason scientists go
down the drain is that they refuse to accept the immediate and obvious
implications of the experimental findings of quantum theory. Biocentrism is the
only humanly comprehensible explanation for how the world can be the way it is.
But, as the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg admits, “It’s an
unpleasant thing to bring people into the basic laws of physics.”
In
order to account for why space and time were relative to the observer, Einstein
assigned tortuous mathematical properties to an invisible, intangible entity
that cannot be seen or touched. This folly continues with the advent of quantum
mechanics. Despite the central role of the observer in this theory—extending it
from space and time to the very properties of matter itself—scientists still
dismiss the observer as an inconvenience to their theories. It has been proven
experimentally that when studying subatomic particles, the observer actually
alters and determines what is perceived. The work of the observer is hopelessly
entangled in that which he is attempting to observe. An electron turns out to
be both a particle and a wave. But how and where such a particle will be
located remains entirely dependent upon the very act of observation.
Pre-quantum
physicists thought that they could determine the trajectory of individual
particles with complete certainty. They assumed that the behavior of particles
would be predictable if everything were known at the outset—that there was no
limit to the accuracy with which they could measure the physical properties of
a particle. But Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle showed that this is
not the case. You can know either the velocity of a particle or its location
but not both. If you know one, you cannot know the other. Heisenberg compared
this to the little man and woman in a weather house, an old folk art device
that functions as a hygrometer, indicating the air’s humidity. The two figures
ride opposite each other on a balance bar. “If one comes out,” Heisenberg said,
“the other goes in.”
Consider
for a moment that you are watching a film of an archery tournament, with the
Zeno’s arrow paradox in mind. 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—it’s just beyond the grandstand, about 20 feet above
the ground. But you have lost all information about its momentum. It is going
nowhere; its velocity is zero. Its path is no longer known. It is uncertain.
To
measure the position precisely at any given instant is to lock in on one static
frame, to put the movie on pause, so to speak. Conversely, as soon as you
observe momentum you can’t isolate a frame, because momentum is the summation
of many frames. You can’t know one and the other with complete
accuracy. There is uncertainty as you hone in, whether on motion or position.
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. “Contemporary science,” said Heisenberg, “today more than at any
previous time, has been forced by nature herself to pose again the old question
of the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes, and to answer
it in a slightly different way.”
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.
Another
aspect of modern physics, in addition to quantum uncertainty, also strikes at
the core of Einstein’s concept of discrete entities and spacetime. Einstein
held that the speed of light is constant and that events in one place cannot
influence events in another place simultaneously. In the relativity theory, the
speed of light has to be taken into account for information to travel from one
particle to another. However, experiment after experiment has shown that this
is not the case. In 1965, Irish physicist John Bell created an experiment that
showed that separate particles can influence each other instantaneously over
great distances. The experiment has been performed numerous times and confirms
that the properties of polarized light are correlated, or linked, no matter how
far apart the particles are. There is some kind of instantaneous—faster than
light—communication between them. All of this implies that Einstein’s concept
of spacetime, neatly divided into separate regions by light velocity, is untenable.
Instead, the entities we observe are floating in a field of mind that is not
limited by an external spacetime.
The
experiments of Heisenberg and Bell call us back to experience itself, the
immediacy of the infinite here and now, and shake our unexamined trust in
objective reality. But another support for biocentrism is the famous two hole
experiment, which demands that we go one step further: Zeno’s arrow doesn’t
exist, much less fly, without an observer. The two-hole experiment goes
straight to the core of quantum physics. Scientists have discovered that if
they “watch” a subatomic particle pass through holes on a barrier, it behaves
like a particle: like a tiny bullet, it passes through one or the other holes.
But if the scientists do not observe the particle, then it exhibits
the behavior of a wave. The two-hole experiment has many versions, but in
short: If observed, particles behave like objects; if unobserved, they behave
like waves and can go through more than one hole at the same time.
Dubbed
quantum weirdness, this wave-particle duality has befuddled scientists for
decades. Some of the greatest physicists have described it as impossible to
intuit and impossible to formulate into words, and as invalidating common sense
and ordinary perception. Science has essentially conceded that quantum physics
is incomprehensible outside of complex mathematics. How can quantum physics be
so impervious to metaphor, visualization, and language?
If
we accept a life-created reality at face value, it becomes simple to understand.
The key question is waves of what? Back in 1926, the Nobel laureate
physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability,
not waves of material as the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had
theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus a wave of probability is
nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave
is not there. It’s nothing. As John Wheeler, the eminent theoretical physicist,
once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed
phenomenon.”
A
particle cannot be thought of as having any definite existence—either duration
or a position in space—until we observe it. Until the mind sets the scaffolding
of an object in place, an object cannot be thought of as being either here or
there. Thus, quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can
occupy. A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon,
it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring.
Nothing happens until the event is actually observed. If you watch it go
through the barrier, then the wave function collapses and the particle goes
through one hole or the other. If you don’t watch it, then the particle
detectors will show that it can go through more than one hole at the same time.
Science
has been grappling with the implications of the wave-particle duality ever
since its discovery in the first half of the 20th century. But few people
accept this principle at face value. The Copenhagen interpretation, put in
place by Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Born in the 1920s, set out to do just
that. But it was too unsettling a shift in worldview to accept in full. At
present, the implications of these experiments are conveniently ignored by
limiting the notion of quantum behavior to the microscopic world. But doing
this has no basis in reason, and it is being challenged in laboratories around
the world. New experiments carried out with huge molecules called buckyballs
show that quantum reality extends into the macroscopic world as well.
Experiments make it clear that another weird quantum phenomenon known as
entanglement, which is usually associated with the micro world, is also
relevant on macro scales. An exciting experiment, recently proposed (so-called
scaled-up superposition), would furnish the most powerful evidence to date that
the biocentric view of the world is correct at the level of living organisms.
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.
The
sphere of physical reality for a glowworm and a human are decidedly different.
However, the genome itself is carbon-based. Carbon is formed at the heart of
stars and supernova explosions, formative processes of the universe. Life as we
know it is limited by our spatio-temporal logic—that is, the genome traps us in
the universe with which we are familiar. Animals (including those that evolved
in the past) span part of the spectrum of that possibility. There are surely
other information systems that correspond to other physical realities,
universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space
and time. The universe of space and time belong uniquely to us genome-based
animals.
Eugene
Wigner, one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists, called it impossible “to
formulate the laws of [physics] in a fully consistent way without reference to
the consciousness [of the observer].” Indeed, quantum theory implies that
consciousness must exist and that the content of the mind is the ultimate
reality. If we do not look at it, the moon does not exist in a definite state.
In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to
reality—to a dandelion in a meadow or a seed pod.
As we have seen, the world appears
to be designed for life not just at the microscopic scale of the atom, but at
the level of the universe itself. In cosmology, scientists have discovered that
the universe has a long list of traits that make it appear as if everything it
contains—from atoms to stars—was tailor-made for us. Many are calling this
revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not too this or too
that, but just right for life. Others are calling it the anthropic principle,
because the universe appears to be human centered. And still others are calling
it intelligent design, because they believe it’s no accident that the heavens
are so ideally suited for us. By any name, the discovery is causing a huge
commotion within the astrophysics community and beyond.
At
the moment, the only attempt at an explanation holds that God made the
universe. But there is another explanation based on science. To understand the
mystery, we need to reexamine the everyday world we live in. As unimaginable as
it may seem to us, the logic of quantum physics is inescapable. Every morning
we open our front door to bring in the paper or to go to work. We open the door
to rain, snow, or trees swaying in the breeze. We think the world churns along
whether we happen to open the door or not. Quantum mechanics tells us it
doesn’t.
The
trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The kitchen disappears when we’re
in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal
senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the
smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits
dissolve into nothingness—or into waves of probability. The universe bursts
into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For
each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of
reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions
of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human and perhaps even by
each animal.
Imagine
again you’re on the stalled subway car worried about being late for work. The
engineers get the thing running again and most of the other commuters soon
disembark. What is your universe at the moment? The screeching sound of metal
wheels against metal tracks. Your fellow passengers. The ads for Rogaine and
tech schools. What is not your universe? Everything outside your range of
perception does not exist. Now suppose that I’m with you on the train. My
individual sphere of reality intersects with yours. We two human beings with nearly
identical perception tools are experiencing the same harsh lighting and
uncomfortable sounds.
You
get the idea. But how can this really be? You wake up every morning and your
dresser is still across the room from your comfortable spot in the bed. You put
on the same pair of jeans and favorite shirt and shuffle to the kitchen in
slippers to make coffee. How can anyone in his right mind possibly suggest that
the great world out there is constructed in our heads?
To
more fully grasp a universe of still arrows and disappearing moons, let’s turn
to modern electronics. You know from experience that something in the black box
of a DVD player turns an inanimate disc into a movie. The electronics in the
DVD converts and animates the information on the disc into a 3-D show. Likewise
your brain animates the universe. Imagine the brain as the electronics in your
DVD player. Explained another way, the brain turns electrochemical information
from our five senses into an order, a sequence—into a face, into this page—into
a unified three-dimensional whole. It transforms sensory input into something
so real that few people ever ask how it happens. Stop and think about this for
a minute. Our minds are so good at it that we rarely ever question whether the
world is anything other than what we imagine it to be. Yet the brain—not the
eyes—is the organ sealed inside a vault of bone, locked inside the cranium,
that “sees” the universe.
What
we interpret as the world is brought into existence inside our head. Sensory
information does not impress upon the brain, as particles of light impress upon
the film in a camera. The images you see are a construction by the brain.
Everything you are experiencing right now (pretend you’re back on the subway)
is being actively generated in your mind—the hard plastic seats, the graffiti,
the dark remnants of chewing gum stuck to the floor. All physical things—subway
turnstiles, train platforms, newspaper racks, their shapes, sounds, and
odors—all these sensations are experienced inside your head. Everything we
observe is based on the direct interaction of energy on our senses, whether it
is matter (like your shoe sticking to the floor of a subway car) or particles
of light (emitted from sparks as a subway train rounds a corner). Anything that
we do not observe directly, exists only as potential—or mathematically
speaking—as a haze of probability.
You
may question whether the brain can really create physical reality. However,
remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind)
prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatial-temporal reality as real
as the one you are experiencing now. The visions and sounds schizophrenic
patients see and hear are just as real to them as this page or the chair you’re
sitting on.
We have all seen pictures of the
primitive earth with its volcanoes overflowing with lava, or read about how the
solar system itself condensed out of a giant swirling gas cloud. Science has
sought to extend the physical world beyond the time of our own emergence. It has
found our footsteps wandering backward until on some far shore they were
transmuted into a trail of mud. The cosmologists picked up the story of the
molten earth and carried its evolution backward in time to the insensate past:
from minerals by degrees back through the lower forms of matter—of nuclei and
quarks—and beyond them to the big bang. It seems only natural that life and the
world of the inorganic must separate at some point.
We
consider physics a kind of magic and do not seem at all fazed when we hear that
the universe—indeed the laws of nature themselves—just appeared for no reason
one day. From the dinosaurs to the big bang is an enormous distance. Perhaps we
should remember the experiments of Francesco Redi, Lazzaro Spallanzani, and
Louis Pasteur—basic biological experiments that put to rest the theory of
spontaneous generation, the belief that life had arisen spontaneously from dead
matter (as, for instance, maggots from rotting meat and mice from bundles of
old clothes)—and not make the same mistake for the origin of the universe
itself. We are wont to imagine time extending all the way back to the big bang,
before life’s early beginning in the seas. But before matter can exist, it has
to be observed by a consciousness.
Physical
reality begins and ends with the animal observer. All other times and places,
all other objects and events are products of the imagination, and serve only to
unite knowledge into a logical whole. We are pleased with such books as
Newton’s Principia, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. But they
instill a complacency in the reader. Darwin spoke of the possibility that life
emerged from inorganic matter in some “warm little pond.” Trying to trace life
down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously
from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the quantum
theorist.
Neuroscientists
believe that the problem of consciousness can someday be solved once we
understand all the synaptic connections in the brain. “The tools of
neuroscience,” wrote philosopher and author David Chalmers (Scientific
American, December 1995) “cannot provide a full account of conscious
experience, although they have much to offer. . . . Consciousness might be
explained by a new kind of theory.” Indeed, in a 1983 National Academy Report,
the Research Briefing Panel on Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence
stated that the questions to which it concerned itself “reflect a single
underlying great scientific mystery, on par with understanding the evolution of
the universe, the origin of life, or the nature of elementary particles.”
The
mystery is plain. Neuroscientists have developed theories that might help to
explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and thus
succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived
object—such as the shape, color, and smell of a flower—are merged into a
coherent whole. These theories reflect some of the important work that is
occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories
of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of
these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience; and yet the
difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap in
our understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a physical
process. Even Steven Weinberg concedes that although consciousness may have a
neural correlate, its existence does not seem to be derivable from physical
laws.
Physicists
believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and
yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how
to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to
ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can
furnish no answers for them. “Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the
revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the
Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”
Space
and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of
consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we
realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the
information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of
themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships
involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not
conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that
mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of
the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the
circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal
order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information
leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does
the music indeed exist.
We
are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and
space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong to the
living. Think of all the recent book titles—The End of Science, The End of
History, The End of Eternity, The End of Certainty, The End of Nature, and
The End of Time. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that
time and space do not exist, will it feel like madness.
Robert
Lanza is Vice President of Research and Scientific Development at Advanced Cell
Technology and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has
written 20 scientific books and won a Rave award for medicine from Wired
magazine and an “all star” award for biotechnology from Mass High Tech: The
Journal of New England Technology.
References: The AMERICAN Scholar
