Biocentrism - Robert Lanza

[Zadius Sky]

From Amazon:

Review:

"What makes this book both interesting and worth the effort of reading it; is the unique perspective Lanza brings to the subject matter as a physician....From the way he chooses to present his arguments, it's clear he has a solid grasp of esoteric disciplines like quantum theory, special relativity and particle physics. And what makes his presentation more compelling than other efforts I've encountered is his ability and willingness to weave personal experience into the thoughts and ideas presented. His style is conversational and warm which tends to pull you along through the exposition gently. And his sense of wonder and befuddlement at shop worn enigmas like the double slit experiment, Bell's theorem, non-locality and Schrödinger's cat is as infectious as it is delightful...I very much like what Lanza has to say in Biocentrism." -- Midwest Book Review

Product Description:

Every now and then, a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationships with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory. At the same time, these findings have increased our doubt and uncertainty about traditional physical explanations of the universe's genesis and structure.

Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around. In this new paradigm, life is not just an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics.

Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe--our own--from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism shatters the reader's ideas of life, time and space, and even death. At the same time, it releases us from the dull worldview that life is merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

I have recently finished reading this small book (224 pages) by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman, author of Strange Universe), and I thought it was an interesting read (and quite an easy-to-read at that!), but it contained no original ideas/thoughts as basically what the author was saying is nothing new, so to speak. It is written in a first-person perspective (Lanza's, not clear where Berman is involved).

I've sought out this book after reading "Does The Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone" a while back as I was quite looking forward to reading his book. But, the experiments being discussed in this book - I have read elsewhere, especially Double-Slit Experiment, and of an observer-observed phenomenon to which the author built his theory on. Lanza proposes this new theory called "Biocentrism," which basically revealed a view that "life creates the universe rather than the other way around" by placing biology above all other sciences. In this book, the author use this theory to offer insights or to make sense "of aspects of biological and physical science that are currently insensible" (Biocentrism, page 195).

In his theory of biocentrism, Lanza gave seven principles:

- First Principle: 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.

- Second Principle: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

- Third Principle: 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.

- Fourth Principle: Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

- Fifth Principle: 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.

- Sixth Principle: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

- Seventh Principle: 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.

The above principles were discussed in detail with examples/experiments, and also included background stories from the author's personal life. In his last chapter, Lanza proposed for future experiments to either support or contradict his theory.

This book have generated mixed reviews from scientists and non-scientists alike. Richard Conn Henry, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University, said in his review of Biocentrism: "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!"

About the Author:

From _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lanza:

Robert Lanza (born 11 February 1956) is an American Doctor of Medicine, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Lanza was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up south of there, in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Lanza "altered the genetics of chickens in his basement", and came to the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he appeared at the university with his results. Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard mentored Lanza over the next ten years. Lanza attended University of Pennsylvania, receiving BA and MD degrees. There, he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza was a Fulbright Scholar. Lanza currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

He currently write essays for The Huffington Post website: _http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza

During the search on this forum, I have found neither Lanza's name nor his book(s) as being mentioned.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Cool. Thanks for the review, Myrddin Awyr! Reminds me of some things Gurdjieff says (presented with references to modern science here: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=18025.0). For example, on "time", G wrote:

Time in itself does not exist; there is only the totality of
the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena
present in a given place. Time itself, no being can either
understand by reason or sense by any outer or inner
being-function. It cannot even be sensed by any
gradation of instinct.… It is possible to judge Time only
if one compares real cosmic phenomena which proceed
in the same place and under the same conditions, where
Time is being constated and considered.… Only Time
alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the
result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic
phenomena. And it does not issue from anything, but
blends always with everything, and becomes self-sufficiently
independent; therefore, in the whole of the
Universe, it alone can be called and extolled as the
"Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon."

 

[Buddy]

Yes, thanks Myrddin Awyr. Strangely enough, I was thinking about getting the book, but now that I see what it's about I think it will not answer any questions that I have after reading that SoTT article you linked.

[quote author=http://www.sott.net/articles/show/214060-Does-The-Past-Exist-Yet-Evidence-Suggests-Your-Past-Isn-t-Set-in-Stone]
Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.[/quote]

This sounds kind of disturbing to me, but I might be missing something. Isn't Lanza assuming that just because there is not enough information for a particular observer to make a determination from his/her point of view, that there is actually reason to assume some "objective indeterminate state"?

If so, then why is that exactly?

[quote author=Lanza]
Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer.
[/quote]

I sometimes wonder how much Neils Bohr may have been influenced by Soren Kierkegaard's existentialist philosophy. It seems to me that Bohr was initially more concerned with what observers were observing, rather than what was actually happening in the experiments. Maybe that's what led him to eventually assert that at a fundamental physical level, there is no reality unless it has been observed. That is, he made the reality in the internal thinking space and the denial of any objective reality which exists (whether or not humans know what it is doing), a fundamental principle of physics!

According to Bohr, it is conscious beings observing the universe who bring it into being. Quite how the conscious beings could observe something that they have not yet created by observing it was never clear, nor was it clear just how conscious a creature had to be to have this remarkable faculty of creating reality.

Many of Bohr's great colleagues didn't even believe it.

Erwin Schrodinger was open to the idea that consciousness is important in physics, but even he wasn't happy with Bohr's view. He suggested an experiment where a Geiger counter controlled the release of some poison, so that a cat in the same box would either survive or be killed depending on whether the counter clicked or not. Was he seriously expected to believe that the cat was half dead and half alive until someone opened the box and made an observation?

Where is the rest of the Universe context? Does the Universe, or Reality itself, not have knowledge of, or a point of view of it's own state of which we can look for ways to track and constrain our ignorance?

An example of what I mean concerns a discussion back in October 1990 and '91 when so many people - from kids to post-graduate Ph.Ds (and a bunch of those) gave Marilyn vos Savant so much grief over a silly little problem even though she explained herself quite well.

She finally had to just say "Hush, now."

In the linked example, the "indeterminate state" would be the fact that the player thinks there is no reason to assume the car is more likely to be behind one door or the other when the time comes to "stick or switch". However, the reality is that, in a self-consistent Universe, the location of the car (and the fact of its existence) is exactly known at all times, even if the player can't figure it out.

_http://www.marilynvossavant.com/articles/gameshow.html
_http://www.marilynvossavant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64

Finally, I was wondering why this "observer creates the observed" idea has been accepted for so long with no mechanism having ever been demonstrated, yet someone like Lovelock must demonstrate mechanism before he can get the GAIA concept accepted.

A lot of things still make me wonder...

 

[caballero reyes]

Biocentrism

Has anyone heard or read about Biocentrism? This theory has points in common with what the Cassiopaeans have expressed in transcripts. The author is Robert Lanza. An article about his theory:

Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the “many-worlds” interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the ‘multiverse’). A new scientific theory – called biocentrism – refines these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it’s still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air – if you take everything away, what’s left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can’t see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “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.” Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine’s husband – Ed – started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.

Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man that she loved very much. My younger sister couldn’t make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn’t make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine’s life. Since no one else from our side of the family showed, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away.

Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a banking of snow.

“Ed,” she said “I can’t feel my leg.”

She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half and blood was rushing into her peritoneum.

After the death of his son, Emerson wrote “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.”

Whether it’s flipping the switch for the Science experiment, or turning the driving wheel ever so slightly this way or that way on black-ice, it’s the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result. In some cases the car will swerve off the road, but in other cases the car will continue on its way to my sister’s dream house.

Christine had recently lost 100 pounds, and Ed had bought her a surprise pair of diamond earrings. It’s going to be hard to wait, but I
know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her.