Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (12 page)

If the strong force and gravity are so amazingly tweaked, we can’t ignore the electromagnetic force that holds sway in the electrical and magnetic connections found in all atoms. Discussing it, the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said in his book
The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
(Princeton University Press, 1985): “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of
the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.’ We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”

It amounts to 1/137 when the units are filled in, and what it signifies is a constant of electromagnetism, another of the four fundamental forces, that helps facilitate the existence of atoms and allows the entire visible universe to exist. Any small change in its value and none of us are here.

Such factual oddities powerfully influence modern cosmological thinking. After all, mustn’t cosmologists’ theories plausibly explain why we live in such a highly unlikely reality?

“Not at all,” said Princeton physicist Robert Dicke in papers written in the sixties and elaborated upon by Brandon Carter in 1974. This perspective was dubbed “the Anthropic Principle.” Carter explained that what we can expect to observe “must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.” Put another way, if gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker, and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter,
we
couldn’t be here to think about it. Because we’re here, the universe
has
to be the way it is and therefore isn’t unlikely at all. Case closed.

By this reasoning, there’s no need for cosmological gratitude. Our seemingly fortuitous, suspiciously specific locale, temperature range, chemical and physical milieus are just what’s needed to produce life. If we’re here, then this is what we must find around us.

Such reasoning is now known as the “weak” version of the Anthropic Principle or WAP. The “strong” version, one that skirts the edges of philosophy even more closely but clearly supports biocentrism, says that the universe
must
have those properties that allow life to develop within it because it was obviously “designed” with the goal of generating and sustaining observers. But without biocentrism, the strong anthropic principle has no mechanism for
explaining why the universe must have life-sustaining properties. Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are
required
to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the universe under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-life universe can only exist
retroactively
after the fact of consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but provides a way of visualizing things.)

If the universe is in a non-determined state until forced to resolve by an observer, and this non-determined state included the determination of the various fundamental constants, then the resolution would necessarily fall in such a way that allows for an observer, and therefore the constants would have to resolve in such a way as to allow life. Biocentrism therefore supports and builds upon John Wheeler’s conclusions about where quantum theory leads, and provides a solution to the anthropic problem that is unique and more reasonable than any alternative.

While the latter two versions of the Anthropic Principle, needless to say, strongly support biocentrism, many in the astronomical community seem to embrace the simplest anthropic version, at least guardingly. “I like the weak anthropic principle,” said astronomer Alex Filippenko of the University of California, when one of the authors asked his opinion. “Used appropriately, it has some predictive value.” After all, he added, “Small changes to seemingly boring properties of the universe could have easily produced a universe in which nobody would have been around to be bored.”

Ah, but the point is that it didn’t and couldn’t.

To be honest and present all views, however, it should be noted that some critics wonder whether the Weak Anthropic Principle is no more than a piece of circular reasoning or a facile way of squirming
out of explaining the enormous peculiarities of the physical universe. Philosopher John Leslie, in his 1989 book
Universes
(there is a 1996 reprint edition), says, “A man in front of a firing squad of one hundred riflemen is going to be pretty surprised if every bullet misses him. Sure he could say to himself, ‘Of course they all missed; that makes perfect sense, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to wonder why they all missed.’ But anyone in his or her right mind is going to want to know how such an unlikely event occurred.”

But biocentrism provides the explanation for why all the shots missed. If the universe is created by life, then no universe that didn’t allow for life could possibly exist. This fits very neatly into quantum theory and John Wheeler’s
participatory universe
in which observers are
required
to bring the universe into existence. Because, if indeed there ever was such a time, the universe was in an undetermined probability state before the presence of observers (some probabilities—or most—not allowing for life), when observation began and the universe collapsed into a real state, it inevitably collapsed into a state that allowed for the observation that collapsed it. With biocentrism, the mystery of the Goldilocks universe goes away, and the critical role of life and consciousness in shaping the universe becomes clear.

So you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric. Either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly.

And if any of this seems too preposterous, just consider the alternative, which is what contemporary science asks us to believe: that the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped into existence out of absolute nothingness. Who in their right mind would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible suggestion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred
trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter from—zilch? Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become sentient—aware!—and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random process could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can anyone conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many supposed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops? Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and a loathing for macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life?

Is it not obvious that science only
pretends
to explain the cosmos on its fundamental level?

By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim processes and the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently ridiculous “explanations” for the nature of the cosmos as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.

Unless one awards points for familiarity and repetition, a consciousness-based universe scarcely seems far-fetched when compared with the alternatives.

We can now add another principle:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.

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.

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.

From wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space—Out of Time

—Edgar Allan Poe, “Dreamland” (1845)

 

 

 

B
ecause quantum theory increasingly casts doubts about the existence of time as we know it, let’s head straight into this surprisingly ancient scientific issue. As irrelevant as it might first appear, the presence or absence of time is an important factor in any fundamental look into the nature of the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, our sense of the forward motion of time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a world of infinite activities and outcomes that only
seems
to result in a smooth, continuous path.

At each moment, we are at the edge of a paradox known as “The Arrow,” first described twenty-five hundred 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 location during any given instant of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must momentarily be at rest. The arrow must then be present somewhere, at some specific location, at every moment of its trajectory. Logically, then, motion per se is not what is really occurring. Rather, it is a series of separate events. This may be a first indication that the forward motion of time—of which the movement of the arrow is an embodiment—is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us
, as we tie together things we are observing
. By this reasoning, time is not an absolute reality but a feature of our minds.

In truth, 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 solely neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment.

Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time? Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description of motion and events? In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream.

Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for reality—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-symmetrical. Time is a concept looking for a function—except when we’re speaking about a change, as in acceleration, but change (usually symbolized by the Greek capital letter delta or Δ) is not the same thing as time, as we shall see.

Popularly speaking, time is often called “the fourth dimension.” This usually throws people for a loop because time in daily life bears
no resemblance to the three spatial realms, which, to review basic geometry, are:

Lines
, which are one-dimensional. except in string theory, which offers an exception to one-dimensional lines: its threads of energy/ particles are so thin they’re stretched-out points that do not quite constitute an actual coordinate. The ratio of their negligible thickness to an atomic nucleus equals that of a proton to a large city.

Planes
, like shadows upon a flat wall, which have the two dimensions of length and width.

Solids
such as spheres or cubes have three dimensions. An
actual
sphere or cube is sometimes said to require four dimensions because it continues to endure. That it persists and perhaps even changes means that something “else” besides the spatial coordinates is part of its existence, and we call this time. But is time an idea or an actuality?

Scientifically, time
appears
to be indispensable in just one area—thermodynamics, whose second law has no meaning at all without the passage of time. Thermodynamics’ second law describes
entropy
(the process of going from greater to lesser structure, like the bottom of your clothes closet). Without time, entropy cannot happen or even make sense.