Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (21 page)

What created the Big Bang? A: No “dead” universe ever existed outside of Mind. “Nothingness” is a meaningless concept.

Which came first, rocks or life? A: Time is a form of animal-sense perception.

What
is
this universe? A: An active, life-based process.

Our
concepts
about the universe are reminiscent of a common classroom world globe, which is a tool allowing us to think about Earth as a whole. However, the Grand Canyon or Taj Mahal are only real when you go there. And having a globe doesn’t guarantee you
can actually get to the North Pole or Antarctica. Likewise, the universe is a concept we use to represent everything that is theoretically possible in experience in space and time. It’s like a CD—the music only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs.

One issue that can arise with biocentrism is solipsism—the notion that all is one, that a single consciousness pervades everything, and that appearances of individuality are real only on a relative level but are not true fundamentally. The authors don’t insist on this and allow that it may or may not be so. Certainly, there is a strong appearance or verisimilitude of separate organisms, each with its own consciousness. And the “many beings” viewpoint overwhelmingly dominates public belief in all parts of the world. It may seem mad to entertain any view to the contrary.

Still, nagging hints that “All Is One” peek from cracks in every discipline—the universal applicability of numerous constants and physical laws, the insistence of many people in all cultures and throughout history of having had a “revelatory experience” that carried “no doubt” that All is One. We can be
sure
of one thing only: our perceptions themselves—nothing else. Then, too, the connectedness in quantum theory’s EPR correlations, where objects vastly far apart remain intimately connected, make perfect sense if solipsism is true. Thus, we have occasional subjective experience, reports of mystical revelation, unity of physical constants and laws, entangled particle phenomena, and a certain appealing esthetics (of the type that Einstein put so much stock in) that serve as little hints of this potential Oneness. Indeed, it is the tacit engine behind physicists’ tireless search for a Grand Unified Theory. In any case, it may be true; it may not be. If it is, it clinches biocentrism. If it isn’t, it doesn’t matter.

Looking back over the various worldviews, it’s clear that biocentrism is distinct from previous models. It has commonality with classical science in that studies of the brain, further efforts to understand consciousness scientifically, and many of the efforts of experimental neurobiology will help expand our grasp of the cosmos. On the other hand, it has some similarities to
some
of the tenets of some Eastern religions as well.

Biocentrism is perhaps most valuable in helping us decide what
not
to waste time with—areas where biocentrism suggests our efforts at attempting to better understand the universe as a whole may be futile. “Theories of Everything” that do not account for life or consciousness will certainly lead ultimately to dead-ends, and this includes string theory. Models that are strictly time-based, such as further work on understanding the Big Bang as the putative natal event of the cosmos, will never deliver full satisfaction or closure. Conversely, biocentrism is in no way anti-science; science dedicated to processes or technological leaps create untold benefits within their circumscribed fields of endeavor. But those that attempt to provide deep or ultimate answers—to a population that remains hungry for them—must ultimately turn to some form of biocentrism if they are to succeed.

O
ffering a new way to conceive the cosmos always means battling the inertia of the existing cultural mindset. We all share a way of thinking that has spread, virus-like, thanks to books, television, and now, the Internet. Our general model of reality first originated in cruder form a few centuries ago but reached its present shape only in the middle of the twentieth century. Prior to that, it seemed plausible that the universe had always existed more or less the way it is now—meaning the cosmos is eternal. This steady-state model had great philosophic appeal but had become shaky after Edwin Hubble announced the expansion of the universe in 1930, and then became untenable in 1965 with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation—both of which strongly point to a natal Big Bang.

A Big Bang means the universe was born, and that therefore it must someday die, even if no one knows whether this is just one of an endlessly repeating temporal cycle of Bangs, or even if other universes exist concurrently. Thus, eternity cannot be disproved.
Just prior to the current model, an even vaster change had been the earlier replacement of the divine universe, one whose operation was due solely to the Hand of God or the gods, with one made of stupid stuff, and whose sole animating power is random action, like pebbles cascading down a hillside.

Through it all, however, there was always some generally accepted collective view of where the universe’s components were to be found, the relation between the living and the non-living, and its overall structure. For example, ever since the early nineteenth century, scientists and the public alike envisioned life dwelling solely on the surfaces of celestial bodies, even the Moon, and until the mid- 1800s, many scientists, including the eminent William Herschel, thought it “likely” that human-like creatures even inhabited the surface of the Sun, protected against its putative hot, luminous clouds by a second, inner, insulating cloud layer. Science fiction writers grabbed this nineteenth-century obsession with extraterrestrial life and ran with it, producing a steady stream of invaders-from-Mars-type novels, which eventually found their way into whatever new entertainment medium became available, from books and magazine serials to film and radio, and then television.

Such works of fiction are enormously powerful in shaping a culture’s mindset. Until Jules Verne and others wrote about humans going to the Moon in the nineteenth century, it was too fantastic a notion to spread widely. By the 1960s, however, manned space travel had become such a common sci-fi theme that it was an easy sell to the public, who readily agreed to fork over taxpayer dollars to turn it into a reality during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

Science and sci-fi are thus often the primary means, rather than religion or philosophy, by which much of the public envisions the structure of the universe. By the start of the twenty-first century, few people didn’t express confidence that everything began in a titanic explosion long ago, that time and space are real, that galaxies and stars are achingly distant, that the universe is essentially as dumb as gravel, and that randomness rules. Even more solid is the idea that
each person is an isolated lifeform who confronts an external reality, and that there is no tangible interconnectedness between organisms. These are the current mainstream models of reality.

In early, pre-1960 film, sci-fi almost always limited itself to such existing mindsets. When presenting aliens—still one of the most popular themes—they tended to hail from the surfaces of planets. In appearance, the basics of drama require them to resemble humanoids closely, for example, the Klingons of
Star Trek
, and preferably have language, and for that matter
our
language (and even our dialect) because excessive silence is anathema to holding cinematic interest. If organisms are shown to be mere blobs of light, say, their appearances will always be brief.

Several popular alien plot lines include the human who falls in love with the nonhuman, as in the various gorgeous Cylons of
Battle-star Galactica
or the old television show
Mork & Mindy
, and the lone hero or lovable misfit who is the only one who knows about an alien invasion or is able to save the world from it.

Generally, sci-fi’s aliens have evil motives, rather than displaying benign intentions such as saving humankind from our destructive tendencies, such as frequent wars or futile chronic dieting. In the last two decades, another now-tiresome plot has started to repeat with no more than slight variations: humans battling our own runaway machines. While anyone who has struggled with a balky, non-starting lawnmower can relate to an anti-machine motif and probably already harbors some degree of loathing for various contraptions, such sentiments have now reached the cliché level in the
Terminator
series, in
I, Robot
, in the
Matrix
trilogy—and there’s no end in sight. As a consequence, everyone now has “robots—bad!” firmly implanted like a subliminal message, and it will be a real challenge for future designers of helpful machines to make them appear both obsequious and harmlessly moronic.

Most of the remaining sci-fi plot lines could be counted on the fingers of one hand. There’s the “crew lost in space” business, the plague that might wipe out Earth, and the evil-U.S.-government theme, where whatever’s happening is due to some secret project
gone awry or else hatched by a breakaway spy or military agency performing perilous unauthorized experiments.

What we had
not
seen in pre-1955 sci-fi was any treatment of reality itself nor, for that matter, anything truly original that might call into doubt the prevailing worldview. Aliens were organisms from a planet; they were never the planet itself or an energy field. The universe was portrayed as being external and vast rather than internal and interconnected. Life was always finite, time was always real, events unfolded solely from mechanistic accidents rather than any innate cosmic intelligence. And as for any quantum role where the observer influences the play of inanimate objects, forget it.

Things began to shift around 1960, especially with
Solaris
(1961), in which the planet itself was alive. Then came the ultra-imaginative consequences of the psychedelic revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, and the public’s greater exposure to
avant-garde
sci-fi writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as a sudden if fringe interest in Eastern philosophy.

This abandonment of the traditional mindset concerning the nature of the universe probably began with a renaissance of the old time-travel theme, which had always been a favorite sci-fi motif. Up to the 1960s, it had merely meant an excursion into a different period of American or British life (and this motif remains popular today), as we’ve seen in the
Back to the Future
series or, going the other way, the original and the remake of H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine.
Often, dramas involving time involved not travel but merely a story set in some future era, often combined with a societal theme, as we saw in
Logan’s Run
.

But—getting back to biocentrism’s themes—films that question time’s very validity started to appear in the 1970s. In the movie made from Carl Sagan’s novel
Contact,
we’re treated to the relativistic delight of having time pass at an eye blink for the scientists running the experiment, while the traveler played by Jodie Foster simultaneously experiences days of adventures on another world. Time as an iffy item was a major theme in movies like
Peggy Sue Got Married
, in which a childhood is relived by an adult. Such motifs have allowed
the concept of time as a suspiciously untrustworthy commodity to creep increasingly into the public brainpan.

Also entering the sci-fi lexicon is the notion of reality being consciousness-based.
Memento
showed the protagonist dealing with multiple time-levels, as did
Run, Lola, Run
, which also incorporated quantum theory’s MWI explanation that all possibilities occur even if we are only aware of one of them, although the film’s sequential outcomes were presented without explanation of their physics pedigree.

So the table has been set in the public mind for biocentrism’s jump to the reality that it’s all
only
in the mind, that the universe exists nowhere else.

Thus, despite a biocentric view being absent thus far in school-room science, religion, or in the common mindset, the gradual recent weaving of some of its tenets into sci-fi should make it seem less than totally alien or completely outside all familiar experience. It is said that popular jokes are self-replicating, like viruses, and that they spread among the community outside of any human effort or control. It’s almost as if they have a life of their own. Groundbreaking ideas are often like that, too. They are not just catchy, they are
catching
—contagious. So while Galileo was hugely exasperated at finding essentially no one willing even to look through his telescope to see for themselves that Earth was not the stationary center of all motion, the problem may at least partly have been due to the concept having not yet reached the “contagion” level where it could self-replicate.

By contrast, thanks to sci-fi’s enormous popularization of many biocentric-sympathetic ideas, biocentrism’s time may be upon us very soon. When maverick sci-fi writers do hit upon the notion of exploiting the strange, newly established realities they have not yet really plumbed—whether it be entanglement, or the past mutating because of decisions made in the present, or biocentrism itself—the cycle will be complete with something truly fresh for sci-fi aficionados. Success breeds success, and the new ideas may percolate rapidly through the collective consciousness, just as space travel did not
so long ago. And, before you know it, we find ourselves in an era of fresh thinking.

All because of our human attraction for both science and the universe of make-believe.

To be conscious that we are perceiving . . . is to be conscious of our own existence.

—Aristotle (384-322 BC)

 

 

 

C
onsciousness poses the deepest problem for science, even as it resides as one of the key tenets of biocentrism. There is nothing more intimate than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. “All sorts of mental phenomena,” says consciousness researcher David Chalmers at the Australian National University, “have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.”