What If? - Quareness Series 80th "Lecture".

What if this world really was different

From what we've thought it to be

With its linear line of progression

From beginning to end.

What if the truth was different

From what we've been taught to believe

With its past, present and future

Has been, now being and yet to be.

When the atom split with a quantum leap

The moving and static of our formulating

Showed us both wave and particle

The dual nature of the real deal

And thus also revealed 

That what we see is what has to be

And where and how we look

Is what we must needs witness.

Any new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within an existing paradigm, but taking into account the observer (as per the relatively recent theory of biocentrism courtesy of the American medics/scientists Robert Lanza and Bob Berman) seems to open up new approaches to potentially understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death. Our search for a Theory of Everything may continue to be stymied until we recognise the universe in our heads. Our reality is that nothing resembling what we see could be present without our consciousness...everything I experience is an organised whirl of information occurring in my mind. And space and time may simply be the mind's tools for putting it all together. Indeed the

structure of the universe itself makes it seem as if everything (from atoms to stars) has been tailor-made just for us...all aspects appear carefully chosen to allow for the existence of life, suggesting that it all might be created by life rather than the other way round?

This new biocentrism sees space and time as forms of animal sense perception rather than objective phenomena. Change of course is not the same thing as time. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle for example tells us that a particle's exact location and momentum cannot be known at the same time. And this uncertainty which is built into the fabric of the universe, might only seem to make sense if the universe is itself biocentric. We know that everything we perceive is actively reconstructed inside our heads and time may be just the summation of the "change frames" occurring inside the mind. Maybe there isn't any actual invisible matrix called “time” in which changes occur...that is just our own way of making sense of things.

Neither does space necessarily have to be a thing or object...it could perhaps be more a part of our mental software which molds sensations into multidimensional objects. For example it really has no boundaries/walls...distances between objects change depending on conditions like gravity and velocity...there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. In trying to understand our world, perhaps science has so far focused on the wrong starting point in treating space and time as fundamental and independent things?

Ultimately our lived reality is observer-determined. It’s a spatio-temporal process meaning that things must change. The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, getting to experience the full spectrum of biological existence. But there's more involved here than our biological aging and dying - in his “Critique of Pure Reason” Immanuel Kant explained how space and time are forms of human intuition with everything we see and experience being information in our minds. And if space and time are really tools of the mind, there has to be a break in the connection of time and place at death because both are meaningless without consciousness. For biocentrism our biological death is more a manifold to all dimensional potentialities (echoing the controversial American writer Chuck Palahniuk “the first step to eternal life is you have to die”) and is viewed simply as a break in our linear stream of consciousness. Time then is here regarded as the inner sense animating existence in our thoughts and feelings as well as in the spatial representations we experience from birth until death. It’s just the way we connect things rather than an invisible continuous matrix. Consciousness, however, isn’t created or destroyed...it only changes forms, same as energy. 

The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science suggest that the mind could be our ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Of course time and space are integral to every moment of our earthly existence and the idea of them being tools of our mind and our source of comprehension is an abstraction...it seems to go against common sense. Accordingly it demands quite a radical shift of perspective to accept/realise they may be life-created...in effect placing ourselves as the creators. And if time is an illusion the question arises as to whether consciousness can ever truly be extinguished. The fear of death seems to be a universal concern for all? of us but should we ever come to abandon the notion of a random, physical-centered cosmos and start to see things "biocentrically", the idea of a finite life could seriously loosen its grip.

Something we just take for granted is how our minds weave everything together e.g. even in dreams we generate a "reality" via a thinking/functioning/experiencing body interacting with a surrounding physical environment. Should it be true that everything physically possible has to happen (as many physicists believe) we might reasonably wonder about our ultimate destiny and where our life and consciousness begin and end. Evolutionary biology suggests that life has progressed from a one dimensional reality to two and three dimensions, and there’s no real reason to think that life stops there. Consciousness appears to run upwards by insensible degrees from the lowest forms of life through to vertebrate existence, and maybe onward far beyond us humanoids to extracorporeal (transcendental) existences. And although we experience these degrees piece by piece, they may even represent parts of a unitary reality that exists outside the classical divisions of space and time.

Biocentrism holds that space and time are merely tools of the mind and cannot be studied in the same way as particles. “I think, therefore I am” said Descartes in declaring the primacy of consciousness and all knowledge beginning with the individual. And perhaps treating space and time as physical objects is not the best start point for investigating the nature of reality. So far science has been unable to discover the physical qualities bestowed by physicists upon space. Many experiments have seemed to bear out Einstein's theory of special relativity and its implications (clocks really do slow down when they move)...the equations have been checked and cross-checked and whole technologies depend on them e.g. electron microscope, klystron (which supplies power to radar systems), etc. Indeed relativity and biocentrism both predict the same phenomena but with the latter there’s no need to invent new dimensions and new mathematics to explain why space and time are relative to the observer. In addition Einstein’s theory appears not to apply at all to small distances and seems rather inconsistent with the uncertainty principle. Relativity was designed to explain paradoxes caused by motion and gravity and it works just as well whether particles travel in a field of consciousness or total nothingness. Even though he had his concerns/doubts Einstein ascribed objective reality to space-time independent of actual events...in effect substituting one absolute external entity for another. And this has left us with the awkward dilemma that the reality may no longer exist if there's a break/split between the observer and the observed.

Understanding how we perceive the world may be key to our understanding the nature of time and space e.g. how the human mind turns information into something so real that so few of us realise what we see is actually constructed inside our heads. As Einstein himself acknowledged...“I quickly recognized what a slippery field I had ventured upon having, due to lack of experience, until now cautiously limited myself to the field of physics”...hinting perhaps that space and time might truly belong to us rather than to the physical world. Somewhere in the universe there may be black holes and quasars, but without life they don’t have any power to pull planets and solar systems when the whole of space and time may be locked inside our own heads?

Could the universe just be life’s launching-pad, like biocentrism proposes? The long-sought Theory of Everything may have been missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed. We seem to have an innate desire for completeness and totality but the comprehensiveness involved in say mapping the human genome or understanding the Big Bang may have failed to take into account that we could in fact have created them ourselves...it’s the biological creature that makes the observations and names things. Until now science hasn’t really confronted consciousness...the one thing that’s both most familiar and most mysterious. Reality could simply be an information system that involves our consciousness. There may be no invisible matrix out there that explains our origin rather than each life forming its own universe. According to biocentrism each of us generates our own sphere of reality and the universe is comprised of untold billions of such spheres...anything we don’t observe directly exists only as potential (= a haze of probability)...and since time doesn’t exist on any level before being observed, those traditional pre-Earth explanations of the universe can’t explain our origin? We now appear to be living through the early stages of a profound shift in worldview, from the belief perhaps that life is an insignificant part of the physical universe originating with the Big Bang, to one in which we ourselves are the source. Physics tells us that energy is never lost and that our brains operate by electrical energy. There could be no true death in any real sense in a timeless and spaceless world...immortality resides outside of time altogether. Our eastern religions have tended to the view that birth and death are equally illusory with consciousness transcending the body as the bedrock of existence. More usually death has been taken to mean an end with no reprieve and of course we must die if we’re just our body. However, if we’re our consciousness / sense of experience, then we cannot really die because consciousness is unavoidably expressed in manifold fashion and is ultimately unconfined.

Both science and religion appear now to be honing in more on a deeper reality. Classic science is concerned with classification of objects and how things work (e.g. how stars are born, how viruses replicate, etc.) essentially seeking to discover the properties and processes within the cosmos. For it, everything started 13.7 billion years ago when the entire universe materialised out of nothingness and all structures and events are created randomly. It holds that life began around 3.9 billion years ago on Earth (and possibly elsewhere at unknown times) and that it too occurred by the random collisions of molecules. And it sees consciousness or awareness arising out of life in a manner that remains mysterious. It has offered no real answers for how the Big Bang happened or if anything existed beforehand, how life actually arose, the nature of consciousness, why the forces and constants are the way they are, or whether life continues after the body dies...but maybe these fundamentals of existence are in fact beyond its reach (somewhat like asking particle physics to evaluate art)?

For the main western religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) our universe of distinct birth and end dates is entirely a creation of God, who is omnipotent and omnipresent and both sustains and stands apart from it. Life was also created by God and its most critical purposes are to have faith in Him and to be obey His rules. Although life is regarded as continuing after bodily death, no mention is made of consciousness and the Big Bang is irrelevant (because God is the eternal sole creator).

The main eastern religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) see all as fundamentally one and the appearance of individual separate forms as illusory. For them the true nature of reality is existence, consciousness, bliss and the One is eternal and perfect and operates effortlessly...time is illusory and the goal of our eternal life is to perceive cosmic truth by losing our false sense of illusion and separateness. These too see life as continuing beyond the demise of the body but the nature of consciousness is regarded as unknowable through logic and the Big Bang is irrelevant if time doesn't exist.

For the new scientific paradigm of biocentrism, however, there's no separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness...nothing is real that isn’t perceived...there was never an external physical universe and life didn't spring randomly from it at any time...space and time exist only as constructs of the mind...experiments in which the observer influences the outcome can be explained by the interrelatedness of consciousness and the physical universe...nature and mind are correlative. As regards the basic questions for biocentrism...the universe is an active life-based process and time is a form of animal intuition, and the Big Bang makes no sense because "nothingness" is a meaningless concept. Its basic principles are: 

- What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

- Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined...different sides of the same coin and can’t be divorced.

- The behaviour of matter is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer.

- Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability.

- The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism...life (fine-tuned) creates the universe, not the other way round.

- Time doesn’t have a real existence outside of animal intuition.

- Neither space nor time are objects or things with an independent reality.

Whilst these various world views have distinctly different answers to the "bigger" questions, both biocentrism and quantum physics do have similarities to some of the tenets of eastern religion and a degree of converging may now be emerging. It's still an open question though as to whether or not there is/was a creator even if it appears increasingly likely that our universe isn't a closed system and that science may not be playing with a full deck. There are of course natural explanations for the evolution of stars and planets and even life, with many detailed descriptions of how hadrons and leptons assemble into atoms and molecules, and how they in turn coalesce into more complex forms. And our scientists are taught that an outside creator isn’t needed to complete this mechanical explanation of life and the universe. The entire human body consists of trillions of tiny machines (cells) made up of smaller components (such as the ribosomes, mitochondria and Golgi bodies) which in turn are made up of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. But as the wheels get smaller and smaller and the cogs spin faster and faster, it all dissolves away into a swarm of energy. And perhaps even Einstein himself stumbled on the truth that "there must be something behind the energy”?

Wondering if God made the world and indeed what/who made God himself may simply be a humanly-created dilemma, given that the idea of the primacy of consciousness (featured in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Bergson) supports the claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense intuition rather than physical objects...that they are the tools our mind uses to put everything together. We can maybe think of our consciousness as animating reality much like a phonograph...listening to it doesn’t alter the record itself and we hear only one particular track depending on where the needle is placed. This is what we might call “now” but in reality there would be no before or after. All the nows (past, present and future) would always have existed even though we could only listen to the songs one by one. It seems to be the observer (us) who creates the space and time (as so many experiments have shown) and the universe is simply the spatio-temporal logic of our existence i.e. the way all the pieces (cells, proteins and all the other wheels and cogs) fit together. And a further complication arises here in view of it now appearing increasingly likely that our universe is not a closed system (with most current data suggesting it will continue to expand forever and that an extraordinary “inflationary” period has to be artificially added at the beginning to make everything work correctly)...our "subjective" space and time may represent only one of many possible information systems with some maybe requiring the influence of an outside entity moving consciousness beyond any dimensions we may find ourselves. 

All of this suggests that any unitary sense experience or consciousness must occur before the mind constructs a spatial-temporal reality...something apparently beyond the capability of a computer or machine or object with no other principle than physics and the chemistry of the atoms that compose it. No doubt science will eventually understand these algorithms well enough to create "thinking" machines and enhancements to ourselves (both biological and artificial) but it's no harm for us to be conscious of the potential for evolution to extinguish us as a separate and distinct species through any desire of ours to achieve perfection.

Science as well as philosophy is belatedly? now starting to grasp the non-linear nature of reality. Per that man Heisenberg again - “Contemporary science, today more than at any previous time, has been forced by nature herself to pose again the question of the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes”. And we know from numerous repeated experiments that entangled particles act as if there’s no space or time separating them...a result that seems intelligible only if we assume the mind transcends the existence of things in space and time. There may be some truth in the conventional view that “if you deny the objectivity of the world, unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as many prominent physicists have), then you end up with solipsism - the belief that your consciousness is the only one” but the reality is that your consciousness is not the only one, it’s ours. As that old Hindu poem put it...“know in thyself and All one self-same soul, banish the dream that sunders part from whole”. And for biocentrism with the mind transcending space and time, this conception of reality dissolves away human individuality. As Thoreau said - “sometimes as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be". Here may lie the truth that the walls of space and time are illusory and we’re all ephemeral forms of an individuality greater than ourselves, eternal even when we die (= the indispensable prelude to immortality and its highest form)...“never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (John Donne).

A word here on dreams which we tend to dismiss as unreal because they’re associated with brain activity during sleep, but our waking hours are hardly unreal because they’re associated with the neural activity in our brain. Whether awake or dreaming, we’re experiencing the same bio-physical process...real enough if we're thinking and feeling despite being qualitatively different realities...

cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).

Brilliant equations that accurately explain the vagaries of motion seem to contradict observations about how things behave on the small scale and Einstein’s relativity appears incompatible with quantum mechanics. But consciousness is a funny thing...if you could see beyond the sphere of space and time which we creatures spin around us, you might find yourself at last in the “garden” behind the atoms and the stars, before Adam and Eve, and after the last man and woman...and only you would remain as that consciousness whose mode of thinking contains the actors and the audience and all creation?

Finally may I refer the reader back to my 20th Quareness "Lecture" of July 2012 (Unity and Diversity) wherein I mentioned the concept of an underlying vacuum or void containing all potential "reality". This current effort is somewhat of an expansion of that idea drawn from later study.

Sean.

Dean of Quareness.

July, 2017.

The nature of the universe can’t be divorced from the nature of life itself?