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Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a "genius" and a "renegade thinker," even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.
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 relationship 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, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the 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 paradigm, life is not 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 will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.
The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. 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.
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 relationship 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, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the 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 paradigm, life is not 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 will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.
The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. 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.
223 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2009
About the author
Robert Lanza
37 books346 followersROBERT LANZA, MD, is one of the most respected scientists in the world. He is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 “World Thinkers” in 2015. He is credited with several hundred publications and inventions, and more than 30 scientific books, including the definitive references in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine. A former Fulbright Scholar, he studied with polio pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel Laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo, as well as the first to successfully generate stem cells from adults using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 503 reviews
June 17, 2018
A Worldview That Works For The 21st Century
Perhaps the most important book about science ever written.
The authors, both scientists with impeccable credentials, have made an enormous contribution to human civilization that will raise the consciousness of every serious open minded reader.
Perhaps the most important book about science ever written.
The authors, both scientists with impeccable credentials, have made an enormous contribution to human civilization that will raise the consciousness of every serious open minded reader.
January 26, 2015
This is one of those books that I will always believe changed my life. It's also going to be one of the few books I read more than once. Biocentrism helped me understand how I am not alone in this universe, but a part of it, and realize that I do matter in the grand scheme of things, if only to create the world around me. I came across this theory after reading James Rollins' "The Eye of God" and it was nothing like I expected. Since reading this book I have felt much closer to the universe and more aware of the world around me. I have comforted friends who suffer from bouts of depression and loneliness, including myself.
Don't get me wrong, this is a difficult read; possibly the most difficult I have ever read. But if you put the time into it and really apply the concepts, it could open you up to a world you never knew was around you.
Don't get me wrong, this is a difficult read; possibly the most difficult I have ever read. But if you put the time into it and really apply the concepts, it could open you up to a world you never knew was around you.
December 10, 2013
Robert Lanza has been noted as a brilliant biologist, having accomplished significant breakthroughs in stem cell research as well as other contributions to medical science. In Biocentrism, he elucidates an extremely challenging concept for the reader bound to the status quo to grasp: that the universe is actually a perception of consciousness, not a static "out there" reality. Lanza explains step-by-step how this is so, using known and quantified laws of physics and other sciences, and explains his claim in an exquisite, elegant yet easy-to-understand language so that any lay person can easily grasp what he is saying. He also has a wonderful sense of humor that pops through at the most unexpected times that brings a lightheartedness to the weight of his subject.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who enjoys exploring the age-old quandary of the origin of the universe.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who enjoys exploring the age-old quandary of the origin of the universe.
January 4, 2016
This book of biocentrism is a scientific book. It is one of the best books I have ever read. Not that it was entertaining. It wasn't. What this book did was introduce me to some of the most amazing experimental accomplished in the realm of quantum physics and some conclusions that can be drawn. There is not any argument in the scientific community about much of the results of experiments in quantum physics but it has become clear that quantum physic is ill equipped to explain many things. Thus came along biocentrism. The concepts in biocentrism has its roots in quantum physic testing but a great deal of thought and reflection is required to objectively delve into this exciting new field.
One of the quantum physics experiments that is astounding is the two photons that go through a slit and are divided by space. Observing one photon which is a subatomic particle causes it to change and exhibit wave characteristics with vertical polarization. The twin photon separated by considerable space immediately changes from a particle to a wave with horizontal polarization. This leads to a conclusion that philosophers for years have speculated upon. Space and time do not exist in the real universe but are only fabrications of the human mind to enable us to sort things out. Another concept is that if you could travel at the speed of light you could be everywhere in the universe at the same time. Putting it another way if you were in a space ship approaching the speed of light the cosmos would look like a basketball in front of you.
For engineers, philosophers, and scientist this is a must read book. I think everybody should read this book. This book gets as close to religion as science has ever done. I love reading science books that explain complex ideas in a way that can be easy visualized. This book does this. The more I learn the more the reality of a supreme being and eternal life are manifested. The body dies but the spirit lives on. As the scientists will say energy never is destroyed it only changes form. And science shows we are energy. It can be measure as equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb.
So read this book and let your mind be stretched. You will find it fascinating.
One of the quantum physics experiments that is astounding is the two photons that go through a slit and are divided by space. Observing one photon which is a subatomic particle causes it to change and exhibit wave characteristics with vertical polarization. The twin photon separated by considerable space immediately changes from a particle to a wave with horizontal polarization. This leads to a conclusion that philosophers for years have speculated upon. Space and time do not exist in the real universe but are only fabrications of the human mind to enable us to sort things out. Another concept is that if you could travel at the speed of light you could be everywhere in the universe at the same time. Putting it another way if you were in a space ship approaching the speed of light the cosmos would look like a basketball in front of you.
For engineers, philosophers, and scientist this is a must read book. I think everybody should read this book. This book gets as close to religion as science has ever done. I love reading science books that explain complex ideas in a way that can be easy visualized. This book does this. The more I learn the more the reality of a supreme being and eternal life are manifested. The body dies but the spirit lives on. As the scientists will say energy never is destroyed it only changes form. And science shows we are energy. It can be measure as equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb.
So read this book and let your mind be stretched. You will find it fascinating.
October 30, 2016
I read this book at the prompting of a friend from a church I frequent. He is an emeritus professor of biology who recommended this book to me by way of answering my question about how he reconciles science, specifically neo-Darwinian evolution, with his liberal Anabaptist Christian theology. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with that answer.
Anyhow, here is the spoiler, all Lanza's "Principle of Biocentrism" spelled out as on pp. 159-60:
No surprise, the reception to this book by the scientific community has been mixed, because its major premise challenges "common sense," the basic presumption, scientific or otherwise, that the world "out there" is real. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the book's thesis "baloney" as has another reviewer (mainly because I am agnostic about the nature of reality and the ability of talking monkeys to encapsulate it, either in ink squiggles on a page or through small mouth noises) I would definitely agree that this book fails to make a persuasive case for a thesis that is, to put it mildly, counterintuitive.
Additionally, I have to wonder if the author really set out to write his memoirs rather than a philosophical treatise, because at least 20% of the material in the book consists of details from the author's life that have little, if any, bearing on his thesis. I now know that Lanza's dad was a gambler, that his sister became a mentally ill drug addict, that Lanza had many brushes with greatness as a young man (he even makes a comment about the value of name-dropping!), what his 10-acre island property looks like, and that many media outlets regard him as a "genius."
Lanza's actual thesis of "biocentrism" isn't actually all that novel. It is a re-packaging of Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhist understandings of Mind and Reality (as Lanza notes several times). It is a rehashing of the same "quantum mysticism" that is popular with the New Age, paradigm-shifting crowds (it is good to remember that there are multiple interpretations of quantum "weirdness" and thus that Lanza's isn't the only one). It draws on similar insights as Robert Anton Wilson's, and others', about how the mind is inextricably bound up with the world-as-perceived. For example, neuroscience agrees that the screen I see as I type these words is not something "out there" that is being perceived by me "in here," but that instead my perception of the screen consists of my brain organizing various energetic signals coming in through my senses and structuring them in such a way as to "create" the visual field/sensorium that I perceive as "out there." Meanwhile, the fly on the monitor receives different signals and interprets them as a gigantic wall upon which to stand, and so on.
It is a truism to say that reality as we know it is only possible through our mechanisms of knowing, and so I have no problem agreeing that any of our experiences are only experienced because we are alive and aware to experience them. Any comment we can make about the "external" world is necessarily about our perceptions of that world, rather than the world-as-it-is. Questions about the absolute nature of a world separate from human consciousness of that world cannot be answered in any meaningful way, and as far as we know, because it is the only way we can know, "reality" arises as correlated subject and object, whatever that means. I can buy that, and it ain't news to the philosophical traditions of India and China, as well as to many Western philosophers. (In case you can't tell, I am a little irked at Lanza and his publicist for the grandiosity with which his "revolutionary ideas" are presented.) But it is one thing to note that there is an inextricable correlation in our lived experience between "inside" and "outside," and quite another to assert that this proves that there is in fact no world "out there" independent of the perceptions of minded, living beings. It proves instead that, by definition, we do not and cannot know what, if anything, the universe is like without minds to perceive it, and reminds at least this reader that some questions don't lend themselves to answers.
Anyhow, here is the spoiler, all Lanza's "Principle of Biocentrism" spelled out as on pp. 159-60:
No surprise, the reception to this book by the scientific community has been mixed, because its major premise challenges "common sense," the basic presumption, scientific or otherwise, that the world "out there" is real. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the book's thesis "baloney" as has another reviewer (mainly because I am agnostic about the nature of reality and the ability of talking monkeys to encapsulate it, either in ink squiggles on a page or through small mouth noises) I would definitely agree that this book fails to make a persuasive case for a thesis that is, to put it mildly, counterintuitive.
Additionally, I have to wonder if the author really set out to write his memoirs rather than a philosophical treatise, because at least 20% of the material in the book consists of details from the author's life that have little, if any, bearing on his thesis. I now know that Lanza's dad was a gambler, that his sister became a mentally ill drug addict, that Lanza had many brushes with greatness as a young man (he even makes a comment about the value of name-dropping!), what his 10-acre island property looks like, and that many media outlets regard him as a "genius."
[N]othing can be perceived that is not already interacting with our consciousness, which is why biocentric axiom number one is that nature or the so-called external world must be correlative with consciousness. One doesn't exist without the other. What this means is that when we do not look at the Moon the Moon effectively vanishes—which, subjectively, is obvious enough. If we still think of the Moon and believe that it's out there orbiting the Earth, or accept that other people are probably watching it, all such thoughts are mental constructs. The bottom-line issue here is if no consciousness existed at all, in what sense would the Moon persist, and in what form? (p. 35)
When we observe the words printed in a book, its paper seemingly a foot away, is not being perceived—the image, the paper, is the perception—and as such, it is contained in the logic of this neurocircuitry. A correlative reality encompasses everything, with only language providing separation between external and internal, between there and here. Is this matrix of neurons and atoms fashioned in an energy field of Mind? (p. 149)
Lanza's actual thesis of "biocentrism" isn't actually all that novel. It is a re-packaging of Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhist understandings of Mind and Reality (as Lanza notes several times). It is a rehashing of the same "quantum mysticism" that is popular with the New Age, paradigm-shifting crowds (it is good to remember that there are multiple interpretations of quantum "weirdness" and thus that Lanza's isn't the only one). It draws on similar insights as Robert Anton Wilson's, and others', about how the mind is inextricably bound up with the world-as-perceived. For example, neuroscience agrees that the screen I see as I type these words is not something "out there" that is being perceived by me "in here," but that instead my perception of the screen consists of my brain organizing various energetic signals coming in through my senses and structuring them in such a way as to "create" the visual field/sensorium that I perceive as "out there." Meanwhile, the fly on the monitor receives different signals and interprets them as a gigantic wall upon which to stand, and so on.
It is a truism to say that reality as we know it is only possible through our mechanisms of knowing, and so I have no problem agreeing that any of our experiences are only experienced because we are alive and aware to experience them. Any comment we can make about the "external" world is necessarily about our perceptions of that world, rather than the world-as-it-is. Questions about the absolute nature of a world separate from human consciousness of that world cannot be answered in any meaningful way, and as far as we know, because it is the only way we can know, "reality" arises as correlated subject and object, whatever that means. I can buy that, and it ain't news to the philosophical traditions of India and China, as well as to many Western philosophers. (In case you can't tell, I am a little irked at Lanza and his publicist for the grandiosity with which his "revolutionary ideas" are presented.) But it is one thing to note that there is an inextricable correlation in our lived experience between "inside" and "outside," and quite another to assert that this proves that there is in fact no world "out there" independent of the perceptions of minded, living beings. It proves instead that, by definition, we do not and cannot know what, if anything, the universe is like without minds to perceive it, and reminds at least this reader that some questions don't lend themselves to answers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 3, 2014
After reading a lot on relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness, this is the first book where I felt that the author had a solid grasp of all three and was able to bring something to the conversation.
The Western scientific revolution was predicated on an ontology of objective things that had an existence independent of observers. The periodic table we encountered in high school science is a good example. It exists independent of the reader of the table or the observer of the elements. The observer is an afterthought, and superfluous to the elements, which have their own concrete existence.
However, this view of the world - though utilitarian in that it produces technology such as the computer I am using to write this review - ignores that the entire ontological structure is in fact built through the very observation of the observer that it ignores.
The book begins by examining the Zen-koan-like question "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The authors approach this question in a way that distinguishes sense perception from the phenomena it perceives. "Sound" is a perception - it requires an observer. Things do not make sound - we perceive certain phenomena as sound. Sound is an emergent phenomenon at the intersection of consciousness, senses, and stimulus. The author uses this to show how closely, and transparently, consciousness and observing are bound to our observations; and how difficult it is for us to reason about the world with this distinction.
This is by no means the first time I'd encountered the question of the tree in the woods, but before reading this, it had never occurred to me that the language of "sound" intrinsically implies an observer. Otherwise the "what happened" is merely pressure waves in air. These only become "sound" when perceived through the ear of an observer that processes this phenomenon as sound. No observer = no "sound"; merely pressure waves.
Observation is invisibly embedded in our language and the ideal of objectivity promoted by classical science is an illusion. Lanza uses this example to cause the observer to show up in classical physics.
This is just the beginning, though.
The discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, beginning in the 20th century, turned the ontological basis of science on its head. It turns out that the universe does not exist in the concrete fashion depicted in the periodic table when no-one is looking at it. Ignoring the consciousness of the tree for the moment - if there is no observer present, not only does the tree not make a sound when it falls - it doesn't even exist!
Not only the existence of concrete elements beginning from atoms, but even the phenomenon of time and space themselves are dependent on observation.
In other words, time and space are not an objective background against which reality takes place, but rather they emerge from the interaction of the universe and our experience. Consciousness really is at the centre of everything that we know about the world. Time and space, and even concrete matter do not appear unless consciousness is present. Quantum mechanical experiments have given us knowledge of what the universe "looks like" when no-one is looking: it is an uncollapsed wave function - a state of undetermined probability.
Relativity was the first clue that experience dictates the nature of reality - with changes to space and time taking place depending on the observer - and quantum mechanics has shown that it is not merely a late-stage artifact of reality, but at its very core.
Lanza then takes us further, to show how the primacy of consciousness not only explains both relativity and quantum mechanics, but reconciles the two.
Having personally spent over a decade studying yoga and Eastern philosophy, in addition to my western scientific and engineering education and career, I found this book to come the closest of any I have read to date in presenting an accurate synthesis of the two.
I've read many books that misrepresented either, and sometimes both, in their efforts.
Having given the author credit for presenting a synthesis, in some respects his original material represents a more accurate presentation of ancient ideas than when he is explicitly presenting "Eastern religion" or philosophy. Those parts are a superficial presentation, dwelling on the popularly-known aspects like unified consciousness (Advaita) or reincarnation.
There are other aspects of Vedic cosmology that are more interesting in light of the findings of relativity and quantum mechanics and the desire of the author to explain these things in light of consciousness.
In a discourse on the nature of the material world (a section of Eastern philosophy known as "Sankhya" or "Distinction"), material nature is described in the Srimad Bhagavatam as "pradhana" - an undifferentiated state of potential:
"The unmanifested eternal combination of the three modes is the cause of the manifest state and is called pradhana. It is called prakriti when in the manifested stage of existence." SB. 3.26.10
The discussion continues to describe the various object of sense perception ("sound", "sight", etc), the sense organs ("ears", "eyes"), which are material, and then the senses ("hearing", "vision") and mental apparatus, which are of a subtle material nature, through which consciousness experiences the world (SB. 3.26.11-14), and then explains that both time and the appearance of space of variegated experience arise from the undifferentiated material potentiality through the injection of consciousness (SB.3.26.15-19).
This is, in fact, the argument being made by Lanza in this book. Quantum mechanical experiments reveal that the world exists as a cloud of undifferentiated, unmanifested "probability" until experienced by consciousness through senses, at which point it "collapses" into a deterministic state.
The author of this book comes down against the Many Worlds interpretation of QM.
Personally, I find the Many Worlds interpretation of QM to be more in line with the descriptions given in Bhagavatam, which - in addition to the consciousness-first nature of reality, and sensory-driven wave form collapse - deals with karma - fate and freewill.
An Einsteinian block universe is experienced by living entities as a sequence of events. However, the sequence is "predetermined" in that time is a subjective experience - not an objective reality. This gives us a universe in which past, present, and future are already written, and are merely experienced sequentially. (Don't worry if you don't get that immediately - it took me a lot of reading about the implications of the physics arrow of time to get that).
However, QM demonstrates that quantum uncertainty exists. This is one of the issues in reconciling Newtonian/Einsteinian physics of the macro-world with the Quantum Mechanical nature of the microscopic.
The Many Worlds interpretation of QM allows that an unlimited number of static, predetermined Einsteinian block universes exist, but which universe you are in can change at every moment.
Exactly this scenario is described in Bhagavad-gita, where Arjuna is shown "the Universal Form" - a vision of the Einsteinian block universe in which past, present, and future are all present and visible. He is told that the fate of his enemies is already sealed, but he has the free will to become the agent of that fate. The stage is set, the script is written, but the casting is open.
In this model predetermination and free will co-exist, as they do in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. All the paths are there, already written; but which one you are on can change.
The factors that influence the flow of a living entity through different paths (different universes == different fates) are discussed in Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhagavad-gita, and many other texts of Buddhist and Vedic-derivation.
I'm looking forward to the book that builds on Lanza's offering with a more detailed exposition of the relationship between relativity, QM, and consciousness; the insights available in Eastern philosophies, and the issues of fate and free will.
In some universes there will be a Joshua Wulf reading it. In others Joshua Wulf will be the writer. I wonder which one I will experience?
The Western scientific revolution was predicated on an ontology of objective things that had an existence independent of observers. The periodic table we encountered in high school science is a good example. It exists independent of the reader of the table or the observer of the elements. The observer is an afterthought, and superfluous to the elements, which have their own concrete existence.
However, this view of the world - though utilitarian in that it produces technology such as the computer I am using to write this review - ignores that the entire ontological structure is in fact built through the very observation of the observer that it ignores.
The book begins by examining the Zen-koan-like question "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The authors approach this question in a way that distinguishes sense perception from the phenomena it perceives. "Sound" is a perception - it requires an observer. Things do not make sound - we perceive certain phenomena as sound. Sound is an emergent phenomenon at the intersection of consciousness, senses, and stimulus. The author uses this to show how closely, and transparently, consciousness and observing are bound to our observations; and how difficult it is for us to reason about the world with this distinction.
This is by no means the first time I'd encountered the question of the tree in the woods, but before reading this, it had never occurred to me that the language of "sound" intrinsically implies an observer. Otherwise the "what happened" is merely pressure waves in air. These only become "sound" when perceived through the ear of an observer that processes this phenomenon as sound. No observer = no "sound"; merely pressure waves.
Observation is invisibly embedded in our language and the ideal of objectivity promoted by classical science is an illusion. Lanza uses this example to cause the observer to show up in classical physics.
This is just the beginning, though.
The discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, beginning in the 20th century, turned the ontological basis of science on its head. It turns out that the universe does not exist in the concrete fashion depicted in the periodic table when no-one is looking at it. Ignoring the consciousness of the tree for the moment - if there is no observer present, not only does the tree not make a sound when it falls - it doesn't even exist!
Not only the existence of concrete elements beginning from atoms, but even the phenomenon of time and space themselves are dependent on observation.
In other words, time and space are not an objective background against which reality takes place, but rather they emerge from the interaction of the universe and our experience. Consciousness really is at the centre of everything that we know about the world. Time and space, and even concrete matter do not appear unless consciousness is present. Quantum mechanical experiments have given us knowledge of what the universe "looks like" when no-one is looking: it is an uncollapsed wave function - a state of undetermined probability.
Relativity was the first clue that experience dictates the nature of reality - with changes to space and time taking place depending on the observer - and quantum mechanics has shown that it is not merely a late-stage artifact of reality, but at its very core.
Lanza then takes us further, to show how the primacy of consciousness not only explains both relativity and quantum mechanics, but reconciles the two.
Having personally spent over a decade studying yoga and Eastern philosophy, in addition to my western scientific and engineering education and career, I found this book to come the closest of any I have read to date in presenting an accurate synthesis of the two.
I've read many books that misrepresented either, and sometimes both, in their efforts.
Having given the author credit for presenting a synthesis, in some respects his original material represents a more accurate presentation of ancient ideas than when he is explicitly presenting "Eastern religion" or philosophy. Those parts are a superficial presentation, dwelling on the popularly-known aspects like unified consciousness (Advaita) or reincarnation.
There are other aspects of Vedic cosmology that are more interesting in light of the findings of relativity and quantum mechanics and the desire of the author to explain these things in light of consciousness.
In a discourse on the nature of the material world (a section of Eastern philosophy known as "Sankhya" or "Distinction"), material nature is described in the Srimad Bhagavatam as "pradhana" - an undifferentiated state of potential:
"The unmanifested eternal combination of the three modes is the cause of the manifest state and is called pradhana. It is called prakriti when in the manifested stage of existence." SB. 3.26.10
The discussion continues to describe the various object of sense perception ("sound", "sight", etc), the sense organs ("ears", "eyes"), which are material, and then the senses ("hearing", "vision") and mental apparatus, which are of a subtle material nature, through which consciousness experiences the world (SB. 3.26.11-14), and then explains that both time and the appearance of space of variegated experience arise from the undifferentiated material potentiality through the injection of consciousness (SB.3.26.15-19).
This is, in fact, the argument being made by Lanza in this book. Quantum mechanical experiments reveal that the world exists as a cloud of undifferentiated, unmanifested "probability" until experienced by consciousness through senses, at which point it "collapses" into a deterministic state.
The author of this book comes down against the Many Worlds interpretation of QM.
Personally, I find the Many Worlds interpretation of QM to be more in line with the descriptions given in Bhagavatam, which - in addition to the consciousness-first nature of reality, and sensory-driven wave form collapse - deals with karma - fate and freewill.
An Einsteinian block universe is experienced by living entities as a sequence of events. However, the sequence is "predetermined" in that time is a subjective experience - not an objective reality. This gives us a universe in which past, present, and future are already written, and are merely experienced sequentially. (Don't worry if you don't get that immediately - it took me a lot of reading about the implications of the physics arrow of time to get that).
However, QM demonstrates that quantum uncertainty exists. This is one of the issues in reconciling Newtonian/Einsteinian physics of the macro-world with the Quantum Mechanical nature of the microscopic.
The Many Worlds interpretation of QM allows that an unlimited number of static, predetermined Einsteinian block universes exist, but which universe you are in can change at every moment.
Exactly this scenario is described in Bhagavad-gita, where Arjuna is shown "the Universal Form" - a vision of the Einsteinian block universe in which past, present, and future are all present and visible. He is told that the fate of his enemies is already sealed, but he has the free will to become the agent of that fate. The stage is set, the script is written, but the casting is open.
In this model predetermination and free will co-exist, as they do in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. All the paths are there, already written; but which one you are on can change.
The factors that influence the flow of a living entity through different paths (different universes == different fates) are discussed in Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhagavad-gita, and many other texts of Buddhist and Vedic-derivation.
I'm looking forward to the book that builds on Lanza's offering with a more detailed exposition of the relationship between relativity, QM, and consciousness; the insights available in Eastern philosophies, and the issues of fate and free will.
In some universes there will be a Joshua Wulf reading it. In others Joshua Wulf will be the writer. I wonder which one I will experience?
March 19, 2014
Before reading this book, I had always thought of time as somehow real. But now I know it isn't. Whey you look at a distant star, you think you are seeing light millions of years old. This is only because the science, in the last hundred years or so, has told us so. But, quantum entanglement means that if I am on that distant star, and I am quantumly entangled with you, the reader, then things happen simultaneously. These two principles seem to violate each other. How can things be millions of light years apart but acting simultaneously? Here is a quote from Wikipedia:
"Like Einstein, Schrödinger was dissatisfied with the concept of entanglement, because it seemed to violate the speed limit on the transmission of information implicit in the theory of relativity.[16] Einstein later famously derided entanglement as "spukhafte Fernwirkung"[17] or "spooky action at a distance.""
But, as the observer knows, they are seeing the light from the stars now, as you look at that star, in the evening, in the sky, and hear the trees rustle around you. The time is now, not millions of years ago.
It is all a very clever illusion, and we are creating it with our completely lost-from-source minds. And we believe it to be "real" and out of our control. But it is we, the observer, who are out of control.
We need to become better observers. This book helps.
"Like Einstein, Schrödinger was dissatisfied with the concept of entanglement, because it seemed to violate the speed limit on the transmission of information implicit in the theory of relativity.[16] Einstein later famously derided entanglement as "spukhafte Fernwirkung"[17] or "spooky action at a distance.""
But, as the observer knows, they are seeing the light from the stars now, as you look at that star, in the evening, in the sky, and hear the trees rustle around you. The time is now, not millions of years ago.
It is all a very clever illusion, and we are creating it with our completely lost-from-source minds. And we believe it to be "real" and out of our control. But it is we, the observer, who are out of control.
We need to become better observers. This book helps.
March 29, 2017
Reading science/cosmology/metaphysical in combination makes me forget my name and all my passwords. But I zipped right through this book which leads me to believe that I am already on the path, or I totally don't get it. The book quotes a Zen saying, "Name the color, blind the eye," and perhaps putting a label to consciousness does the same to awareness. But the book addresses questions I have now. What was there before the Big Bang? What is the universe expanding into? Quantum physics doesn't answer. The answer cannot be nothing, because nothing is not model-based reality. Quantum physics is working on finding a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that wraps all this up nicely. In waves or strings, or M-theory, or vintage jacquard ribbon? Superposition experiments now underway might reveal something. But what if, the authors of Biocentrism query, what if consciousness is what created it all? Suppose that external and internal are just language distinctions. Suppose time and space are constructs of our consciousness?
March 5, 2023
I want all of my friends to read this so we can talk about it for hours. My only problem with this book was some questions he left unanswered (which did not compromise my rating because questions are not the same as criticism.) His premise is logically viable, it works very well with Bohm's hypothesis; however I would have enjoyed him exploring more of the various states of consciousness or even more of the neuroscience behind consciousness. I think it would have strengthened his argument if he was able to elaborate, for consciousness is not a static entity. Brain waves, for example: alpha, beta, theta, and delta, sleep, dreaming & altered states of consciousness that can come about through psychoactive drugs or meditation. Anyway, this was an amazing, horizon-expanding altered view of the universe. It annoyed me to read in some of the reviews that this was a philosophy book when he clearly used experiments and data from the literature to prove every point he made. It's like people skipped the intro, skimmed the first view paragraphs in each chapter and wrote it off as a new-age concept book written by a hippie.
If life exists because consciousness exists, that could be the "theory of everything" that physicists & philosophers alike have been looking for since man could "think, therefore I am."
If life exists because consciousness exists, that could be the "theory of everything" that physicists & philosophers alike have been looking for since man could "think, therefore I am."
January 14, 2020
I bought this book a couple of years ago on a whim, and it forever changed how I look at the universe. Biocentrism is scientific theory mixed in with some philosophy and metaphysics. Lanza does a good balancing act, and his theories are compelling. The idea that physicists have had it exactly backward the past hundred-plus years, that the universe is in fact a construct of our own minds and cannot exist without us, not the other way around, is mindblowing. I think Lanza is onto something
May 29, 2011
This book is a bunch of baloney. When I read The Master and His Emissary a few weeks ago, I complained that McGilchrist had written such a large tome to support his claim that I got lost putting it together. Lanza has gone to the other extreme. He’s making pretty much the biggest claim that anyone can make, i.e., explaining existence itself, and he’s put together a few chapters of hogwash to prove it. Lanza is not only sloppy in every aspect, he comes off totally smug and arrogant. You can almost read “Look, aren’t I a genius” between the lines. He’s inserted a few stories from his own personal life for no apparent reason but self-infatuation.
Lanza explicitly denies the reality of time and space. Implicitly, he also denies the existence of an objective reality outside ourselves. Nothing exists out there if there is no “consciousness” to observe it. He stays clear of defining this consciousness and explaining how it came about if nothing existed prior to it. What he offers in term of “scientific proof” is: a) the infamous double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics; b) the amazing fact that the constants of physics appear as if they’d been fine-tuned for the eventual emergence of starts and planets and life. As puzzling and inexplicable these two may be (there are theories and explanations), none of them can support Lanza’s claim by any stretch of imagination. The only chapter worth reading in the book is the one about the double-slit experiment and its different ingenious variations.
I should have taken Deepak Chopra’s endorsement of this book as a bad sign. Lanza plays defensive in the introduction and says that he’s not trying to prove any New Age philosophies (I have to give him credit for realizing that this would be quite bad for a book that claims to be scientific), but in the end what he says is not more than some New Age mumbo-jumbo about the universe being a single and continuous consciousness, etc. – all with the pretense of being scientific.
Lanza explicitly denies the reality of time and space. Implicitly, he also denies the existence of an objective reality outside ourselves. Nothing exists out there if there is no “consciousness” to observe it. He stays clear of defining this consciousness and explaining how it came about if nothing existed prior to it. What he offers in term of “scientific proof” is: a) the infamous double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics; b) the amazing fact that the constants of physics appear as if they’d been fine-tuned for the eventual emergence of starts and planets and life. As puzzling and inexplicable these two may be (there are theories and explanations), none of them can support Lanza’s claim by any stretch of imagination. The only chapter worth reading in the book is the one about the double-slit experiment and its different ingenious variations.
I should have taken Deepak Chopra’s endorsement of this book as a bad sign. Lanza plays defensive in the introduction and says that he’s not trying to prove any New Age philosophies (I have to give him credit for realizing that this would be quite bad for a book that claims to be scientific), but in the end what he says is not more than some New Age mumbo-jumbo about the universe being a single and continuous consciousness, etc. – all with the pretense of being scientific.
June 21, 2014
Robert Lanza steps forward to prompt a paradigm shift in the way we think. For those of us who have been waiting for science to finally tackle (Or at least tickle) the behemoth question of consciousness and produce a piece of literature that can practically influence us in a down to earth manner regarding our daily rituals, without boiling down reality to a mass of random stupidity; this is for you.
A wonderful, colourful read, striking the perfect balance between fact, story and wonder, leaving out all the 'spooky knowledge' that so taints previous explanations of the sorts.
Would recommend to all.
A wonderful, colourful read, striking the perfect balance between fact, story and wonder, leaving out all the 'spooky knowledge' that so taints previous explanations of the sorts.
Would recommend to all.
April 23, 2014
“Biocentrism” by Robert Lanza and Robert Berman is excellent.
Lanza is an M.D., and advanced cell scientist, and Berman a famous astronomer. They propose that life creates the universe and not the other way around, and that biology should be the discipline used to develop a “theory of everything” that accounts for life and consciousness to better understand reality, being and the cosmos.
According to Lanza the physics model that Western science has employed has reached its limits in attempting to explain the age-old questions raised by philosophers and theologians regarding the cosmos, the origin of existence and consciousness.
Lanza challenges readers to question the claims of contemporary science such as where the Big Bang came from, the probability of our existence, and how consciousness arose from matter. Essentially Lanza makes the case that the more we know, the less we understand, and that answering the aforesaid questions requires a fundamental shift away from physics and toward biology. By extension, Lanza suggests the theory he proposes, Biocentrism, provides the answers physics cannot answer. Beyond offering the basis for a complete paradigm shift that opens new lines of investigation in physics and cosmology, Lanza suggests other researchers conduct “quantum superposition” experiments to either confirm or refute the theory.
Like any decent resource, Lanza spends much of his time declaring the limitations of what we know before proceeding with his proposed theory that could help close those gaps. For example, we now know that 96% of the universe is dark energy and dark matter but we have little idea of what those are or how they operate. We understand and guide our lives based on animal conceptions of time and space but both are illusory. We have academic fleets dedicated to brain science but the holes in the methodologies used to explain consciousness is never discussed (a problem particularly rife in behavioral ‘science’). We suggest that life was an incredibly improbable chance event when it is more probable the universe was fine-tuned to support life. We operate within the confines of human language and logic, and due to these limitations, are “constitutional materialists, hard-wired, designed, to think linearly”, always seeking sociological and scientific certainty upon which to base the order of our lives.
Much of biocentrism is explained through Lanza and Berman’s understandings of quantum theory and the bizarre relationships between subatomic particles. I have read several breakdowns of this theory by different scholars and felt Lanza’s was well explained. He also uses variations of the Anthropic Principle to support his arguments and ultimately concludes that consciousness must exist beyond our terrestrial realm, and that the content of our minds constitute “reality”, as humans throughout history have always suspected.
Structurally Lanza’s book is user-friendly, particularly at the end where Lanza breaks down “Answers to Basic Questions” and the different ways in which Classical Science, Western Religions and advocates of Biocentrism would respond. The dialogue he sets forth helps exemplify what Western science cannot know and what Biocentrism can provide in consideration of the gaps exposed.
I have also found fascinating how many scholars, building upon recent theoretical findings in physics, have concluded that these new theories increasingly support multi-universe, BiosLogos, and the Anthropic theories, the tenets of which line up with various aspects of millennia old Eastern religions.
5 stars out of 5 for Lanza and Berman!
Lanza is an M.D., and advanced cell scientist, and Berman a famous astronomer. They propose that life creates the universe and not the other way around, and that biology should be the discipline used to develop a “theory of everything” that accounts for life and consciousness to better understand reality, being and the cosmos.
According to Lanza the physics model that Western science has employed has reached its limits in attempting to explain the age-old questions raised by philosophers and theologians regarding the cosmos, the origin of existence and consciousness.
Lanza challenges readers to question the claims of contemporary science such as where the Big Bang came from, the probability of our existence, and how consciousness arose from matter. Essentially Lanza makes the case that the more we know, the less we understand, and that answering the aforesaid questions requires a fundamental shift away from physics and toward biology. By extension, Lanza suggests the theory he proposes, Biocentrism, provides the answers physics cannot answer. Beyond offering the basis for a complete paradigm shift that opens new lines of investigation in physics and cosmology, Lanza suggests other researchers conduct “quantum superposition” experiments to either confirm or refute the theory.
Like any decent resource, Lanza spends much of his time declaring the limitations of what we know before proceeding with his proposed theory that could help close those gaps. For example, we now know that 96% of the universe is dark energy and dark matter but we have little idea of what those are or how they operate. We understand and guide our lives based on animal conceptions of time and space but both are illusory. We have academic fleets dedicated to brain science but the holes in the methodologies used to explain consciousness is never discussed (a problem particularly rife in behavioral ‘science’). We suggest that life was an incredibly improbable chance event when it is more probable the universe was fine-tuned to support life. We operate within the confines of human language and logic, and due to these limitations, are “constitutional materialists, hard-wired, designed, to think linearly”, always seeking sociological and scientific certainty upon which to base the order of our lives.
Much of biocentrism is explained through Lanza and Berman’s understandings of quantum theory and the bizarre relationships between subatomic particles. I have read several breakdowns of this theory by different scholars and felt Lanza’s was well explained. He also uses variations of the Anthropic Principle to support his arguments and ultimately concludes that consciousness must exist beyond our terrestrial realm, and that the content of our minds constitute “reality”, as humans throughout history have always suspected.
Structurally Lanza’s book is user-friendly, particularly at the end where Lanza breaks down “Answers to Basic Questions” and the different ways in which Classical Science, Western Religions and advocates of Biocentrism would respond. The dialogue he sets forth helps exemplify what Western science cannot know and what Biocentrism can provide in consideration of the gaps exposed.
I have also found fascinating how many scholars, building upon recent theoretical findings in physics, have concluded that these new theories increasingly support multi-universe, BiosLogos, and the Anthropic theories, the tenets of which line up with various aspects of millennia old Eastern religions.
5 stars out of 5 for Lanza and Berman!
June 14, 2014
Brain successfully fried.
September 9, 2014
At first I thought these guys were full of it. Everything that they started to approach seemed common sense and to be already proven with psychology and philosophy which in my mind are not to be considered a "science". I decided it would be best to actually read the whole book before making a proper judgement.
As I read I realized the point. If you rated this book a low rating it's probably because you didn't get it. Trust me it took me a few times to read this just to grasp the concept fully.
I have always been on the side of science and never believed perception or consciousness were relevant when discussing the matters of the universe. I love science because there is always an answer and there are very few exceptions to the laws and theories we have developed over the course of human history. What makes this book special is it's ability to force the reader to realize their place. The only reason why anything exists is because we exist to perceive it.
I hate to admit it but psychology and philosophy may actually have a place in the world of science, something you would never catch me saying out loud.
As I read I realized the point. If you rated this book a low rating it's probably because you didn't get it. Trust me it took me a few times to read this just to grasp the concept fully.
I have always been on the side of science and never believed perception or consciousness were relevant when discussing the matters of the universe. I love science because there is always an answer and there are very few exceptions to the laws and theories we have developed over the course of human history. What makes this book special is it's ability to force the reader to realize their place. The only reason why anything exists is because we exist to perceive it.
I hate to admit it but psychology and philosophy may actually have a place in the world of science, something you would never catch me saying out loud.
October 17, 2010
This book must be read twice! I am into my second read and the clarity is overwhelming. Lanza points out and illustrates the flaws in majorly accepted scientific theory about the universe and how it is, and offers up the only possible alternative in his theory of Biocentrism -- a universe that springs from life (the observer), instead of a universe that exists independently of life.
July 28, 2009
The central theme of this book is that life creates the universe and that consciousness lies at the center of existence. This is not a new idea and there is absolutely nothing new in this book. Lanza draws on two main sources to back up this idea. The first is that consciousness appears to cause the wave function to collapse in the famous double slit experiment. The second concerns the anthropic principle and how it seems that universe is uncannily just right for life. Both of these 'proofs' are open to various interpretations including the possibility that consciousness does indeed lie at the center of creation. However, that is only one possible conclusion that can be drawn and Lanza adds absolutely zero to the debate. He uses his book to lambaste physics and physicists for such like as not being able to tell us what came before the big bang, whilst at the same time declaring consciousness to be the be all and end all of everything without actually defining what consciousness is or offering any sort of explanation of how it came into existence or how it creates the physical universe. On top of that much of the book contains sections that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter and concern nothing more than Lanza's own life experiences. He uses these chapters to butter his own biscuit, blast his own trumpet and bang his own drum interspersed with a bit of name dropping. The worst book I've read all year!
December 13, 2016
I purchased this book when I saw it mentioned on an episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. It was presented there as an alternative to the preeminent string theory and I was enchanted by the idea. However, what I learned from this book ended up being so much more than that.
Not only does Biocentrism, the theory, do more than simply explain the strange behavior of quantum particles, Biocentrism, the book, was an excellent starting point for all kinds of scientific knowledge. I didn’t just learn about a new theory, I learned about the various scientific experiments and scientific theories that lead the authors to come to the Biocentrism conclusion. If ever I so choose, I can find my way to all that additional science through this book’s bibliography and expand my scientific knowledge even further. I think this is the main reason I LOVED reading this book: it didn’t just shove a new idea in my face and say, “There! Accept it!”, it took the time to explain itself and teach me new things along the way. The two main facets, learning the tenets of a new and wildly different scientific theory and learning about all the solid evidence that supports that theory, worked in harmony to make the whole book extremely readable and eternally fascinating.
Whether or not you end up convinced about this idea’s validity (I certainly am!), this is still an excellent book that sparks new ideas, can elicit extreme emotional response in its reader, is written in an easy style sprinkled with dry humor, and leads the reader to even more avenues of scientific exploration. My view of life and existence has been wholly altered by this book and I’m extremely glad I read it.
Not only does Biocentrism, the theory, do more than simply explain the strange behavior of quantum particles, Biocentrism, the book, was an excellent starting point for all kinds of scientific knowledge. I didn’t just learn about a new theory, I learned about the various scientific experiments and scientific theories that lead the authors to come to the Biocentrism conclusion. If ever I so choose, I can find my way to all that additional science through this book’s bibliography and expand my scientific knowledge even further. I think this is the main reason I LOVED reading this book: it didn’t just shove a new idea in my face and say, “There! Accept it!”, it took the time to explain itself and teach me new things along the way. The two main facets, learning the tenets of a new and wildly different scientific theory and learning about all the solid evidence that supports that theory, worked in harmony to make the whole book extremely readable and eternally fascinating.
Whether or not you end up convinced about this idea’s validity (I certainly am!), this is still an excellent book that sparks new ideas, can elicit extreme emotional response in its reader, is written in an easy style sprinkled with dry humor, and leads the reader to even more avenues of scientific exploration. My view of life and existence has been wholly altered by this book and I’m extremely glad I read it.
September 19, 2018
This book is fantastic. It presents a worldview entirely new to me, rooted in science and very exciting. Some of the science blew my mind. The only thing I still struggle with is other consciousness. Does reality exist where not you as the individual, but someone else sees it? How is consciousness tied to the individual? It probably isn't, because the book makes clear there are clear hints to a single consciousness (and no free will), but regardless, I'm still struggling with those questions.
May 6, 2015
The central point of this book is that consciousness creates the universe, not the other way round. Although not a new insight, this compelling book is the best I have read to bring home the importance of this phenomenon, and the simplest explanation of the quantum physics behind it. Interweaved with the science is a charmingly personal account of some defining experiences in Lanza's life. A wonderful book, and to me a must-read for any student of the mind, the universe, or indeed practically anything.
January 26, 2012
Easy reading... difficult to process. Currently stuck in the twisted perspective of extrapolating my own existence from the behavior of subatomic particles in a laboratory double slit experiment. Taking a pause.
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Pause over. Finished the book months ago and just did not get back to review. Now that I'm putting my thoughts together,(some distance from the actual processing of Biocentrism's view of existence) the beauty and simplicity of this universe perspective captivates my idle thoughts and periodically shifts my entire relation to how this word actually works. It is a paradigm shifting thought manipulation that is actually quite a ride if you follow along.
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Pause over. Finished the book months ago and just did not get back to review. Now that I'm putting my thoughts together,(some distance from the actual processing of Biocentrism's view of existence) the beauty and simplicity of this universe perspective captivates my idle thoughts and periodically shifts my entire relation to how this word actually works. It is a paradigm shifting thought manipulation that is actually quite a ride if you follow along.
March 13, 2014
Robert Lanza writes a book about his theory of everything, biocentrism, and makes it clear from the start that this is not just some new age fooey, he has real science backing him up. Well, he was lying. He points out every trapping that can happen to a theory of such magnitude and strangeness, then he proceeds to fall into every. single. one. If this wasn't bad enough, the writing itself just screams arrogance. It has some of the worst, most out of place purple passages that I've ever had the misfortune of reading. This may have been forgivable if the prose was actually good but it's not, it's sloppy and down right laughable. At one point, he uses the same analogy about feeling like he was some sort of herald standing between past and present, life and death while standing in the hospital room while his best friend was in a coma and then goes on to use THE SAME EXACT WORDS to describe how he felt during the death of his sister. I thought for sure he meant to, but then he never linked the two usages, he just kept going on about something else, I had to do a double take.
It may seem like I'm being harsh on this guy's writing, but let me make it clear that I believe him to be one of the worst kind of people and here's why. He is arrogant. He is a special little genius and wants you to know it, he worked with BF Skinner and he will remind you often so you don't forget it (even though his work with Skinner was very minor compared to what Skinner did earlier in his life). When he isn't name dropping every famous scientist he so much as served coffee to, he is actively disrespecting every discipline he can think of. He does a disservice to physics and philosophy, as well as both eastern and western religions regarding all of them with equal parts contempt and ignorance.
His theory isn't even novel. John Wheeler had been saying the same thing for the later half of his life. The tenants of biocentrism are a jumbled repeating mess. The evidence he has isn't evidence so much as misinterpretation and manipulation of data. For a guy who claims to hate untestable theories, biocentricism sure is hard to test... Biocentricism also has about as much practicality as solipsism.
But then again, it doesn't matter whether the theory is shit or if the man is also shit, he already has my money and that's a shame. This is pretty much the only book I regret not stealing.
It may seem like I'm being harsh on this guy's writing, but let me make it clear that I believe him to be one of the worst kind of people and here's why. He is arrogant. He is a special little genius and wants you to know it, he worked with BF Skinner and he will remind you often so you don't forget it (even though his work with Skinner was very minor compared to what Skinner did earlier in his life). When he isn't name dropping every famous scientist he so much as served coffee to, he is actively disrespecting every discipline he can think of. He does a disservice to physics and philosophy, as well as both eastern and western religions regarding all of them with equal parts contempt and ignorance.
His theory isn't even novel. John Wheeler had been saying the same thing for the later half of his life. The tenants of biocentrism are a jumbled repeating mess. The evidence he has isn't evidence so much as misinterpretation and manipulation of data. For a guy who claims to hate untestable theories, biocentricism sure is hard to test... Biocentricism also has about as much practicality as solipsism.
But then again, it doesn't matter whether the theory is shit or if the man is also shit, he already has my money and that's a shame. This is pretty much the only book I regret not stealing.
January 2, 2010
Some folks didn't like this book, but I really found it thought provoking. The writing is mostly crisp and clear and the the author's theory (that he calls Biocentrism) seems firmly grounded--at least as far as he can take it. He writes of quantum mechanics, relativity, and numerous experiments and related theories without allowing the mathematics to overwhelm the prose. His main idea is that our universe is not external, but inexorably linked to our conscious selves--we are the observers that make the universe as it is, not the other way around. I'm not well versed in the different facets of physics, but the book impressed me in its academic rigor, even as the author used an autobiographical structure to get his points across. He cites numerous other scientists to back up his claims and has several appendixes that include a more mathematical approach. He definitively distances himself from the Intelligent Design school of thought (he is a well respected biologist, medical doctor, and leading stem cell researcher, not a spiritualist or philosopher) and also quasi-scientific films like "What the Bleep do we Know." His theory does not come out of nowhere--he is quick to point out all the scientists that came before him that provided clues and building blocks of his theory. He is also quick to point out what so many physicists can't explain--how our observation of particle movement shapes that particle movement. Without our consciousness, the universe does not exist. I'm no scientist, but the mathematical proofs he provides are at the very least intriguing. And at the most, life altering. I found the entire book fascinating--and it has made me want to read more about the physics of the universe--and my place in it.
December 30, 2020
This book is garbage and a waste of time. It's a clusterfuck of items that gets you lost in a maze designed to make the author seem intelligent, better yet more intelligent than the reader. It's just a story book piggy-backing on big names of scientists and philosophers with no real conclusion or value on its own. The whole idea of biocentrism claims that reality and time don't exist outside of our own heads, which is preposterous. A bunch of bogus and wishful thinking. I honestly don't remember how on earth I got a copy of this book and its sequel which I'm about to review next, but it was a grave mistake. I feel like I completely wasted my time after being pulled into a labyrinth of big questions and big promises where Lanza is just trying to blame science for having blind spots and not offering sufficient evidences for its claims. He is not adding any value or answers either, instead I cannot help but conclude this book was just a click-bait marketing scheme designed to take the money and attention of the naïve.
November 30, 2014
This is a trippy, wild and ultimately enjoyable ride of a book, one that makes a mockery of Goodreads star system, as I could have easily given it 2 stars or 5 stars - it's a collection of ideas thrown out surrounded by anecdote and with passion, and often without systematisation or thorough refutation of critics.
Reading it, I kept being reminded of the writings of medieval scholars like Giordano Bruno - it has that feel of heady mix of philosophy and science that defies any attempts to keep religion apart, and is driven by a passion to look at the world through a different lens.
All of this is one way to say I have no idea if Lanza is a genius or a madman, the-only-one-who-sees or the-one-who-cant-see-the-obvious - but I think if you are trying to work that out, then you are denying yourself a treat. The book demands you consider the impossible, and in doing so, you can step to Lanza's side for a moment, and glimpse this pulsating world as he sees it, inextricably entertwined with our conciousness, not for us, but by us. It's a fascinating shift to make.
The book's thesis is actually pretty simple - it's padded out with outrage about the direction of modern theoretical physics and wonderfully written if frequently-too-perfect-to-be-true anecdotes about Lanza's life. (The stories are important, they are both illustrative and representative of how Lanza draws his worldview from all inputs around him, refusing the typical 'objectivity' or isolation of science.) Anyway, his thesis: that the reason physics tells us that the world doesn't exist until observed is because, well, it doesn't exist until observed, by a never-defined 'consciousness', which may be one or many. Until then, it simply remains a series of possibilities, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Lanza views existence as created through interaction, without a conscious being to interact with, there is simply nothing there.
Lanza spends a fair bit of time explaining the evidence for this in quantum physics, and is not above criticising the greats in doing so, but really his basic contention is that Science has found this so unbelievable that it has gone to enormous lengths to come up with alternate suggestions, ones which preserve an 'objectively existing' universe.
I kinda loved reading the book, and not really because I think Lanza is right. I distrust any grand theory, and this is absolutely in that category. The evidence is also a little thinner than the enthusiasm, although Lanza's strongest ground is that physics is actually pretty crazy, and no-one's theories really make much sense outside mathematical modelling. But I loved the book simply for Lanza's courage to seek a worldview in a holistic sense, barging through philosophy, religion and the basic tenets of capital-S-science to do so, and even drawing simply on the way the world feels on a still morning near a lake. I am highly skeptical these days of the lines, the rules, that are drawn around science, as if it exists in a vacuum from the world we live in, as if peer review eliminates human bias and perception, and as if religious/philosophical ideas can be isolated somehow from paleontology or evolutionary biology, or even theoretical physics. By denying the assumptions, the worldviews, the concern over implications of this, we denude science, make it weaker, than if we acknowledged that our understanding of the world has many inputs, and they all impact each other.
In short, I admire the Brunos, the Abelards, the al-Farghanis not because they challenged 'religion' but because they argued for the right to draw on all the tools at their disposal to understand the world and how it worked. There are moments when Lanza, drawing on biology and physics, and in demanding that taken together, they insist we look at the world through a different lens, invokes this spirit of pushing orthodoxy back so we can *see* differently. That's a kind of science we could use a little more of, even if I'd like it with a little more detail and a little less skimming over the contradictory bits
Reading it, I kept being reminded of the writings of medieval scholars like Giordano Bruno - it has that feel of heady mix of philosophy and science that defies any attempts to keep religion apart, and is driven by a passion to look at the world through a different lens.
All of this is one way to say I have no idea if Lanza is a genius or a madman, the-only-one-who-sees or the-one-who-cant-see-the-obvious - but I think if you are trying to work that out, then you are denying yourself a treat. The book demands you consider the impossible, and in doing so, you can step to Lanza's side for a moment, and glimpse this pulsating world as he sees it, inextricably entertwined with our conciousness, not for us, but by us. It's a fascinating shift to make.
The book's thesis is actually pretty simple - it's padded out with outrage about the direction of modern theoretical physics and wonderfully written if frequently-too-perfect-to-be-true anecdotes about Lanza's life. (The stories are important, they are both illustrative and representative of how Lanza draws his worldview from all inputs around him, refusing the typical 'objectivity' or isolation of science.) Anyway, his thesis: that the reason physics tells us that the world doesn't exist until observed is because, well, it doesn't exist until observed, by a never-defined 'consciousness', which may be one or many. Until then, it simply remains a series of possibilities, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Lanza views existence as created through interaction, without a conscious being to interact with, there is simply nothing there.
Lanza spends a fair bit of time explaining the evidence for this in quantum physics, and is not above criticising the greats in doing so, but really his basic contention is that Science has found this so unbelievable that it has gone to enormous lengths to come up with alternate suggestions, ones which preserve an 'objectively existing' universe.
I kinda loved reading the book, and not really because I think Lanza is right. I distrust any grand theory, and this is absolutely in that category. The evidence is also a little thinner than the enthusiasm, although Lanza's strongest ground is that physics is actually pretty crazy, and no-one's theories really make much sense outside mathematical modelling. But I loved the book simply for Lanza's courage to seek a worldview in a holistic sense, barging through philosophy, religion and the basic tenets of capital-S-science to do so, and even drawing simply on the way the world feels on a still morning near a lake. I am highly skeptical these days of the lines, the rules, that are drawn around science, as if it exists in a vacuum from the world we live in, as if peer review eliminates human bias and perception, and as if religious/philosophical ideas can be isolated somehow from paleontology or evolutionary biology, or even theoretical physics. By denying the assumptions, the worldviews, the concern over implications of this, we denude science, make it weaker, than if we acknowledged that our understanding of the world has many inputs, and they all impact each other.
In short, I admire the Brunos, the Abelards, the al-Farghanis not because they challenged 'religion' but because they argued for the right to draw on all the tools at their disposal to understand the world and how it worked. There are moments when Lanza, drawing on biology and physics, and in demanding that taken together, they insist we look at the world through a different lens, invokes this spirit of pushing orthodoxy back so we can *see* differently. That's a kind of science we could use a little more of, even if I'd like it with a little more detail and a little less skimming over the contradictory bits
November 12, 2015
This is a book with the purpose of putting the human species back at the centre of the universe, where the author seems to believe we clearly belong.
I selected this book as part of this year's Reading Journey specifically to challenge my preconceptions. Controversy is good for making you think and rexamine what you think you know. Going in, the idea of Biocentrism seemed like just another restatement of the Anthropic Principle to me, albeit in grander, more scientific-sounding terms.
As an aside, the Anthropic Principle is basically a philosophical statement, sometimes dressed up with some science-y words, that the universe is too fine-tuned for life and this means it has to be compatible with not just life, but conscious, sapient life to observe it. In other words, the universe is tailor made to produce us or at least the parts of it that we can observe are. It’s had a number of different statements and restatements from reasonable-sounding to ridiculous.
I’m not fond of the anthropic principle. It seems to smack of human arrogance to me. The universe is how it is because it has eventually to produce us, or any observers, really. So the universe exists just to produce us. We’re the centre of and the reason for everything. Sorry, doesn’t work for me. While I agree that abiogenesis (life arising from non-living matter) is not currently understood, and probably incredibly rare, Star Trek notwithstanding, even the visible universe is a pretty damned big place. Very improbable things will eventually happen.
Back to the book. The first six chapters of the book seem to be written to illustrate that, “See? You’ve got no way to know that something is happening or even exists unless you’re there to observe it. Therefore, if no one observes it, that thing doesn’t happen, doesn’t even exist.”
Then the author starts trying to pull science in, starting with Quantum Theory. Apparently no one in the world actually understands QT, at least in his opinion, but it doesn’t seem to occur to the author that maybe that’s because it’s not complete yet, even if that is true. We obviously have some understanding as a species, since we use it for advanced lasers and we’re working towards quantum computing, but that’s just playing in the sandbox, after all. And he does admit that.
At the beginning of chapter 8, the author actually admits that Quantum Theory has become a pat phrase for people “proving” new age nonsense. But don’t let that fool you. It supports Biocentrism. We never find out why the author, a biologist, has the expertise in QT to tell us no one else understands it either. The presentation of it he gives is less comprehensive than the bits and pieces I got in high school or in first year university physics. I feel like he’s taken a bare surface understanding of some basic Quantum principles and shaken them until they say what he wants them to.
You may guess I have a lot of problems with this book. You guess right. I’m not going to list them all, but I think it’s worth pointing out the big ones, at least.
After the first section, a large part of the book seems dedicated to holding things up and saying, “See this thing/experiment/result? It’s weird and Science can’t explain it completely. Therefore, Biocentrism!” He’s basically pulling a page from the young earth creationist playbook: science can’t explain it (yet), therefore God. So now we have Biocentrism of the Gaps to hold hands with God of the Gaps.
Remember how I mentioned the Anthropic Principle at the beginning of this? The author actually introduces it in chapter 9, but doesn’t really provide an explanation, much less a convincing one, of how Biocentrism is anything other than a restatement of it with additional “scientific” trappings and wishful thinking. The author does admit his preferred version of the AP is the Participatory Anthropic Principle, which requires observers for the universe to exist. So the universe didn’t actually exist until someone was around to observe it. How perfect for Biocentrism.
We get what seems to be a deliberate misrepresentation or misstatement of certain aspects of Relativity to support the author’s view.
He discusses peculiarities of language, particularly when it comes to expressions of logic, as support to his argument that physics is obviously the wrong tool for the job to explain the universe. Therefore, Biocentrism. Because you know we (the human species) are mostly too lazy to go looking for the right tool, anyway, so here it is laid out for you.
And if you get to the point where your mind reaches “a blank wall beyond which lie contradictions or – worse – nothingness”, don’t worry. That doesn’t mean Biocentrism is false, it’s just a mystery and Biocentrism still offers the best explanation of why things are the way they are. This reminds me a lot of George Carlin telling stories of how the priests used to answer hard questions about God when he was young (and probably still do): “Well, it’s a mystery.” It’s an easy answer that skilfully allows the person answering to avoid thinking.
I spent a big chunk of the book waiting for the author to tell me that Biocentrism would make it possible for me to live forever because, just like space, time, reality, and everything else, death is just a perceptual flaw on my part. I’m still disappointed when he finally asks if consciousness can ever truly be extinguished. And even more so when he tells us that consciousness is eternal without any reason or justification, even under biocentrism.
And I’m not really going to address the limited view and analysis he has of Science Fiction, since it seems to be based purely on blockbuster movies and huge budget television shows, and not always good ones, with a few authors’ names someone has thrown at him mixed in. It seems unlikely he watches or reads the genres himself, but that’s speculation on my part.
And, in spite of being a career biologist, the author seems to have a problem with conventional science, mainly its failure to explain consciousness. Somehow, and it’s never made clear how, biocentrism explains it, or at least supports it, or something. But, you know, Biocentrism.
There are seven principles of Biocentrism. They take a whole page of text to state, and most of a book to not explain very well (or at all) but they boil down to a fairly simple statement: nothing is real unless someone is looking at it.
How Zen.
Well no, actually. Not only did the tree not make a sound because no one heard it fall, it didn’t actually fall, at least not until someone sees it lying on the ground. Then, obviously it did fall and the observation altered the past to make it match the fallen tree in the present.
Right.
Overall rating: 1 star.
I’ve had to re-categorize the subject area for this book. I can’t call it cosmology, which is how it was originally represented. Honestly, the only subject area I think I can place this is in is new age philosophy, and it bothers me to use “philosophy” as part of that description. Sure, it has some bits of cherry-picked science that with sufficient obfuscation or misrepresentation seem to support the author’s view that we’re the centre of the universe, but this is an opinion book, not a science book.
I like things that challenge my preconceptions and make me think. This book tried to challenge my preconceptions, but not by making me think. Instead, it dressed up some mystical woo with a science-y mask and cloak and asked me to believe that the universe didn’t exist until we were around to look at it.
To my reading, this book represents the height of human arrogance outside of religion. Don’t waste your time.
I selected this book as part of this year's Reading Journey specifically to challenge my preconceptions. Controversy is good for making you think and rexamine what you think you know. Going in, the idea of Biocentrism seemed like just another restatement of the Anthropic Principle to me, albeit in grander, more scientific-sounding terms.
As an aside, the Anthropic Principle is basically a philosophical statement, sometimes dressed up with some science-y words, that the universe is too fine-tuned for life and this means it has to be compatible with not just life, but conscious, sapient life to observe it. In other words, the universe is tailor made to produce us or at least the parts of it that we can observe are. It’s had a number of different statements and restatements from reasonable-sounding to ridiculous.
I’m not fond of the anthropic principle. It seems to smack of human arrogance to me. The universe is how it is because it has eventually to produce us, or any observers, really. So the universe exists just to produce us. We’re the centre of and the reason for everything. Sorry, doesn’t work for me. While I agree that abiogenesis (life arising from non-living matter) is not currently understood, and probably incredibly rare, Star Trek notwithstanding, even the visible universe is a pretty damned big place. Very improbable things will eventually happen.
Back to the book. The first six chapters of the book seem to be written to illustrate that, “See? You’ve got no way to know that something is happening or even exists unless you’re there to observe it. Therefore, if no one observes it, that thing doesn’t happen, doesn’t even exist.”
Then the author starts trying to pull science in, starting with Quantum Theory. Apparently no one in the world actually understands QT, at least in his opinion, but it doesn’t seem to occur to the author that maybe that’s because it’s not complete yet, even if that is true. We obviously have some understanding as a species, since we use it for advanced lasers and we’re working towards quantum computing, but that’s just playing in the sandbox, after all. And he does admit that.
At the beginning of chapter 8, the author actually admits that Quantum Theory has become a pat phrase for people “proving” new age nonsense. But don’t let that fool you. It supports Biocentrism. We never find out why the author, a biologist, has the expertise in QT to tell us no one else understands it either. The presentation of it he gives is less comprehensive than the bits and pieces I got in high school or in first year university physics. I feel like he’s taken a bare surface understanding of some basic Quantum principles and shaken them until they say what he wants them to.
You may guess I have a lot of problems with this book. You guess right. I’m not going to list them all, but I think it’s worth pointing out the big ones, at least.
After the first section, a large part of the book seems dedicated to holding things up and saying, “See this thing/experiment/result? It’s weird and Science can’t explain it completely. Therefore, Biocentrism!” He’s basically pulling a page from the young earth creationist playbook: science can’t explain it (yet), therefore God. So now we have Biocentrism of the Gaps to hold hands with God of the Gaps.
Remember how I mentioned the Anthropic Principle at the beginning of this? The author actually introduces it in chapter 9, but doesn’t really provide an explanation, much less a convincing one, of how Biocentrism is anything other than a restatement of it with additional “scientific” trappings and wishful thinking. The author does admit his preferred version of the AP is the Participatory Anthropic Principle, which requires observers for the universe to exist. So the universe didn’t actually exist until someone was around to observe it. How perfect for Biocentrism.
We get what seems to be a deliberate misrepresentation or misstatement of certain aspects of Relativity to support the author’s view.
He discusses peculiarities of language, particularly when it comes to expressions of logic, as support to his argument that physics is obviously the wrong tool for the job to explain the universe. Therefore, Biocentrism. Because you know we (the human species) are mostly too lazy to go looking for the right tool, anyway, so here it is laid out for you.
And if you get to the point where your mind reaches “a blank wall beyond which lie contradictions or – worse – nothingness”, don’t worry. That doesn’t mean Biocentrism is false, it’s just a mystery and Biocentrism still offers the best explanation of why things are the way they are. This reminds me a lot of George Carlin telling stories of how the priests used to answer hard questions about God when he was young (and probably still do): “Well, it’s a mystery.” It’s an easy answer that skilfully allows the person answering to avoid thinking.
I spent a big chunk of the book waiting for the author to tell me that Biocentrism would make it possible for me to live forever because, just like space, time, reality, and everything else, death is just a perceptual flaw on my part. I’m still disappointed when he finally asks if consciousness can ever truly be extinguished. And even more so when he tells us that consciousness is eternal without any reason or justification, even under biocentrism.
And I’m not really going to address the limited view and analysis he has of Science Fiction, since it seems to be based purely on blockbuster movies and huge budget television shows, and not always good ones, with a few authors’ names someone has thrown at him mixed in. It seems unlikely he watches or reads the genres himself, but that’s speculation on my part.
And, in spite of being a career biologist, the author seems to have a problem with conventional science, mainly its failure to explain consciousness. Somehow, and it’s never made clear how, biocentrism explains it, or at least supports it, or something. But, you know, Biocentrism.
There are seven principles of Biocentrism. They take a whole page of text to state, and most of a book to not explain very well (or at all) but they boil down to a fairly simple statement: nothing is real unless someone is looking at it.
How Zen.
Well no, actually. Not only did the tree not make a sound because no one heard it fall, it didn’t actually fall, at least not until someone sees it lying on the ground. Then, obviously it did fall and the observation altered the past to make it match the fallen tree in the present.
Right.
Overall rating: 1 star.
I’ve had to re-categorize the subject area for this book. I can’t call it cosmology, which is how it was originally represented. Honestly, the only subject area I think I can place this is in is new age philosophy, and it bothers me to use “philosophy” as part of that description. Sure, it has some bits of cherry-picked science that with sufficient obfuscation or misrepresentation seem to support the author’s view that we’re the centre of the universe, but this is an opinion book, not a science book.
I like things that challenge my preconceptions and make me think. This book tried to challenge my preconceptions, but not by making me think. Instead, it dressed up some mystical woo with a science-y mask and cloak and asked me to believe that the universe didn’t exist until we were around to look at it.
To my reading, this book represents the height of human arrogance outside of religion. Don’t waste your time.
December 5, 2018
This book argues for an understanding of the universe in which consciousness is key – the sine qua non of reality, i.e. without which there’s nothing. While Lanza emphasizes biocentrism is a scientifically-based conception, his argument will likely find more immediate traction with people of faith than with the scientific community. Skepticism is likely to arise among the scientific community because the history of science from the Copernican Revolution onward has indicated that we are a bi-product of the universe in action, and not the reason for its existence. Humanity, with our brilliant brains that are the most complex systems we know of in the universe, is neither the geographic center of the universe nor are we its center of meaning or purpose either. Looking at it another way, our annihilation wouldn’t even register as a blip to the universe. Lanza (along with his co-author Bob Berman), fairly uniquely among men of science, argues otherwise.
Lanza and Berman present seven principles of biocentrism over the course of the book. I won’t list these, but they essentially say that in the absence of an observer the world exists only as an unresolved probability function, and that time and space are meaningless in the absence of consciousness. Not to oversimplify the authors’ case, but the heart of their biocentric argument is that it’s consistent with, and could arguably solve, two of the biggest mysteries in science.
The first mystery is the nature of quantum weirdness that has been shown true repeatedly through experiments such as the double slit experiment (which the authors discuss in some detail, but I will not.) I will mention a thought experiment designed make this subatomic strangeness clear in the world at our scale. It’s called Schrödinger's cat. The idea is that a cat is in a box with a vile of poison that is released by a radioactive trigger. One can’t know when the radioactive decay will release the poison. (This is a bit of subatomic strangeness that can only be reconciled in the face of an observer.) It’s said that the cat would have to be thought of as being in a superposition, simultaneously both alive and dead, until the observer enters the picture. The reader also may have heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle, which states one can’t know both of a pair of measurements (e.g. position and momentum) with perfect accuracy. All of this says that at the infinitesimally tiny scale of the quantum, particle behavior seems erratic, baffling, and is influenced by observation. While it’s hard to relate to through the lens of our macroscopic experience of the world, it’s a notion that is completely accepted by physicists because it’s been validated by countless experimental observations.
The second truth that science struggles to make sense of that biocentrism presumes to eradicate is the conundrum of the “Goldilock’s universe.” Taken from the fable of finding the porridge that was “just right.” We live in a universe whose actions comply with a series of equations and constants that – were they slightly different – would make life in all the forms we can fathom completely impossible. Starting from the fact that our universe is so mathematically consistent (a feature that it’s commonly argued needn’t be) to the fact that turning the dials a little would make intelligent life impossible, it’s easy to start wondering whether the creationists aren’t on to something. Religion doesn’t have a problem with the Goldilock’s Universe because it presumes the universe was made this way purposefully. Biocentrism doesn’t have a problem because the universe can only exist where there are conscious beings. Of course, science hypothesizes its own solutions to the conundrum. These varied solutions generally revolve around the anthropic principle (we exist in a universe capable of supporting life because if we didn’t we couldn’t) and a multiverse of parallel universes (because the anthropic principle applied to a single universe isn’t intuitively superior to assuming a god, goddess, or gods magically “poofed” us into existence.) Under this idea, which appeals to the Copernican Revolutionary mindset, there will be many more universes where life doesn’t exist, and perhaps even ephemeral bubble universes that can’t even exist as a universe – let alone as a life supporting universe.
There’s a major challenge to biocentrism that results from the fact that we are fairly certain that the universe is 13+ billion years old and our planet didn’t come into existence until about 9 billion years after that (i.e. Earth is about 4.5 billion-years-old.) Even if one assumes the conscious life grew up elsewhere before us, it’s hard to imagine it having happened instantaneously with the beginning of the universe. Lanza’s end run around this can be found in his sixth and seventh principles of biocentrism which state that time and space are illusory in the absence of an observer. Of course, this raises questions of how this could be so and why we might believe it is so -- because “it’s essential to my case” isn’t a good reason to believe anything. To be fair, there are all sorts of theories out there – many more mainstream than Lanza’s – that propose time and space aren’t what they seem – starting with Einstein’s well-proven idea that time and space are relative.
This book is oddly composed. It describes the principles of biocentrism largely in the first half to two-thirds of the book, with a few random digressions, and then it really goes off the rails. Most of the digressions are little biographical stories about Robert Lanza, many of which are interesting but completely irrelevant to the book’s proposed topic. I’m unsure which of three competing explanations account for these erratic digressions: a.) the publisher said, “this manuscript must be 200 pages or we aren’t publishing it.” b.) the author is getting up there in age, realizes there is no market for his memoirs, and thinks he can sneak the highlights into this book which is sure to have a following if a controversial one. c.) the author was concerned about being taken for a kook and wanted to establish his bona fides (note: many of the biographical digressions consist of name-dropping.) I should point out that these digressions are the main reason for my mediocre rating of this book, and not disenchantment with the case for biocentrism. (I think we know too little about consciousness and about it’s odd interactions at the quantum level to draw any firm conclusions in that regard.)
I found this book to be fascinating – even some of the digressions were interesting, though not helpful to discussion of the topic at hand. It’s a thought-provoking work. I have no idea whether it will prove to have merit as a description of how the world works. I’ll leave it to readers to determine whether they think it is a sound interpretation of observed reality or a physics-envy based attack on the stronghold of physics as the heart of science or an attempt to reduce the fear of death in a way consistent with science (i.e. time as we perceive it being an illusion makes us all immortal.) If you are interested in the big questions of why the universe exists and what is the nature of reality, you may want to give this book a read – not that it’ll answer all your questions, but it will provide an alternative to mainstream views that you may find useful.
Lanza and Berman present seven principles of biocentrism over the course of the book. I won’t list these, but they essentially say that in the absence of an observer the world exists only as an unresolved probability function, and that time and space are meaningless in the absence of consciousness. Not to oversimplify the authors’ case, but the heart of their biocentric argument is that it’s consistent with, and could arguably solve, two of the biggest mysteries in science.
The first mystery is the nature of quantum weirdness that has been shown true repeatedly through experiments such as the double slit experiment (which the authors discuss in some detail, but I will not.) I will mention a thought experiment designed make this subatomic strangeness clear in the world at our scale. It’s called Schrödinger's cat. The idea is that a cat is in a box with a vile of poison that is released by a radioactive trigger. One can’t know when the radioactive decay will release the poison. (This is a bit of subatomic strangeness that can only be reconciled in the face of an observer.) It’s said that the cat would have to be thought of as being in a superposition, simultaneously both alive and dead, until the observer enters the picture. The reader also may have heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle, which states one can’t know both of a pair of measurements (e.g. position and momentum) with perfect accuracy. All of this says that at the infinitesimally tiny scale of the quantum, particle behavior seems erratic, baffling, and is influenced by observation. While it’s hard to relate to through the lens of our macroscopic experience of the world, it’s a notion that is completely accepted by physicists because it’s been validated by countless experimental observations.
The second truth that science struggles to make sense of that biocentrism presumes to eradicate is the conundrum of the “Goldilock’s universe.” Taken from the fable of finding the porridge that was “just right.” We live in a universe whose actions comply with a series of equations and constants that – were they slightly different – would make life in all the forms we can fathom completely impossible. Starting from the fact that our universe is so mathematically consistent (a feature that it’s commonly argued needn’t be) to the fact that turning the dials a little would make intelligent life impossible, it’s easy to start wondering whether the creationists aren’t on to something. Religion doesn’t have a problem with the Goldilock’s Universe because it presumes the universe was made this way purposefully. Biocentrism doesn’t have a problem because the universe can only exist where there are conscious beings. Of course, science hypothesizes its own solutions to the conundrum. These varied solutions generally revolve around the anthropic principle (we exist in a universe capable of supporting life because if we didn’t we couldn’t) and a multiverse of parallel universes (because the anthropic principle applied to a single universe isn’t intuitively superior to assuming a god, goddess, or gods magically “poofed” us into existence.) Under this idea, which appeals to the Copernican Revolutionary mindset, there will be many more universes where life doesn’t exist, and perhaps even ephemeral bubble universes that can’t even exist as a universe – let alone as a life supporting universe.
There’s a major challenge to biocentrism that results from the fact that we are fairly certain that the universe is 13+ billion years old and our planet didn’t come into existence until about 9 billion years after that (i.e. Earth is about 4.5 billion-years-old.) Even if one assumes the conscious life grew up elsewhere before us, it’s hard to imagine it having happened instantaneously with the beginning of the universe. Lanza’s end run around this can be found in his sixth and seventh principles of biocentrism which state that time and space are illusory in the absence of an observer. Of course, this raises questions of how this could be so and why we might believe it is so -- because “it’s essential to my case” isn’t a good reason to believe anything. To be fair, there are all sorts of theories out there – many more mainstream than Lanza’s – that propose time and space aren’t what they seem – starting with Einstein’s well-proven idea that time and space are relative.
This book is oddly composed. It describes the principles of biocentrism largely in the first half to two-thirds of the book, with a few random digressions, and then it really goes off the rails. Most of the digressions are little biographical stories about Robert Lanza, many of which are interesting but completely irrelevant to the book’s proposed topic. I’m unsure which of three competing explanations account for these erratic digressions: a.) the publisher said, “this manuscript must be 200 pages or we aren’t publishing it.” b.) the author is getting up there in age, realizes there is no market for his memoirs, and thinks he can sneak the highlights into this book which is sure to have a following if a controversial one. c.) the author was concerned about being taken for a kook and wanted to establish his bona fides (note: many of the biographical digressions consist of name-dropping.) I should point out that these digressions are the main reason for my mediocre rating of this book, and not disenchantment with the case for biocentrism. (I think we know too little about consciousness and about it’s odd interactions at the quantum level to draw any firm conclusions in that regard.)
I found this book to be fascinating – even some of the digressions were interesting, though not helpful to discussion of the topic at hand. It’s a thought-provoking work. I have no idea whether it will prove to have merit as a description of how the world works. I’ll leave it to readers to determine whether they think it is a sound interpretation of observed reality or a physics-envy based attack on the stronghold of physics as the heart of science or an attempt to reduce the fear of death in a way consistent with science (i.e. time as we perceive it being an illusion makes us all immortal.) If you are interested in the big questions of why the universe exists and what is the nature of reality, you may want to give this book a read – not that it’ll answer all your questions, but it will provide an alternative to mainstream views that you may find useful.
August 16, 2011
Lanza' Biocentrism constitues the take of two scientists, one a cell biologist, the other an astronomer, on the old mind/body "problem", attacking it not from the perspective of philosophy but from that of physics. Lanza, the primary author, being scientifically educated but not a physicist, explains elements of microphysics with accessible clarity and astrophysics and cosmology, with the help of his co-author, similarly.
As someone trained in philosophy, much of what Lanza has to say was reminiscent of what some philosophers, most notably Spinoza and Kant, have been maintaining for centuries. Lanza states it (p. 159) as the proposition that "there is no separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness." What he should have written was that we cannot know whether there is a "separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness", but then he is not a philosopher and not, apparently, much aware of history of epistemological or ontological thought within the discipline. Still, for those with more of a science than a philosophical background, the basic point gets across.
For me, the best parts of this book were the autobiographical portions, many of which I found quite moving.
As someone trained in philosophy, much of what Lanza has to say was reminiscent of what some philosophers, most notably Spinoza and Kant, have been maintaining for centuries. Lanza states it (p. 159) as the proposition that "there is no separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness." What he should have written was that we cannot know whether there is a "separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness", but then he is not a philosopher and not, apparently, much aware of history of epistemological or ontological thought within the discipline. Still, for those with more of a science than a philosophical background, the basic point gets across.
For me, the best parts of this book were the autobiographical portions, many of which I found quite moving.
March 23, 2013
Many seem to either love or hate this book, or rather to either embrace it or harshly criticize it. Myself I have a more moderate opinion, I agree with the critics that it's not really a science book, and neither are the ideas in it completely new for the most part. If you're looking for hard scientific facts and don't have the patience for an author telling much of his life story in between chapters this book is definitely not for you. On the other hand if you yourself have given much thought to the questions about the true nature of the universe and the mystery of consciousness you might enjoy reading Robert Lanza's thoughts on them. He won't provide a final conclusion - which couldn't be expected since it's about the ultimate question, after all - but he'll rather relate some very personal life events on the way that guided him to the perspective he takes. Not groundbreaking but well written.
June 2, 2014
Excellent book - intriguing and thought provoking, from the tree falling in the Forest, to the speed of light and Einstein.
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