In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

One theory holds that consciousness is part of the physical world, like gravity, and participated in the original creation of the universe. A fleeting subatomic particle called the Higgs boson is responsible for the force of gravity and gives matter mass; perhaps a similar unknown particle is responsible for consciousness. It would pervade the universe the way gravity does and, like gravity, determine how everything works. Without it, nothing would exist; the universe would just be a massive wave function. Scientists are so far from explaining consciousness that they can’t even agree on a definition, yet it is the crowning achievement of the physical world and seems to be the reason that anything exists in the form that it does. The circularity is audacious: a mix of minerals organized as a human brain summon the world into existence by collapsing its wave function, giving physical reality to the very minerals the brain is made of.

But a universe where consciousness is woven into the very nature of matter would seem to explain both the greatest quantum puzzles as well as our subjective experience of life. The proposal, sometimes known as biocentrism, and championed by an American doctor named Robert Lanza, protects us from an eternity of individual consciousness while still lifting us out of the meaninglessness of pure biology. Critics say that biocentrism is not a legitimate theory because it can’t be tested, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. If consciousness comprises an essential part of the physical universe, the very idea of testing its existence may be a logical impossibility.