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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert Lanza
This way of thinking starts by recognizing that our existing model of reality is looking increasingly creaky in the face of recent scientific discoveries.
the cosmic egg model—where everything began with a sudden explosive event—similar to what Edgar Allan Poe originally proposed in an 1848 essay. In this model, the universe was presented as a kind of self-operating machine. It was composed of stupid stuff, meaning atoms of hydrogen and other elements that had no innate intelligence. Nor did any sort of external intelligence rule. Rather, unseen forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, acting according to the random laws of chance, produced everything we observe.
Our absolute bedrock bottom-line reality is not that we humans descended from plankton on a world born near a third-generation star 4.65 billion years ago. That may seem certain to many in our modern world, but here’s an even more inarguable starting point: We find ourselves to be conscious, in a matrix we call the universe.
This is not to blame science in any way. Far less than one-trillionth of 1 percent of the cosmos lies within view of our telescopes. And even this is just a small fraction of the actual cosmos, because the majority of everything is composed of unknown entities. Our sample size is thus minuscule.
there exists an alternative model for What All This Is. The alternative is necessary because modern cosmology, in its attempts to explain the cosmos, keeps committing an odd oversight: It scrupulously holds the living observer at a distance from the rest of the universe. It asks us to accept a dichotomy, a split.
Figuring out how nature operated was on nobody’s to-do list. Indeed, the things that provoke our curiosity today—the nature of life, and time, and consciousness, and the working of the brain—all would have seemed alien to early civilizations. Everyday survival was priority number one, behaving according to Scripture so that God wouldn’t smite you was number two, and debating issues like whether space is real never made it to the campfire agenda.
Yet even if cause-and-effect rationality reached blank walls quickly, the early Greeks admirably didn’t quit. And like science even today, especially the quantum theory experiments we will explore later, the ancients had to deal with verisimilitude, a wonderful word that means “the appearance of truth.” Something that appears true may indeed be true. Or it may not be. The Sun crossing the sky while Earth remains motionless is a verisimilitude, an appearance. It seems true. It still appears true today, which is why we say “the Sun is setting” and not “the horizon is rising.”
Aristotle didn’t quit there. In Book IV of Physics, he argued that time has no independent existence on its own. It only subsists when people are around; we bring it into existence through our observations.
In common with Aristotle, Advaita taught that the universe is a single entity, which it called Brahmin. But unlike the Greeks, this “One” included the divine, as well as each person’s individual sense of self. All appearances of dichotomy or separateness, it insisted, are mere illusions,
If a person seeks knowledge of reality and one’s nature and one’s place in the universe, what if she has no spiritual calling? What if she solely demands fact-based evidence? Can these deep issues be tackled decisively by science alone? That is our sixty-four-thousand-dollar question—and the real starting point for our journey.
No matter what picture of the universe one embraces, time seems to play a key role.
If there is one big difference between people and animals, it is not that we are unafraid of vacuum cleaners. It is that we are time obsessed.
here we have only two contrasting viewpoints. One is the opinion held by such noted smart people as Isaac Newton, who saw time as part of the fundamental structure of the universe.
The opposing view, argued for centuries by other smart people such as Immanuel Kant, is that time is not an actual entity. It is not a kind of “container” that events “move through.” In this view, there is no flow to time. Rather, it’s a framework devised by human observers as they attempt to give organization and structure to the vast labyrinth of information whirling in their minds.
Even if time is an actual entity, it cannot be a constant like lightspeed or gravity. It flows at different rates.
We’re intuitively ignorant of this because we all attended a high school where everybody hung out in the same gravitational field—and never, even in our wildest teenage years, sped our car in a joyride faster than an eight-millionth of the speed of light.
Are you a truly nerdy, geeky person who cares about such technological or physics details? If so, consider the many wrinkles in how time seems to flow, all introduced by the very technology designed to measure it: Wrinkle one: Satellites travel at 8,700 miles per hour, slowing their clocks. Wrinkle two: They’re distant from Earth in a reduced gravitational field, which accelerates their time relative to Earth’s surface. Wrinkle three: GPS users on the Earth’s surface are located at various distances from Earth’s center (at Denver’s high altitude versus low-altitude Miami, say), producing a
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And always remember: We’re not talking about the warping of an actual entity called time. We’re noticing only that events unfold at more leisurely rates, or more hurriedly, than they did before, relative to others.
There are places in the universe where only a single second of events pass while a million years’ worth of activities simultaneously elapses here on Earth. Yet both feel a normal passage of time. So observers in different places experience out-of-sync sequences. If the rate of the passage of events depends on factors like the local gravity and one’s speed, how can there be a stable commodity called time?
Philosophers generally agreed. After all, the past is just a selective memory; your recollections of an event are different from mine. Both memories are simply that—signals from brain cells, neurons firing in the present moment. If the past is an idea that can only occur in the here and now, and the future is also just a concept happening strictly in the present, there seems nothing but now. Always. So is there really a past and a future? Or just a continuum of present moments?
Enough philosophizing. Though such debates continue today, they’ve been offered only to illustrate how time’s reality, so assumed by the public, continues to be seriously doubted among people with excessive leisure time who ponder such things.
We must shift to the only place in science where a directionality of time is assumed to be needed: the field of thermodynamics, whose second law involves a process called entropy. This natural inclination to go from order to disorder necessitates an “arrow” or direction to time.
Parmenides’ views were seconded and championed by Zeno, born in the same settlement twenty-five years later. Both men tirelessly argued that the apparent multiplicity of objects we see around us, along with their changing forms and motions, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality they called “Being.”
For our purposes, however, it’s enough to show that space and time—the seemingly bedrock grid many of us assume to be a real framework for the universe—are fragile mental constructs whose logical existence can be shaken by the likes of Zeno.
Disorder happens naturally. And if this really is physical or mathematical evidence for a “direction” or “arrow” of time, then time is real.
Stephen Hawking once argued that if the universe ever stops expanding and begins to collapse, the arrow of time would point in the opposite direction and physical processes would reverse themselves on every level. Presumably we’d never notice anything amiss, since our own mental workings and brain functions would be running backward, too. In any case, Hawking eventually decided that reversed time couldn’t happen, and he changed his mind as if to demonstrate the process.
Although many casually use entropy as an argument for time, Boltzmann himself didn’t see it that way. Entropy, he argued, is simply the result of living in a world of mechanically colliding particles where disordered states are the most probable. Because there are so many more possible disordered states than ordered ones, the state of maximum disorder is simply the most likely to appear. Put another way, entropy is merely a matter of things slamming into other things in the here and now. No arrows exist.
When halfhearted efforts to unite everything occasionally arose, they were always based on the primacy of the random and inert material world that presumably gave birth to awareness somehow. (This was sometimes called physical monism.) No one tried traveling the obverse route by attempting to argue that the material universe might arise from consciousness.
This means the electron or photon doesn’t enjoy any independent existence as an actual object in a real place, with a real motion. Instead, it exists only probabilistically. Which is to say it doesn’t exist at all—until it’s observed. And who observes it? We do. With our consciousness.
Objectivity was melting, too, because the observer alone made these tiny objects materialize. Causal determinism was vanishing as well, because nothing palpable or visible caused the entities to assume one position instead of another. And as for the “physical monism” that made consciousness a random offspring of the material cosmos, it now gained interest and was reexamined. It suddenly seemed like consciousness might enjoy some central importance in the universe’s overall reality.
uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality.
the act of observing results in perceiving one characteristic or the other or else a vague sense of both.
According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world.
Because space and time are forms of animal intuition, they’re tools of the mind and thus don’t exist as external objects independent of life.
So there it is. Particles and photons—matter and energy— apparently transmit knowledge across the entire universe instantly.
quantum knowledge, if that’s what it is, where one object “responds” to the situation of another in zero time, meaning at infinitely fast speed, is stunning.
In any case, we’re walking a fine line about what constitutes information. Something is being conveyed instantaneously.
What it really means is that there is an underlying reality that connects all the universe’s contents. In this place, no separations exist between anything and anything else. Yet this realm creates events that materialize in space-time, in the observable physical cosmos.
Dispensing with empty space will take us most of the way toward discarding the notion of a little island “me” bravely forging ahead in a vast, lonely cosmos. It will help demolish the modern image of insentient vastness being the dominant quality of reality. By contrast, the life-centered view is that “space” is largely a sense of order created exclusively by the mind’s automatic algorithms. Beyond the observer, no real emptiness exists.
there’s more to “space” than a mere recitation of its particle density. For starters, it’s permeated by fields. Magnetic and electric fields fill the cosmos, and these have the power to influence the motion of every particle with an electrical charge. Space is also penetrated by an unrelenting torrent of photons of all kinds, which are the most prevalent entities in the cosmos. Neutrinos, the second-most common item, also continually rip through the entire universe; a trillion of them pass through each of your fingernails each second. And gravity waves flow everywhere, according to physicists.
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dark energy. We know nothing about it, of course, except that it must be some kind of antigravity force.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows that space is not a constant and therefore not inherently substantive. High-speed travel makes intervening space dramatically shrink.
experiments have repeatedly proven that this seeming separation between ourselves and anything else is subject to point of view—what Einstein called a reference frame—and therefore has no inherent bedrock reality.
Where, then, is the supposedly trustworthy space matrix, the gridwork within which we observe the universe or even the objects in our earthly environment?
Actual nothingness would of course contain no oomph, no power. How could pure emptiness exhibit animation? And yet, for over a half century, astrophysicists have believed the universe’s vast tracts of emptiness seethe with energy. As we’ll see, this pathway will let us now get closer to grasping the limitless raw power of the mind-nature amalgam.
That the cosmos is suffused with energy that makes the mere light waves and electrical fields around us seem by comparison like wimpy pretenders means that this essence of Being—this Nature of All Things, this true Self behind awareness and life itself, this seeming void that appears to be the matrix, the easel, the backdrop for all our human misadventures—is an unimaginably powerful entity.
That we visually see and physically feel none of it means nothing; our senses are architecturally constructed to perceive what’s useful in our everyday lives. What purpose would be served by perceiving the blinding ultra-energy that permeates every crevice of reality?
In this different mindset, might we perceive a fundamental oneness rather than individual entities separated by space?
Thus, we are not individuals “here” with some empty gap— dead space—standing between us and, say, other galaxies. Space is unreal on multiple levels, and it is misleading to conceive of All There Is as some vast, mostly vacant sphere.
By now, the reader is well aware that our view couldn’t be more antithetical, since biocentrism, as its very name suggests, means that life and awareness are indispensable cosmic attributes.
