Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

by Robert Lanza

We have already seen that the existing view is firmly rooted in a space-and-time modality: You and I are bodies on a planet that dwells in a particular cosmic neighborhood. Our world had a birth 4.65 billion years ago, some 9.15 billion years after the Big Bang, and so on. This is how we visualize things, or, hopefully, how we used to, as we’ve already seen that neither space nor time has any kind of fundamental reality beyond being tools of animal perception. Once we’ve dispensed with space and time, one other major player has a central role in the current standard model: randomness, or chance.

Completely eliminating cosmic intelligence in any form is a rather recent development, even if it is the current science norm. Still, in popular parlance, folks continue to say things like, “Nature knows what it’s doing.”

In any event, the modern dumb-universe paradigm requires that we explain the complex physical and biological architecture we see all around us by some other means. And chance is all we have. It’s all an accident. The dumb-universe model sinks or swims on the life raft of randomness. Randomness is also a central key of evolution, where it works splendidly.

Natural selection works because some random mutation conferred an advantage that let the animal better survive to procreate. But an eye—any eye, even the earliest ones—required not just a single mutation that created a light-sensitive cell, but also a nerve system or some other modality to carry such sensations to a brain or brain precursor, so the information could be utilized in some way,

If we, the observer, collapse these possibilities (that is, the past and future), then where does that leave evolutionary theory as described in our schoolbooks? Until the present is determined, how can there be a past? The past begins with the observer, us, not the other way around as we’ve been taught.

what’s immediately inarguable is the futility of assigning randomness as any kind of genesis in the development of consciousness. The fact of having perception, of being aware, is a quality that has eluded all researchers.

everything we see and think about the universe—the very act of seeing and thinking—involves perception.

let’s say they type forty-five words a minute, so the fifteen keystrokes that make up the phrase take just four seconds. And they never rest or sleep. How much time, then, according to probability laws, before one of them finally types, “Call me Ishmael”? Answer: about 36 trillion years, or roughly 2,600 times the age of the universe.

we’d be more likely to make progress by candidly saying, “This is a mystery”—and then researchers might begin to tackle it from scratch with a clean slate.

So back to our original question: Can you get the cosmos we see, including the complex biological designs of the brain and the trumpeter swan, through random atom collisions alone? If randomness requires thirty-six trillion years to type a single passage of fifteen letters and spaces, the answer is obvious: not a chance. On the other hand, if the desired endpoint is not some specific accomplishment like mangoes or the genesis of life, and you’re merely asking those colliding billiard balls to come up with something or other, anything at all, it will surely oblige.

So by any stretch of wishful thinking, a cosmos that even allows life—let alone the fact of life’s development—is inconceivable by chance alone. Randomness is not a tenable hypothesis. Truth be told, as an explanation it’s close to idiotic—right up there with “the dog ate my homework.”

This is an extremely unlikely universe. So unlikely that even the most die-hard classical, randomness-believing, atheism-proselytizing physicists concede that the cosmos is insanely improbable in terms of life-friendliness. The combined existence of all the life-friendly values of all its physical constants and values defy the odds of one in several hundred million.

Our luck didn’t stop with the physical properties of the universe. S. tchadensis, O. tugenensis, A. ramidus, A. anamensis, A. afarensis, K. platyops, A. africanus, A. garhi, A. sediba, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus, P. boisei, H. habilis, H. erectus, and H. georgicus—among other hominid species—all went extinct. Even the Neanderthals went extinct. We alone made it.

This string-based multiverse reasoning instantly lets our hyper-unlikely friendly universe experience a sudden metamorphosis and go from extraordinary to worthy of no more than a shrug. By such reasoning, the random explanation for reality gets a new lease. And lifelessness becomes the cosmic normal.

a much more uplifting perception would be feeling oneself to be absent altogether. Neither small nor large, but simply gone. Then alone, without the diversion of trying to be simultaneously aware of the observer, can the full experience of the perceived object manifest itself without distraction.

That’s our coauthor’s personal account. If it’s delusional, then it’s odd indeed that it mirrors accounts from different centuries and cultures.

“All you have to do is change the data input and its interpretation by the detector (the brain and its complex neural perceptive system) and you perceive reality differently. Thus, we cannot trust our primitive animal brains to paint an accurate picture of what’s really going on.

The takeaway here is that you can restructure the neurocircuitry of the brain so we experience oneness rather than separateness. That it does happen spontaneously, but not to most people, may simply mean that such widespread perceptions would not be evolutionarily adaptive.

Fine, the reader may be thinking, perception depends upon various brain mechanisms, even those that we are only just learning about. Still, isn’t there a visual universe “out there” that exists independent of our biocircuitry? Aren’t the sunset colors and blue sky self-existing, awaiting the clear-glass windows of one’s eye-lenses, and the occipital-lobe visual receptors within some conscious animal, in order to perceive and enjoy them? In what way do these aforementioned experiences prove the unity of the subject and the natural world?

When we now look across our room to a window fifteen feet away, we’re entitled to ask: Where is it located? Where is the universe? Language and custom say that it is outside us. That it is “out there.” But a smattering of scientists know that this cannot be so. That, in fact, everything occurs strictly within our heads.

But, you may protest, aren’t there two worlds? The external “real” world, and then another, separate visual world inside your head? No, there is only one. Where the visual image is perceived is where it actually is. There is nothing outside of perception. How could there be?

Now, if “that” is within myself, then in a very concrete sense, everything I see is “me.” I do not end, not even at the Moon and beyond—at least visually, and aurally, and perceptually.

is not necessary to negate the external world. We needn’t say that it doesn’t exist. It is enough to see through the false assumptions that we “look at” an external world while simultaneously (and equally erroneously) believing that a separate visual world lurks somewhere inside our skull despite it being seemingly imperceptible. What’s important is to grasp that the two-world assumption is illusory. That the world we see is the visual perception located in our head.

“The only things we can ever perceive,” said George Berkeley, for whom the campus and city were named, “are our perceptions.” There is no universe without perception. Consciousness and the cosmos are correlative. They are one and the same.

Reality is a swirl of information in the mind. This means that absolutely everything, from the trees “out there” to our sense of time and perception of distance, is all being continually constructed and perceived by lightning-quick life-based information systems. Let’s examine how this works.

By most definitions, information works through an exchange of energy, so the falling bit of ice is indeed interrelating with the field by contributing to the mass of the planet. More obviously, you yourself invariably gain knowledge via energy absorption;

If information is defined as everything involved in cause-and-effect exchanges, then information interactions are continuous and omnipresent on all levels.

what a particular neuron “decides”—its ultimate output—is the result of the sum of all the varied signals it is receiving, which definitely lies along a continuum and therefore is not at all digital.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to call the brain’s/mind’s potential, or its capability for variety, limitless.

The point is that our technology always has to be designed to operate in tune with the vagaries of our mind’s architecture, including its quirks.

Our takeaway from this: The magical sensation of depth must arise internally, when the visual input with its parallax discrepancies is sorted out and presented to the conscious level of the brain.

The fear generated by the Singularitarians is that artificial intelligence will someday reach a point of complexity where the machines become self-aware.

As machines get better at learning how to learn, Lipson believes it invariably “leads down the path to consciousness and self-awareness.”

We feel. How and why? It’s the most basic kind of question, yet it has no answer to date.

We may believe this consciousness has a home in our brains, and there’s a relative truth to that, but not an absolute one, because the brain itself is as much a construction in our minds as the supposedly external trees and tablecloths.

What we do observe, all this richness, is a deliberate spatio-temporal algorithm attuned to particular electromagnetic frequencies.

Indeed, the universe can be viewed as a blurry, probabilistic state of potential information, which the mind-system “collapses” into actual information and sensations when processed by the mind-system.

In the ordinary way of conceiving things, we regard consciousness as having individual centers—you and me and each raccoon. We imagine it arises at birth and subsides at death. Since it thus seemingly comes and goes, the issue of whether it can arise in a machine certainly seems reasonable. But if consciousness is correlative with the cosmos, then the question defaults to an inquiry into the entirety of existence. Tackling this is the same task as pondering the overarching universe. Though a valid and venerable topic, all methodologies employing symbolism limited to representing individual parts must fall short.

We think and speak using language, which in turn employs words that are all symbols for something else. This is an adequate process for engineering bridges or asking someone to pass the mustard. But it fails as soon as it involves something beyond symbolism such as ecstasy, love, certain empathic feelings, and certainly The Whole Shebang.

Time is bio-logical—completely subjective and invariably emergent from a unitary co-relative process. All knowledge amounts to relationships of information, with the observer alone imparting spatio-temporal meaning. Because time doesn’t actually exist outside of perception, there is no experiential “after death” even for a plant, except the death of its physical structure in our “now.” You can’t say the plant or animal observer comes or goes or dies, since these are merely temporal concepts.

science’s purpose is to understand this world and our place in this universe and how things fit together.

The endpoint seemed clear: Perhaps everything is a single entity and we need only find how exactly the four fundamental forces and the three fundamental particles interrelate, and how they got that way.

the authors say that these models were doomed to fail because theoreticians always tried to fashion a theory of everything that ignored the section of reality comprising somewhere between 50 and 100 percent of it: the observer.

Science wasn’t to blame for trying to keep people out of the equation. Humans screw up. Our predilection for error is renowned. Just survey the eyewitnesses to a car or plane crash, and you’ll get accounts that reliably diverge. Besides, science works better when you can remove the human factor.

But in discarding human personalities and foibles, science also turned its back on the fundamental act of perception itself. What was brushed off as irrelevant was something profound, with roots that predate personality and even taxonomy. In reality, awareness is something deep rather than idiosyncratic. It is basic and permanent rather than transient and dispensable.

Now, if the land of the very small lies outside our logic system, why must the meta-universe, the cosmos as a whole, be any more obliging so far as our thought-systems operate?

Rather, we should face up to something that’s rarely if ever voiced in modern cosmology: the possibility that the true nature of the universe as a whole has nothing to do with the way its parts work, that it indeed lies outside the very characteristics of its components.

Isn’t it obvious that a situation that always yields no answer, that invariably ends in utter mystery, is being tackled by a process inadequate to the job?

because absolutely everything studied, perceived, observed, thought, or conjectured occurs in the matrix of consciousness, the latter must be part of the Big Picture, perforce.

Doing so, we find that the squirrely nature of space and time suddenly makes sense, because they are tools of our mind, a way to frame and order what we experience. They are the language of consciousness.