The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality

by Robert Lanza

measuring or even observing a subatomic object always has an effect on it because any information we gain always involves an energy exchange. Think about it: If you see something, it means photons or bits of electromagnetic energy have impacted retinal cells, delivering the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces, to atoms in those cells, and ultimately caused electrical impulses to arise. What can you ever perceive without an energy exchange? The mere process of observation can alter what’s occurring at a fundamental level without you even being aware of it—just as using a flashlight to try to learn what mice do at night will change their nocturnal behavior and automatically result in erroneous conclusions.

As noted by Heisenberg, it was this: “The transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation. If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word ‘happens’ can apply only to the observation.”

Quantum theory kept showing that at any particular moment an object like an electron or photon could be a wave or a particle but not both, or could have an up spin or a down spin, or a horizontal or a vertical polarization, or could be here rather than there, and which properties it would be observed to have could never be predicted ahead of time. The process of materializing or appearing in one way rather than another involved an instantaneous change in the object’s wave function, which, as we’ve seen, was a strange preexistence as a kind of blurry potential or probability, one that had not yet “collapsed” into an actual item with tangible properties.

As the great Princeton physicist John Wheeler once declared: “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon.” Meaning that the word “observation,” despite seeming to imply a passive process of being an onlooker, is actually the practice of reality creation.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental,” wrote Max Planck, with a confident open-and-shut tone akin to that of the Sermon on the Mount. “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

what scientists last century first realized, that what an observer is aware of—in other words, consciousness—changes reality.

we associate with consciousness—with the unitary “me” feeling—to be simultaneously interconnected. This is the key. What is relevant here (and for the whole book, whenever we talk about consciousness and the wave function) is that those entangled regions of the brain, which together constitute the system perceived as consciousness in all its manifestations, arise as such because a sense of “time”—or the sequential flowing of events—emerges simultaneously throughout all of the spatial algorithms/neurocircuitry responsible for generating a conscious, real-life (spatiotemporal) experience. It is important to note that the spatial separation between neurons in the brain is meaningless before this process occurs. It’s an all-or-nothing phenomenon.

Time and space are projections created inside the mind, where perception, feeling, and experience begin. They are the tools of life, the representations of intellect and sense

the universe as experienced from the perspective of an observer is his consciousness. What an observer perceives as the external world is described in physics by wave function; wave function is a representation of an observer’s awareness of the universe, not directly of the universe itself, which in fact does not exist without consciousness.

reality isn’t a hard, cold thing, but an active process that involves our consciousness. Space and time are simply the tools our mind uses to weave information together into a coherent experience—they are the language of consciousness. Regardless of differences in perception (many of which were discussed in the previous chapter), we genome-based creatures all share a common biological information-processing ability that allows us to arrange those perceptions into a spatiotemporal reality.

The “me” feeling is energy operating in the brain. But energy never dies; it cannot be destroyed.

Time is simply the ordered construction of what we observe in space—much like the frames of a film—occurring inside the mind.

According to biocentrism, these mental constructs are based on algorithms, or complex mathematical relationships, whose physical logic is contained in the neurocircuitry of the brain. The particular algorithms your brain uses to translate the welter of perceptions flooding your senses into a coherent, lived experience are the key to consciousness, and they also explain why time and space—indeed, the properties of matter itself—are relative to the observer.

This evolution away from structure, order, and activity toward uniformity, randomness, and inertness is known as the increase of entropy.

Wheeler said he was sure the universe was filled with “huge clouds of uncertainty” that haven’t yet interacted with anything. In all these places, he said, the cosmos is “a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past.”

reality begins and ends with the observer, whether you’re speaking of the reality of now or that of an eon ago. “We are participators,” Wheeler said, “in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past.”

according to quantum theory, the atom’s position is “blurred” because it is a superposition of many possible positions. It is the job of consciousness to determine which of those possible positions becomes the actual position in the observer’s awareness. By the act of observation, the observer’s mind creates the awareness that, at a certain position and at a certain coordinate time, the photon scattered from the atom. Another photon may arrive, followed by yet another. The cascade of events in spacetime corresponds to a cascade of experiences in the observer’s consciousness. But without a mechanism in the mind to sort these events successively in order to experience them one by one, all those experiences would exist simultaneously: past, present, and future.

Emerson: “The universe is the externalization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it.”

During both dreams and waking hours, our minds collapse probability waves to generate a physical reality that comes complete with a functioning body. The result of this magnificent orchestration is our never-ending ability to experience sensations in a four-dimensional world.

According to biocentrism, we are always not just observing but creating reality.

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown,”

the famed Princeton physicist John Wheeler was able to so confidently state, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

the problem of the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity can be resolved by taking into account something that modern physics has largely ignored till now: the properties of the observers who probe reality.

if you keep measuring the same quantity over and over again, keeping in mind the result of the very first measurement, you’ll see a similar outcome. Similarly, if you learn from somebody about the outcomes of their measurements of a physical quantity, your measurements and those of other observers influence each other—freezing the reality according to that consensus. In this sense, consensus of different opinions regarding the structure of reality defines its very form, shaping the underlying quantum foam.