The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality

by Robert Lanza

Fourth principle of biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state. Quantum mechanics consistently and accurately predicts how and where the basic particles of matter will appear, with the amazing revelation that prior to observation, they exist in all possible places at once—dwelling in a sort of blurry probability state that physicists call “an uncollapsed wave function.”

Instead, we should bear in mind that to embrace all possibilities, all configurations, even all possible universes, particles and objects and energies of all kinds will not manifest themselves unless they’ve been perceived or in some way meddled with by some observer, and so they are relative to that observer.

If so—and everything that could possibly happen actually does occur in some Everett universe—then of course, death does not exist in any real sense because consciousness and experience always continue unabated

“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.”

As we’ll see later, physicists from Hawking to Wheeler have taken things even further in the decades since, with concepts like the “participatory universe” in which we don’t merely create the present but the past as well. As the famed British cosmologist and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has said, “The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.”

Consciousness, according to biocentrism, is fundamental to the cosmos and impossible to separate from it. We see this firsthand with our own experience of cognition, in that it never disappears. Some might ask, “What about when you die?” But experiencing “being dead” is a logical paradox—you cannot simultaneously “be” and also “not be.” One of the properties of consciousness is that it is never subjectively discontinuous. You cannot experience nothing, since even the words “experience” and “nothingness” are mutually exclusive.

The enigmatic issue of death should therefore be understood within the thesis that wave function, relative to an observer and representing his experiences of the world that he lives in, can never cease to exist, and that from an observer’s first-person perspective, there is no death. The observer is always aware of something.

It explains how the arrow of time, and time itself, emerges directly from the observer: that is, from us. Time, it argues, does not exist “out there,” ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on an observer’s ability to preserve information about experienced events.

What is observed is real; all other times and places, all other objects and events are products of the imagination and serve only to unite knowledge into a logical whole.

The “time” utilized by special relativity as the fourth coordinate of the spacetime continuum is in some sense illusory, too, since as we’ve seen it is not true time at all. It is “time” only in the way the position of a clock’s hands depict time. A moving indicator on a clock face can have any position, but all such configurations exist simultaneously in spacetime. It is consciousness that determines which position the clock’s hands are assuming right now.

observers ultimately define the structure of physical reality itself.

Once awake, you can find yourself as being any person, at any time, without having memories about ever being another person or animal. You can even find yourself as a newborn, without any ideas about the reality you are living.

Time has no meaning without relationship to another point. It is a relational concept, one event relative to another. Thus, to have an arrow or directionality of time, there must be an observer with memory. We’re back to the inescapability of the conscious observer.