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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert Lanza
Read between
May 30 - June 7, 2022
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
And this is one of the central themes of biocentrism and this book: that the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.
This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.
Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.
Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the universe under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of
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So you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric.
Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The very structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The universe is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
That time is a fixed arrow is a human construction. That we live on the edge of all time is a fantasy. That there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the Earth is an even greater fantasy. Space and time are forms of animal understanding—period.
People accept that time exists as a physical entity because we have invented those objects called clocks, which are simply more rhythmic and consistent than buds flowering or apples rotting.
Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
“Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying, illustrating that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling creates a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality with a steady stream of labels.
“The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject,” Einstein later wrote, “is the basis of all natural science.” The universe was viewed as a great machine set in motion at the beginning of time, with wheels and cogs that turned according to immutable laws independent of us. “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
Yet even back then in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, ahead of his time, said that “we must rid ourselves of the notion that space and time are actual qualities in things in themselves . . . all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.”
Knowledge,” Henry David Thoreau once said, “does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”
Indeed, how do we see things when in fact the brain is locked inside the cranium, inside a sealed vault of bone? That this whole rich and brilliant universe comes from a quarter-inch opening of the pupil, and the faint bit of light that gains entry thereby? How does it turn some electrochemical impulses into an order, a sequence, and a unity? How can we cognize this page, or a face, or anything that appears so real that very few ever stop to question how it occurs?
Thoreau would have approved. He had always considered morning as a cheerful invitation to make his life of simplicity. “Poetry and art,” he wrote, “and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.”
One day, we each found ourselves alive and aware and, around the age of two in most cases, an ongoing memory track started recording selective inputs.
To be conscious that we are perceiving . . . is to be conscious of our own existence. —Aristotle
As Emerson has said, it contradicts all experience: Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.
Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as a haze of probability.
