Biocentrism Quotes

“Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“How does consciousness ever begin? How could that possibly occur? And is that question any less enigmatic than trying to figure how it might arise at a later date? Is consciousness synonymous with everything?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We can believe and aver that there’s a universe out there even if all living creatures were nonexistent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a thinking organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really there?”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Cosmologists say that everything was in contact, and born together, at the Big Bang. So even employing conventional imagery, it may even make sense that everything is in some sense an entangled relative of every other, and in direct contact with everything else, despite the seeming emptiness between them.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Back in 1926, German physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material, as his colleague Schrödinger had theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus, a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there! It’s intangible. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will go “down the drain” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. —Nobel physicist Richard Feynman”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Because science and religion make odd bedfellows whose offspring is usually malformed,”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. —John Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927)”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“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.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“I wondered if our little interaction was any different from that of any other two objects in the universe. Was this primitive little grub just another collection of atoms—proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun? Could it be grasped by a mechanist’s logic?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“inarguably symbiotic. The pulses of air by themselves do not constitute any sort of sound, which is obvious because 15-pulse air puffs remain silent no matter how many ears are present. Only when a specific range of pulses are present is the ear’s neural architecture designed to let human consciousness conjure the noise experience. In short, an observer, an ear, and a brain are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air pulses. The external world and consciousness are correlative. And a tree that falls in an empty forest creates only silent air pulses—tiny puffs of wind.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location in space) belongs to the outer world and momentum (which involves the temporal component that adds together still “film cells”) belongs to the inner world.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a world of infinite activities and outcomes that only seems to result in a smooth, continuous path.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“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 consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but provides a way of visualizing things.)”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understanding of life cannot be found only by looking at cells and molecules. Conversely, physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Why are the laws of physics exactly balanced for animal life to exist? For example,”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the "now"-where is time? Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description of motion and events? In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt on whether there exists anything outside of an "eternal now" that includes the human mind's tendency to think and daydream.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“In a sense, the experiment had been contaminated. But as more sophisticated experiments were devised (see the next chapter), it became obvious that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to cause the wave-function to collapse.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. 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.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“When the whip-poor-will sings his melody in the moonlight, and it is answered by your own heart beating a bit faster in awed appreciation, who in their right mind would say that it was all conjured by imbecilic billiard balls slamming each other by the laws of chance? No observant person would be able to utter such a thing, which is why it always strikes me as slightly amazing that any scientist can aver, with a straight face, that they stand there at the lectern—a conscious, functioning organism with trillions of perfectly functioning parts—as the sole result of falling dice. Our least gesture affirms the magic of life’s design.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Sights, tactile experiences, odors - all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are "out there" except by the convention of language. 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.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“[I]n the years that have passed, I have come to believe that the questions cannot all be solved by a science of behavior. What is consciousness? Why does it exist? Leaving these unanswered is almost like building and launching a rocket to nowhere - full of noise and real accomplishment, but exposing a vacuum right smack in its raison d'être.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“In 2008, in an article in the journal Progress in Physics, Elmira A. Isaeva said, “The problem of quantum physics, as a choice of one alternative at quantum measurement and a problem of philosophy as to how consciousness functions, is deeply connected with relations between these two. It is quite possible that in solving these two problems, it is likely that experiments in the quantum mechanics will include workings of a brain and consciousness, and it will then be possible to present a new basis for the theory of consciousness.” This—in a physics journal!”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe