Biocentrism Quotes

“In truth, there can be no between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“A full understanding of life cannot be found only by looking at cells and molecules.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Mystery is never disproof.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“And, though it doesn’t seem possible, it gets spookier still. If we now let photon y hit the slits and the measuring screen first, and a split second later measure its twin far away, we should have fooled the quantum laws. The first photon already ran its course before we troubled its distant twin. We should therefore be able to learn both photons’ polarization and been treated to an interference pattern. Right? Wrong. When this experiment is performed, we get a non-interference pattern. The y-photon stops taking paths through both slits retroactively; the interference is gone. Apparently, photon y somehow knew that we would eventually find out its polarization, even though its twin had not yet encountered our polarization-detection apparatus. What”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“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

“A biologist is at first glance perhaps an unlikely source for a new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and some cosmologists predict that a unifying theory of the universe may be discovered in the next two decades, it is perhaps inevitable that a biologist finally seeks to unify existing theories of the “physical world” with those of the “living world.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“This view of the world in which life and consciousness are the bottom line in understanding the larger universe—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We all stand on the shoulders of one another—and all together on nothing.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We scientists have looked at the world for so long that we no longer challenge its reality.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“As Emerson described it in The Over Soul, “The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Energy is known with scientific certainty to be deathless; it can neither be created nor destroyed. It merely changes form. Because absolutely everything has an energy-identity, nothing is exempt from this immortality.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Remember that everything you perceive—even this page—is actively, repeatedly, being reconstructed inside your head. It’s happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“ΔT = t√1-v2/c2”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“They’re telling us that an observer determines physical behavior of “external” objects.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We’re back to quantum theory’s complementarity—that you can measure and learn just one of a pair of characteristics but never both at the same time. If you fully learn about one, you will know nothing about the other. And,”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), which says that everything that can happen, does happen. The universe continually branches out like budding yeast into an infinitude of universes that contain every possibility, no matter how remote. You now occupy one of the universes. But there are innumerable other universes in which another “you,” who once studied photography instead of accounting, did indeed move to Paris and marry that girl you once met while hitchhiking. According to this view, embraced by such modern theorists as Stephen Hawking, our universe has no superpositions or contradictions at all, no spooky action, and no non-locality: seemingly contradictory quantum phenomena, along with all the personal choices you think you didn’t make, exist today in countless parallel universes. Which is true? All the entangled experiments of the past decades point increasingly toward confirming Copenhagen more than anything else. And this, as we’ve said, strongly supports biocentrism. Some physicists, like Einstein, have suggested that “hidden variables” (that is, things not yet discovered or understood) might ultimately explain the strange counterlogical quantum behavior. Maybe the experimental apparatus itself contaminates the behavior of the objects being observed, in ways no one has yet conceived.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“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 Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“At the twilight of life, reached too quickly by us all, we reflect on our loved ones and it always carries an aura of the unreal, a dream-like nature. “Did that really happen?” we wonder when a particular image comes to mind, especially of a dear one who has long departed. We feel as if we are in a waking reverie, a hall of mirrors, where youth and old age, dream and wakefulness, tragedy and elation, flicker as rapidly as frames of an old silent movie.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“And, though it doesn’t seem possible, it gets spookier still. If we now let photon y hit the slits and the measuring screen first, and a split second later measure its twin far away, we should have fooled the quantum laws. The first photon already ran its course before we troubled its distant twin. We should therefore be able to learn both photons’ polarization and been treated to an interference pattern. Right? Wrong. When this experiment is performed, we get a non-interference pattern. The y-photon stops taking paths through both slits retroactively; the interference is gone. Apparently, photon y somehow knew that we would eventually find out its polarization, even though its twin had not yet encountered our polarization-detection apparatus.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“One does occasionally observe a tendency for the beginning zoological textbooks to take the unwary reader by a hop, skip, and jump from the little steaming pond or the beneficent chemical crucible of the sea, into the lower world of life with such sureness and rapidity that it is easy to assume that there is no mystery about this matter at all, or, if there is, that it is a very little one.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Obviously, there’s no possible rebuttal to a suggestion that an unknown variable is producing some result because the phrase itself is as unhelpful as a politician’s election promise.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Any honest metaphorical summary of the current state of explaining the cosmos as a whole is . . . a swamp. And this particular Everglade is one where the alligators of common sense must be evaded at every turn.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“No matter which logic one adopts, one has to come to terms with the fact that we are living in a very peculiar cosmos.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“The avoidance or postponement of answering such deep and basic questions was traditionally the province of religion, which excelled at it. Every thinking person always knew that an insuperable mystery lay at the final square of the game board, and that there was no possible way of avoiding it. So, when we ran out of explanations and processes and causes that preceded the previous cause, we said, “God did it.” Now, this book is not going to discuss spiritual beliefs nor take sides on whether this line of thinking is wrong or right. It will only observe that invoking a deity provided something that was crucially required: it permitted the inquiry to reach some sort of agreed-upon endpoint. As recently as a century ago, science texts routinely cited God and “God’s glory” whenever they reached the truly deep and unanswerable portions of the issue at hand.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“such lines of inquiry start to smack of philosophy, and it is far better to avoid that murky swamp and answer this by science alone.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Currently, the disciplines of biology, physics, cosmology, and all their sub-branches are generally practiced by those with little knowledge of the others. It may take a multidisciplinary approach to achieve tangible results that incorporate biocentrism. The authors are optimistic that this will happen in time. And what, after all, is time?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“We think there is an enclosing wall, a circumference to us. Yet, Bell’s experiment implies that there are cause-effect linkages that transcend our ordinary classical way of thinking. “Men esteem truth remote,” wrote Thoreau, “in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. . . . But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“As the founder of modern behaviorism, Skinner did not attempt to understand the processes occurring within the individual; he had the reserve and prudence to consider the mind a “black box.” Once, in one of our conversations about the nature of the universe, about space and time, Skinner said, “I don’t know how you can think like that. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about the nature of space and time.“ His humility revealed his epistemological wisdom. However, I also saw in the softness of his glance the helplessness that the topic occasioned.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations . . . . Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing . . . . It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe