Ye Olde Breakthrough:

Individualism Recognizes Itself
- Reality Is All About Me

by RAR

In 2007, eminent cell research scientist Robert Lanza, working with science writer Bob Berman, published Biocentrism, a biologically-based alternative to the traditional scientific worldview of physics and chemistry as the key to understanding the universe.

One needn't go any further - though there is a lot farther to go - than that distinction in approach to begin to understand what the M.D. Lanza has been thinking. His approach is to explore the world from within rather than from without. We all, as living components of a connected whole, though not connected in immutable ways, create the reality that we experience, now, in the future, and in the past. It is all connected, and not in a unidirectional way.

This approach tends to draw the support of soft science types like fellow M.D. Deepak Chopra, while drawing unsupportive shrugs from research types who like to imagine that study will eventually reveal the complete truth of all physical things. Somehow, stated that way, Lanza's exercise seems eminently more doable, i.e., if you can think  of a thing that thing stands an improved chance of becoming so.

Lanza offers seven principles of Biocentrism:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. 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.

4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The 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.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

It is a little difficult to read that list and distinguish Biocentrism from mere observational acceptance and religion, in its most esoteric and existential forms. David Letterman used to do this skit where some screwball act would come out and perform and then he and Paul Shafer would decide, Is that anything?

On one level, it is hard to know for sure that the theory of Biocentrism really is anything. It certainly doesn't seem useful as a starting place for further scientific research. A Biocentrist could probably argue that there is no useful research anyway outside the realm of biological research, and its related life sciences, and that to explore otherwise may serve to distract humankind from its path. Certainly we see examples of that all the time, including applications of learned scientific principles of physics and chemistry that have only made our world a far more toxic and dangerous place.

Viewed through that lens, Biocentrism provides a framework for making things well, in the way of the ancients, and is that not also what religion in all of its dogma portends to be, a template for living well with the consequences of your actions?

This worldview is not for the faint of heart.

Biocentrism, in its blend of theoretical mathematics and quantum physics, offers a doorway to feeling the inescapable weight of all things, the veritable heaviness of being.

It places responsibility for the worlds we experience entirely within our collective self (here, then and otherwise), and the space-time thing makes it a particularly compelling load to bear.

Reality -- mine, yours and theirs -- is a bitch.