BIOCENTRISM Read online

  this. But biocentrism supplies answers, as we shall see.

  There’s more. Brilliant equations that accurately explain the

  vagaries of motion contradict observations about how things behave

  on the small scale. (Or, to affix the correct labels on it, Einstein’s

  relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics.) Theories of the

  origins of the cosmos screech to a halt when they reach the very

  event of interest, the Big Bang. Attempts to combine all forces in

  order to produce an underlying oneness—currently in vogue is

  string theory—require invoking at least eight extra dimensions,

  none of which have the slightest basis in human experience, nor can

  be experimentally verified in any way.

  When it comes right down to it, today’s science is amazingly

  good at figuring out how the parts work. The clock has been taken

  apart, and we can accurately count the number of teeth in each

  wheel and gear, and ascertain the rate at which the flywheel spins.

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  b i o C e N T r i s m

  We know that Mars rotates in 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 23 seconds,

  and this information is as solid as it comes. What eludes us is the big

  picture. We provide interim answers, we create exquisite new tech-

  nologies from our ever-expanding knowledge of physical processes,

  we dazzle ourselves with our applications of our newfound discover-

  ies. We do badly in just one area, which unfortunately encompasses

  all the bottom-line issues: what is the nature of this thing we call

  reality, the universe as a whole?

  Any honest metaphorical summary of the current state of

  explaining the cosmos as a whole is . . . a swamp. And this particu-

  lar Everglade is one where the alligators of common sense must be

  evaded at every turn.

  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 insuper-

  able 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 explana-

  tions 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.

  Today, such humility is in short supply. God of course has been

  discarded, which is appropriate in a strictly scientific process, but no

  other entity or device has arisen to stand in for the ultimate “I don’t

  have a clue.” To the contrary, some scientists (Stephen Hawking and

  the late Carl Sagan come to mind) insist that a “theory of every-

  thing” is just around the corner, and then we’ll essentially know it

  all—any day now.

  It hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen. The reason is not for

  any lack of effort or intelligence. It’s that the very underlying world-

  view is flawed. So now, superimposed on the previous theoretical

  m U d d y U N i v e r s e

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  contradictions, stands a new layer of unknowns that pop into our

  awareness with frustrating regularity.

  But a solution lies within our grasp, a solution hinted at by

  the frequency with which, as the old model breaks down, we see

  an answer peeking out from under a corner. This is the underly-

  ing problem: we have ignored a critical component of the cosmos,

  shunted it out of the way because we didn’t know what to do with it.

  This component is consciousness.

  In the BegInnIng

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  there wAs . . . whAt?

  All things are one.

  —Heraclitus, On the Universe (540–480 bc)

  How can a man whose career revolves around stretching the sci-

  entific method to its outer bounds—stem cell research, animal

  cloning, reversing the aging process at the cellular level—bear

  witness to the limits of his profession?

  But there is more to life than can be explained by our science. I

  readily recall how everyday life makes this obvious.

  Just a short time ago, I crossed the causeway of the small island

  I call home. The pond was dark and still. I stopped and turned off

  my flashlight. Several strange glowing objects caught my attention

  on the side of the road. I thought they were some of those jack-o’-

  lantern mushrooms, Clitocybe illudens, whose luminescent caps had

  just started to push up through the decaying leaves. I squatted down

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  to observe one of them with my flashlight. It turned out to be a

  glowworm, the luminous larvae of the European beetle Lampyris

  noctiluca. There was a primitiveness in its little segmented oval body, like some trilobite that had just crawled out of the Cambrian sea

  500 million years ago. There we were, the beetle and I, two living

  objects that had entered into each other’s worlds, and yet were fun-

  damentally linked together all along. It ceased emitting its greenish

  light and I, for my part, turned off my flashlight.

  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?

  It is true that the laws of physics and chemistry can tackle the

  rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can

  recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of

  animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the carbohydrates,

  lipids, and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this luminous

  little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understand-

  ing 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.

  It seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere

  of physical reality just as I was the center of mine. We were con-

  nected not only by intertwined consciousness, nor simply by being

  alive at the same moment in Earth’s 3.9-billion-year biological his-

  tory but by something both mysterious and suggestive—a pattern

  that is a template for the cosmos itself.

  Just as the mere existence of a postage stamp of Elvis would

  reveal to an alien visitor much more than a frozen snapshot of pop

  music history, the slug had a tale to tell that could illuminate even

  the depths of a wormhole—if we only had the right mindset to

  understand it.

  Although the beetle stayed quiescent there in the darkness, it

  had little walking legs, neatly l
ined up under its segmented body,

  i N T H e b e g i N N i N g T H e r e w a s . . . w H a T ?

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  and possessed sensory cells that transmitted messages to the cells in

  its brain. Perhaps the creature was too primitive to collect data and

  pinpoint my location in space. Maybe my existence in its universe

  was limited to some huge and hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight

  in the air. I do not know. But as I stood up and left, I no doubt

  dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the glowworm’s

  little world.

  Our science to date has failed to recognize those special proper-

  ties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. 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.

  It is a vast mystery that I have pursued my entire life with a lot of

  help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the greatest

  and most lauded minds of the modern age. I have also come to con-

  clusions that would shock the conventions of my predecessors, plac-

  ing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory

  of everything (or TOE) that has evaded other disciplines.

  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the

  human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to

  understanding the first second of time after the Big Bang rests in our

  innate human desire for completeness and totality.

  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account

  one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature

  that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives

  names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight,

  that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most

  familiar and most mysterious—conscious awareness. As Emerson

  wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism

  of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but medi-

  ately, 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.”

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  George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named,

  came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he

  would say, “are our perceptions.”

  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 “physi-

  cal world” with those of the “living world.” What other discipline

  can approach it? In that regard, biology should really be the first and

  last study of science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by the

  humanly created natural sciences used to understand the universe.

  A deep problem lurks, too: we have failed to protect science

  against speculative theories that have so entered mainstream think-

  ing that they now masquerade as fact. The “ether” of the nineteenth

  century; the “space–time” of Einstein; the “string theory” of the new

  millennium with new dimensions blowing up in different realms,

  and not only strings but “bubbles” shimmering down the byways

  of the universe are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen

  dimensions (up to one hundred in some theories) are now envi-

  sioned everywhere, some curled up like soda-straws at every point

  in space.

  Today’s preoccupation with unprovable physical “theories of

  everything” is a sacrilege to science itself, a strange detour from the

  purpose of the scientific method, whose bible has always decreed

  that we must question everything relentlessly and not worship what

  Bacon called “The Idols of the Mind.” Modern physics has become

  like Swift’s Kingdom of Laputa, flying precariously on an island

  above the Earth and indifferent to the world beneath. When science

  tries to resolve a theory’s conflicts by adding and subtracting dimen-

  sions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, dimensions

  unknown to our senses and for which not a shred of observational

  or experimental evidence exists, we need to take a time-out and

  examine our dogmas. And when ideas are thrown around with no

  i N T H e b e g i N N i N g T H e r e w a s . . . w H a T ?

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  physical backing and no hope of experimental confirmation, one

  may wonder whether this can still be called science at all. “If you’re

  not observing,” says a relativity expert, Professor Tarun Biswas of

  the State University of New York, “There’s no point in coming up

  with theories.”

  But perhaps the cracks in the system are just the points that let

  the light shine more directly on the mystery of life.

  The root of this present waywardness is always the same—the

  attempt of physicists to overstep the legitimate boundaries of sci-

  ence. The questions they most lust to solve are actually bound up

  with the issues of life and consciousness. But it’s a Sisyphusian task:

  physics can furnish no true answers for them.

  If the most primary questions of the universe have traditionally

  been tackled by physicists attempting to create grand unified theo-

  ries—exciting and glamorous as they are—such theories remain an

  evasion, if not a reversal of the central mystery of knowledge: that

  the laws of the world somehow produced the observer in the first

  place! 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.

  This is not some minor tweak in worldview. Our entire education

  system in all disciplines, the construction of our language, and our

  socially accepted “givens”—those starting points in conversations—

  revolve around a bottom-line mindset that assumes a separate uni-

  verse “out there” into which we have each individually arrived on a

  very temporary basis. It is further assumed that we accurately per-

  ceive this external pre-existing reality and play little or no role in its

  appearance.

  So the first step in constructing a credible alternative is to ques-

  tion the standard view that the universe would exist even if it were

  empty of life, and absent any consciousness or perception of it.

  Although overturning the widespread current mindset, ingrained as

  deeply as it has been, may require the remainder of this book and

  perusal of strong, current evidence from disparate sources, we can

  certainly begin with simple logic. Certainly, great earlier thinkers

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  have insisted that logic alone is all that’s needed to see the universe

  in a fresh light, not complex equations or experimental data using

  $50 billion particle colliders. Indeed, a bit of thought will make it

  obvious that without perception, there can be no reality.

  Absent the act of seeing, thinking, hearing—in short, awareness

  in its myriad aspects—what have we got? We can believe and aver

  that there’s a universe out there even if all living creatures were non-

  existent, but this idea is merely a thought and a thought requires a

  thinking organism. Without any organism, what if anything is really

  there? We’ll delve into this in much greater detail in the next chap-

  ter; for now, we can probably agree that 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.

  For the moment, therefore, we’ll accept on a provisional level

  that what we’d clearly and unambiguously recognize as existence

  must begin with life and perception. Indeed, what could existence

  mean, absent consciousness of any kind?

  Take the seemingly undeniable logic that your kitchen is always

  there, its contents assuming all their familiar forms, shapes, and col-

  ors, whether or not you are in it. At night, you click off the light,

  walk through the door, and leave for the bedroom. Of course it’s

  there, unseen, all through the night. Right?

  But consider: the refrigerator, stove, and everything else are com-

  posed of a shimmering swarm of matter/energy. Quantum theory, to

  which we will devote two full chapters, tells us that not a single one

  of those subatomic particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather,

  they merely exist as a range of probabilities that are unmanifest. In

  the presence of an observer—that is, when you go back in to get a

  drink of water—each one’s wave function collapses and it assumes

  an actual position, a physical reality. Until then, it’s merely a swarm

  of possibilities. And wait, if that seems too far out, then forget quan-

  tum madness and stay with everyday science, which comes to a sim-

  ilar conclusion because the shapes, colors, and forms known as your

  kitchen are seen as they are solely because photons of light from the

  overhead bulb bounce off the various objects and then interact with