BIOCENTRISM Read online

  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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  your brain through a complex set of retinal and neural intermediar-

  ies. This is undeniable—it’s basic seventh-grade science. The prob-

  lem is, light doesn’t have any color nor any visual characteristics at all, as we shall see in the next chapter. So while you may think that

  the kitchen as you remember it was “there” in your absence, the real-

  ity is that nothing remotely resembling what you can imagine could

  be present when a consciousness is not interacting. (If this seems

  impossible, stay tuned: this is one of the easiest, most demonstrable

  aspects of biocentrism.)

  Indeed, it is here that biocentrism arrives at a very different view

  of reality than that which has been generally embraced for the last

  several centuries. Most people, in and out of the sciences, imag-

  ine the external world to exist on its own, with an appearance that

  more or less resembles what we ourselves see. Human or animal

  eyes, according to this view, are mere windows that accurately let

  in the world. If our personal window ceases to exist, as in death,

  or is painted black and opaque, as in blindness, that doesn’t in any

  way alter the continued existence of the external reality or its sup-

  posed “actual” appearance. A tree is still there, the moon still shines,

  whether or not we are cognizing them. They have an independent

  existence. By this reasoning, the human eye and brain have been

  designed to let us cognize the actual visual appearance of things,

  and to alter nothing. True, a dog may see an autumn maple solely in

  shades of gray, and an eagle may perceive much greater detail among

  its leaves, but most creatures basically apprehend the same visually

  real object, which persists even if no eyes are upon it.

  Not so, says biocentrism.

  This “Is it really there?” issue is ancient, and of course predates

  biocentrism, which makes no pretense about being the first to take

  a stance about it. Biocentrism, however, explains why one view and

  not the other must be correct. The converse is equally true: once

  one fully understands that there is no independent external universe

  outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place.

  the sound

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  of A fAllIng tree

  Who hasn’t considered or at least heard the old question, “If a

  tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a

  sound?”

  If we conduct a quick survey of friends and family, we shall find

  that the vast majority of people answer decisively in the affirmative.

  “Of course a falling tree makes a sound,” someone recently replied,

  with a touch of pique, as if this were a question too dumb to merit

  a moment’s contemplation. By taking this stance, what people are

  actually averring is their belief in an objective, independent reality.

  Obviously, the prevailing mindset is of a universe that exists just as

  well without us as with us. This fits in tidily with the Western view

  held at least since Biblical times, that “little me” is of small impor-

  tance or consequence in the cosmos.

  Few consider (or perhaps have sufficient science background

  for) a realistic sonic appraisal of what actually occurs when that

  tree falls in the woods. What is the process that produces sound?

  So, if the reader will forgive a quick return to fifth-grade Earth Sci-

  ence, here’s a quick summary: sound is created by a disturbance

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  in some medium, usually air, although sound travels even faster

  and more efficiently through denser materials such as water or

  steel. Limbs, branches, and trunks violently striking the ground

  create rapid pulses of air. A deaf person can readily feel some of

  these pulsations; they are particularly blatant on the skin when

  the pulses repeat with a frequency of five to thirty times a second.

  So, what we have in hand with the tumbling tree, in actuality, are

  rapid air-pressure variations, which spread out by traveling through

  the surrounding medium at around 750 mph. As they do so, they

  lose their coherency until the background evenness of the air is re-

  established. This, according to simple science, is what occurs even

  when a brain-ear mechanism is absent—a series of greater and

  lesser air-pressure passages. Tiny, rapid, puffs of wind. There is no

  sound attached to them.

  Now, let’s lend an ear to the scene. If someone is nearby, the

  air puffs physically cause the ear’s tympanic membrane (eardrum)

  to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing

  between 20 and 20,000 times a second (with an upper limit more

  like 10,000 for people over forty, and even less for those of us whose

  misspent youth included earsplitting rock concerts). Air that puffs

  15 times a second is not intrinsically different from air that pulses

  30 times, yet the former will never result in a human perception

  of sound because of the design of our neural architecture. In any

  case, nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical sig-

  nals to a section of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise.

  This experience, then, is 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 con-

  jure 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.

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  When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes

  a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their

  inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too

  difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow con-

  tinue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.

  Now consider a lit candle placed on a table in that same empty

  forest. This is not an advisable setup, but let’s pretend Smokey the

  Bear is supervising the whole thing with an extinguisher at the

  ready, while we consider whether the flame has intrinsic brightness

  and a yellow color when no one’s watching.

  Even if we contradict quantum experiments and allow that elec-

  trons and all other particles have assumed actual positions in the

  absence of observers (much more on this later), the flame is still

  merely a hot gas. Like any source of light, it emits photons or tiny

  packets of waves of electromagnetic energy. Each consists of electri-

  cal and magnetic pulses. These momentary exhibitions of electricity

  and magnetism are the whole show, the nature of light itself.

  It is easy
to recall from everyday experience that neither elec-

  tricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it’s not

  hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright

  or colored about that candle flame. Now let these same invisible

  electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the

  waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in

  length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver

  a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in

  turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the

  line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipi-

  tal lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading

  complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjec-

  tively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a

  place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.” Other

  creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something

  altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an

  entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn’t a “bright yel-

  low” light “out there” at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of

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  electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we’d call a yellow flame. Again, it’s correlative.

  What about if you touch something? Isn’t it solid? Push on the

  trunk of the fallen tree and you feel pressure. But this too is a sensa-

  tion strictly inside your brain and only “projected” to your fingers,

  whose existence also lies within the mind. Moreover, that sensation

  of pressure is caused not by any contact with a solid, but by the fact

  that every atom has negatively charged electrons in its outer shells.

  As we all know, charges of the same type repel each other, so the

  bark’s electrons repel yours, and you feel this electrical repulsive force stopping your fingers from penetrating any further. Nothing solid

  ever meets any other solids when you push on a tree. The atoms in

  your fingers are each as empty as a vacant football stadium in which

  a single fly sits on the fifty-yard line. If we needed solids to stop us

  (rather than energy fields) , our fingers could easily penetrate the tree as if we were swiping at fog.

  Consider an even more intuitive example—rainbows. The sud-

  den appearance of those prismatic colors juxtaposed between moun-

  tains can take our breath away. But the truth is we are absolutely

  necessary for the rainbow’s existence. When nobody’s there, there

  simply is no rainbow.

  Not that again, you might be thinking, but hang in there—this

  time it’s more obvious than ever. Three components are necessary

  for a rainbow. There must be sun, there must be raindrops, and

  there must be a conscious eye (or its surrogate, film) at the correct

  geometric location. If your eyes look directly opposite the sun (that

  is, at the antisolar point, which is always marked by the shadow of

  your head), the sunlit water droplets will produce a rainbow that

  surrounds that precise spot at a distance of forty-two degrees. But

  your eyes must be located at that spot where the refracted light from

  the sunlit droplets converges to complete the required geometry. A

  person next to you will complete his or her own geometry, and will

  be at the apex of a cone for an entirely different set of droplets, and

  will therefore see a separate rainbow. Their rainbow is very likely to

  look like yours, but it needn’t be so. The droplets their eyes intercept

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  may be of a different size, and larger droplets make for a more vivid

  rainbow while at the same time robbing it of blue.

  Then, too, if the sunlit droplets are very nearby, as from a lawn

  sprinkler, the person nearby may not see a rainbow at all. Your rain-

  bow is yours alone. But now we get to our point: what if no one’s

  there? Answer: no rainbow. An eye–brain system (or its surrogate,

  a camera, whose results will only be viewed later by a conscious

  observer) must be present to complete the geometry. As real as the

  rainbow looks, it requires your presence just as much as it requires

  sun and rain.

  In the absence of anyone or any animal, it is easy to see that no

  rainbow is present. Or, if you prefer, there are countless trillions of

  potential bows, each one blurrily offset from the next by the minut-

  est margin. None of this is speculative or philosophical. It’s the basic

  science that would be encountered in any grade-school Earth Sci-

  ence class.

  Few would dispute the subjective nature of rainbows, which fig-

  ure so prominently in fairytales that they seem only marginally to

  belong to our world in the first place. It is when we fully grasp that

  the sight of a skyscraper is just as dependent on the observer that we

  have made the first required leap to the true nature of things.

  This leads us to the first principle of biocentrism:

  First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is

  a process that involves our consciousness.

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  lIghts And ActIon!

  Long before medical school, long before my research into the life

  of cells and cloning human embryos, I was fascinated by the

  complex and elusive wonder of the natural world. Some of these

  early experiences led to the development of my biocentric view-

  point: from my boyhood exploring nature and my adventures with

  a tiny primate I ordered for $18.95 from an ad at the back of Field

  and Stream magazine to my genetic experiments with chickens as a

  young teenager, which resulted in me being taken under the wing of

  Stephen Kuffler, a renowned neurobiologist at Harvard.

  My road to Kuffler began, appropriately enough, with science

  fairs, which for me were an antidote against those who looked down

  on me because of my family’s circumstances. Once, after my sister

  was suspended from school, the principal told my mother she was

  not fit to be a parent. By trying earnestly, I thought I could improve

  my situation. I had a vision of accepting an award someday in front

  of all those teachers and classmates who laughed when I said I was

  going to enter the science fair. I applied myself to a new project,

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  an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens

  and make them black. My biology teacher told me it was impossible,

  and my parents thought I was just trying to hatch chicken eggs and

  refused to drive me to the farm to get them.

  I persuaded myself to make a journey by bus and trolley car

  from my house in Stoughton to Harvard Medical School, one of the

  world’s most prestigious institutions of medical science. I mounted

  the stairs that led up to the front doors; the huge granite slabs were

  worn by past generations. Once inside, I hoped the men of science

  would receive me kindly and aid in my efforts. This was science,

  wasn’t it, an
d shouldn’t that have been enough? As it turned out, I

  never got past the guard.

  I felt like Dorothy at Emerald City when the palace guard

  said, “Go away!” I found some breathing space at the back of the

  building to figure out my next move. The doors were all locked. I

  stood by the dumpster for perhaps half an hour. Then I saw a man

  approaching me, no taller than I was, clad in a T-shirt and khaki

  work pants—the janitor, I supposed, coming in the back door and

  all. Thinking that, I realized for the first time how I was going to

  get inside.

  In another moment, we were standing face to face inside. “He

  doesn’t know or care that I’m here,” I thought. “He just cleans the

  floors.”

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I have to ask a Harvard professor a question.”

  “Are you looking for any professor in particular?”

  “Well, actually, no—it’s about DNA and nucleoprotein. I’m try-

  ing to induce melanin synthesis in albino chickens,” I said. My words

  met with a stare of surprise. Seeing the impact they were having, I

  went on, though I was certain he didn’t know what DNA was. “You

  see, albinism is an autosomal recessive disease . . .”

  As we got to talking, I told him how I worked in the school

  cafeteria myself, and how I was good friends with Mr. Chapman,

  the janitor who lived up the street. He asked me if my father was a

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  doctor. I laughed. “No, he’s a professional gambler. He plays poker.”

  It was at that moment, I think, we became friends. After all, we were

  both, I assumed, from the same underprivileged class.

  Of course, what I didn’t know was that he was Dr. Stephen Kuf-

  fler, the world-famous neurobiologist who had been nominated for

  the Nobel Prize. Had he told me so, I would have rushed off. At the

  time, however, I felt like a schoolmaster lecturing to a pupil. I told

  him about the experiment I had performed in my basement—how I

  altered the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black.

  “Your parents must be proud of you,” he said.

  “They don’t know what I do,” I said. “I stay out of their way. They

  just think I’m trying to hatch chicken eggs.”

  “They didn’t drive you here?”