BIOCENTRISM Read online

  “No, they’d kill me if they knew where I was. They think I’m

  playing out in my treehouse.”

  He insisted upon introducing me to a “Harvard doctor.” I hesi-

  tated. After all, he was just the janitor, and I didn’t want him to get

  into trouble.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said with a little grin.

  He took me into a room crammed with sophisticated equipment.

  A “doctor” looking through an instrument with strange, manipula-

  tive probes was about to insert an electrode into the nerve cell of a

  caterpillar (although I didn’t know it at the time, the “doctor” was

  actually a graduate student, Josh Sanes, who is now a member of

  the National Academy of Sciences and Director of the Center for

  Brain Science at Harvard University). Beside him, a small centrifuge

  loaded with samples was going round and round. My friend whis-

  pered something over the doctor’s shoulder. The whining sound of

  the motor drowned out what he said. The doctor smiled at me with

  a curious gentle glance.

  “I’ll stop back later,” my newfound friend said.

  From that moment on, everything was a dream come true. The

  doctor and I talked all afternoon. And then I looked at the clock.

  “Oh, no!” I said. “It’s late. I must go!”

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  b i o C e N T r i s m

  I hurried home and went straight to my treehouse. That eve-

  ning, the call of my mother penetrated the woods, sounding like the

  whistle of a locomotive: “Rob—by! Time for dinner!”

  No one had any idea that evening—including me—that I had

  met one of the greatest scientists in the world. In the 1950s, Kuf-

  fler had perfected an idea that combined several medical disciplines,

  fusing elements of physiology, biochemistry, histology, anatomy, and

  electron microscopy into a single group. His new name for the field:

  “Neurobiology.”

  Harvard’s Department of Neurobiology was created in 1966 with

  Kuffler as its chairman. As a medical student, I eventually ended up

  using his From Neurons to Brain as a textbook.

  I could not have predicted it, but in the months ahead Dr. Kuf-

  fler would help me enter the world of science. I returned many

  times, chatting with the scientists in his lab as they probed the neu-

  rons of caterpillars. In fact, I recently came across a letter Josh Sanes

  sent to the Jackson Laboratories at the time: “If you check your

  records, you will find that Bob ordered four mice from the labo-

  ratories a few months ago. That bankrupted him for a month. At

  present, he is faced with a choice between going to his prom or buy-

  ing a few dozen more eggs.” Although I ultimately decided to go to

  the prom, I became so intrigued by the importance of the “sensory-

  motor system”—of consciousness and animal sense perception—

  that I went back to Harvard to work with the famed psychologist

  B.F. Skinner several years later.

  Oh, and by the way, I won the science fair with my chicken proj-

  ect. And the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the

  whole school.

  Like Emerson and Thoreau—two of the greatest American Tran-

  scendentalists—my youth was spent exploring the forested woods

  of Massachusetts, which teemed with life. More important, I found

  that for each life, there was a universe, its own universe. Witnessing my fellow creatures, I began to see that each appeared to generate a

  sphere of existence, and realized that our perceptions may be unique

  but perhaps not special.

  L i g H T s a N d a C T i o N !

  2 9

  One of my earliest memories of boyhood was venturing beyond

  the mown boundary of our backyard into the wild, overgrown

  region bordering the woods. Today, the world’s population is twice

  what it was then, but even now many kids undoubtedly still know

  where the known world ends and the wild, slightly spooky and

  dangerous, untamed universe begins. One day, after crossing that

  boundary from the orderly to the feral, and after working my way

  through the thickets, I came to an old, gnarled apple tree smothered

  in vines. I squeezed my way into the hidden clearing underneath it.

  It seemed wonderful, on the one hand, that I had discovered a place

  that no other human being knew existed; on the other hand, I was

  confused about how such a place could exist if I hadn’t discovered

  it. I was raised as a Catholic, so I thought I had found a special place

  on God’s stage—and from some celestial vantage point, I was being

  scrutinized and watched by the Supreme Creator, perhaps almost as

  narrowly as I, as a medical student with a microscope, would one

  day scrutinize the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop

  of water.

  At that moment long ago, other questions came to disturb my

  wonder, though I did not yet appreciate that those musings were

  at least as ancient as my species itself. If, indeed, God had made

  the world, then who made God? This question kept tormenting me

  long before I would see micrographs of DNA or the tracks of mat-

  ter and antimatter created in a bubble chamber by the collision of

  high-energy particles. I felt on both an instinctive and intellectual

  level that it did not make sense for this place to exist if no one

  observed it.

  My home life, as I’ve already implied, was less than the Norman

  Rockwell ideal. My father was a professional gambler who played

  cards for a living, and none of my three sisters finished high school.

  The efforts that my older sister and I made to escape beatings at

  home steeled me to expect a life of confrontation. Because my par-

  ents didn’t allow me to hang around the house unless to eat or sleep,

  I was basically on my own. For play, I took excursions deep into

  the surrounding forests, following streams and animal tracks. No

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  b i o C e N T r i s m

  swamp or creek bed was too muddy or dangerous. I was sure no

  one had ever seen or been to those places, and I imagined that so far

  as almost everyone was concerned, they didn’t exist. But, of course,

  they did exist. They teemed with as much life as any large city, with

  snakes, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, and birds.

  My understanding of nature began on those journeys. I rolled

  logs looking for salamanders and climbed trees to investigate bird

  nests and holes in trees. As I pondered the larger existential ques-

  tions about the nature of life, I began to intuit that there was some-

  thing wrong with the static, objective reality I was being taught in

  school. The animals I observed had their own perceptions of the

  world, their own realities. Although it wasn’t the world of human

  beings—of parking lots and malls—it was just as real to them.

  What, then, was really going on in this universe?

  Once I found an old tree with knots and dead limbs. There was

  a giant hole in its trunk, and I couldn’t resist becoming another Jack

  to this beanstalk. Quietly taking my socks off and slipping them

  onto my hands, I reached inside the hole to investigate. A gr
eat beat-

  ing of flying feathers startled me as I felt claws and a beak sink into

  my fingers. As I withdrew my hand, a small screech owl with tufted

  ears stared back at me. Here was another creature, living in its own

  world and yet a realm it somehow shared with me. I let the little fel-

  low go, but I went home a slightly changed young boy. My world of

  home and neighborhood became but one part of a universe inhab-

  ited by consciousness—the same and yet seemingly different from

  mine.

  I was around nine when the inexplicable and elusive quality of

  life truly gripped me. It had become increasingly clear that there was

  something fundamentally unexplainable about life, a force that I felt,

  though I didn’t yet understand. It was on this day that I set out to

  trap a woodchuck that had its burrow next to Barbara’s house. Her

  husband Eugene—Mr. O’Donnell—was one of the last blacksmiths

  in New England, and as I arrived, I noticed that the chimney cap

  over his shop was rotating round and round, squeak, squeak, rattle,

  rattle. Then the blacksmith suddenly emerged with his shotgun in

  L i g H T s a N d a C T i o N !

  3 1

  hand and, scarcely giving me a glance, blew it off. The chimney cap’s

  noise came to a sudden stop. No, I told myself, I didn’t want to be

  caught by him.

  The hole of the woodchuck was not easy to reach, lying in such

  close proximity to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, I remember, that I could

  hear the bellows that fanned the coals in his forge. I crawled noise-

  lessly through the long grass, occasionally stirring a grasshopper or

  a butterfly. I dug a hole under a clump of grass and set a new steel

  trap that I had just purchased at the hardware store. Then I placed

  dirt from the hole in front and concealed the trap under soil at the

  edge of the hole, making certain that there were no stones or roots

  to obstruct the functioning of the metal device. Lastly, I took a stake

  and, rock in hand, pounded it again and again, driving it into the

  ground. This was my mistake. I was still so engaged, I didn’t notice

  anyone approaching, so I was thoroughly startled to hear:

  “What are you doing?”

  I looked up to see Mr. O’Donnell standing there, his eyes care-

  fully inspecting the ground, slowly and inquiringly, until he spotted

  the trap. I said nothing, trying to restrain myself from crying.

  “Give me that trap, child,” said Mr. O’Donnell, “and come with

  me.”

  I was much too afraid of him to refuse compliance. I did as I was

  told, and followed him into the shop, a strange new world crammed

  with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds

  hanging from the ceiling. Against the wall was his forge, opening into

  the center of the room. Starting the bellows, Mr. O’Donnell tossed

  the trap over the coals and a tiny fire appeared underneath, getting

  hotter and hotter, until, with a sudden puff, it burst into flame.

  “This thing can injure dogs and even children!” said Mr.

  O’Donnell, poking the coals with a toasting fork. When the trap was

  red hot, he took it from the forge, and pounded it into a little square

  with his hammer.

  For some little time he said nothing while the metal cooled; I

  meanwhile was thoroughly engaged in looking round, and eyeing all

  the metal figurines, chimes and weather vanes. Proudly displayed

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  on one shelf sat a sculpted mask of a Roman warrior. At length, Mr.

  O’Donnell patted me upon the shoulder, and then held up a few

  sketches of a dragonfly.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you fifty cents for every drag-

  onfly you catch.”

  I said that would be fun, and when I parted I was so excited I

  forgot about the woodchuck and the trap.

  The next day, freshly wakened, I set off to the fields with a mar-

  malade jar and a butterfly net. The air was alive with insects, the

  flowers with bees and butterflies. But I didn’t see any dragonflies. As

  I floated through the last of the meadows, the long and fuzzy spikes

  of a cattail attracted my attention. A huge dragonfly was humming

  round and round; and when at last I caught it, I hopped-skipped-

  and-jumped all the way back to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, a place so

  recently transformed from its so recent existence as a haunted struc-

  ture of terror and mystery.

  Taking a magnifying glass, Mr. O’Donnell held the jar up to the

  light and made a careful study of the dragonfly. He fished out a num-

  ber of rods and bars that lined the wall. Next, with a little pound-

  ing, he wrought a splendorous figurine that was the perfect physical

  image of the insect. Though he was working in metal, it had about it

  a beauty as airy and insubstantial as the delicate creature. But he did

  not capture all of it. What I wanted to know, even then, was how it

  felt to be that dragonfly and to perceive its world.

  As long as I live, I will never forget that day. And though Mr.

  O’Donnell is gone now, there still remains in his shop that little

  iron dragonfly—now covered with dust—to remind me that there

  is something more elusive to life than the succession of shapes and

  forms we see frozen into matter.

  5

  where Is the unIverse?

  Many of the later chapters will use discussions of space and

  time, and especially quantum theory, to help make the case

  for biocentrism. First, however, simple logic must be used to

  answer a most basic question: where is the universe located? It is

  here that we will need to deviate from conventional thinking and

  shared assumptions, some of which are inherent in language itself.

  All of us are taught since earliest childhood that the universe

  can be fundamentally divided into two entities—ourselves, and that

  which is outside of us. This seems logical and apparent. What is

  “me” is commonly defined by what I can control. I can move my

  fingers but I cannot wiggle your toes. The dichotomy, then, is based

  largely on manipulation. The dividing line between self and nonself

  is generally taken to be the skin, strongly implying that I am this

  body and nothing else.

  Of course, when a chunk of the body has vanished, as some

  unfortunate double amputees have experienced, one still feels one-

  self to be just as “present” and “here” as before, and not subjectively

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  diminished in the least. This logic could be carried forth easily

  enough until one arrives at solely the brain itself perceiving itself as

  “me”—because if a human head could be maintained with an arti-

  ficial heart and the rest, it too would reply “Here!” if its name were

  shouted at roll call.

  The central concept of René Descartes, who brought philosophy

  forward into its modern era, was the primacy of consciousness; that

  all knowledge, all truths and principles of being must begin with

  the individual sensation of mind and self. Thus, we come to the<
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  old adage Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. In addition to

  Descartes and Kant, there were of course a great many other phi-

  losophers who argued along these lines—Leibniz, Berkeley, Scho-

  penhauer, and Bergson to name a few. But that former pair, surely

  among the very greatest of all time, mark the epochs of modern

  philosophical history. All start with “self.”

  Much has been written about this sense of self, and entire reli-

  gions (three of the four branches of Buddhism, Zen, and the main-

  stream Advaita Veda¯nta sect of Hinduism, for example) are dedicated

  to proving that a separate independent self, isolated from the vast

  bulk of the cosmos, is a fundamentally illusory sensation. It suffices

  to say that introspection would in all cases conclude that thinking

  itself—as Descartes put it so simply—is normally synonymous with

  the “I” feeling.

  The obverse side of this coin is experienced when thinking

  stops. Many people have had moments, when watching a baby or

  a pet or something in nature, when they feel a rush of ineffable joy,

  of being taken “out of oneself” and essentially becoming the object

  observed. On January 26, 1976, the New York Times Magazine pub-

  lished an entire article on this phenomenon, along with a survey

  showing that at least 25 percent of the population have had at least

  one experience that they described as “a sense of the unity of every-

  thing,” and “a sense that all the universe is alive.” Fully 40 percent

  of the 600 respondents additionally reported it as “a conviction that

  love is at the center of everything” and said it entailed “a feeling of

  deep and profound peace.”

  w H e r e i s T H e U N i v e r s e ?

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  Well, very lovely, but those who have never “been there,” which

  appear to be the majority of the populace, who stand on the outside

  of that nightclub looking in, might well shrug it off and attribute

  it to wishful thinking or hallucination. A survey may be scientifi-

  cally sound, but the conclusions mean little by themselves. We need

  much more than this in attempting to understand the sense of self.

  But perhaps we can grant that something happens when the

  thinking mind takes a vacation. Absence of verbal thought or day-

  dreaming clearly doesn’t mean torpor and vacuity. Rather, it’s as if