Towards a new scientific worldview, part 2: Biocentrism

Picking up from yesterday, Robert Lanza is a scientist who has written a new book entitled Biocentrism that uses the latest findings of physics and quantum mechanics to posit a new scientific worldview. Here are the seven principles of Biocentrism (via Mike LaSalle):

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 — are 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 the physical events occur independent of life.

Now this will be taken as more New Agism, a secularization of the Hindu god-within and as support for the postmodernist view that we create our own reality. If we think in terms of individuals’ perceptions and observations and life, so it is.

But so much more manifestly exists in the universe than what we humans can interact with. There must be a greater Life that is the ground for all other life, an Observer who observes all things who thus keeps them in existence. (If quantum events require an observer, and the universe existed on a quantum level at the big bang, as physicists are saying, there must have been an observer at the beginning.) Such thinking, properly, is surely evidence for the existence of the transcendent personal God.