Taking a jump to the left from yesterday’s post about quantum mysticism, let’s now explore the universe in your head. Alan Boyle posted yesterday on his always-excellent Cosmic Log about the new book Biocentrism – by leading stem cell research Robert Lanza, along with Bob Berman – and linked to an exclusive online abridgement from the book. It’s definitely worth checking out – not only is it a detailed and lengthy read, it touches on numerous fascinating elements of ‘reality’. Integrating everything from the role of the observer in the quantum world, through to the psychological construct of time, Biocentrism suggests that we may be looking at things all wrong when trying to understand the cosmos; perhaps we should be starting with us:
[L]ike time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real. It is a mode of interpretation and understanding — part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
In modern everyday life, however, we’ve come to regard space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. In it, we cognize separate objects that were first learned and identified. These patterns are blocked out by the thinking mind within boundaries of color, shape or utility. Human language and ideation alone decide where the boundaries of one object end and another begins.
…Now, space and time illusions are certainly harmless. A problem only arises because, by treating space as something physical, existing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. In reality there can be no break between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space and time are forms of our animal sense perception. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.
While some parts of the article didn’t really ring true for me, other parts gave me that nagging feeling that Lanza and Berman’s lateral view on these fundamental questions may have some real worth. I don’t think I’ve grasped all of what they’re saying yet actually, probably due to my own ‘indoctrination’ into the current, orthodox view of the cosmos.
