http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocentrism

There is also a scientific theory of biocentrism which posits that life creates the universe, instead of the other way around.[2] In this view, current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness

Is the Universe Biocentric?

http://astrophysics.suite101.com/article.cfm/is_the_universe_biocentric

http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/Met/BioCentUniv.htm

The Biocentric Universe Theory:
Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/may/01-the-biocentric-universe-life-creates-time-space-cosmos/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

But, as I spell out in Personality, Empiricism, & God, Berkeley anticipated and foresaw some of the fundamental answers to the dilemmas of our own time. The article below badly mistakes the Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, as a secular empiricist. That is not even close to the facts.

But the article is correct concerning what Berkeley foresaw. Berkeley saw the fallacy of the Newtonian worldview of hard, massey, inert atoms "out there", independent of our minds. And he foresaw the coming subjectivism as a result of that. Berkeley's answer was that God, and God alone, not an independent physical world, can account for a true objectivity in the world about us. PEG is my attempt to show that Berkeley was right on the money.

See also, Biocentrism: How Life Creates the Universe E. Fox]


Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it.
by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman
From the May 2009 issue, published online May 1, 2009
NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI)
Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.

Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.

Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

MESSING WITH THE LIGHT
Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed.

What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other.

In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms.

Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured.

All of this is now gone for keeps.

WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKS
The strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.

At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true.

The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes.

The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.

SEEKING SPACE AND TIME
Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.

All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.

UNLOCKING THE CAGE
In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.

Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects.

Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe. At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.

Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.

http://telicthoughts.com/biocosm-the-biocentric-universe/

Biocosm & The Biocentric Universe
by nullasalus
I don't recall this being discussed either at Telic Thoughts or Uncommon Descent, so submitted for everyone's attention is the May 2009 cover story for Discover Magazine: The Biocentric Universe Theory.

Or as I like to call it, the "All major sides in the ID debate are wrong" theory.


A pertinent quote:

The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.

Short and highly skeptical summary: "Quantum woo." No universe without consciousness, and consciousness is fundamental to reality itself. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman are not, to my knowledge, unique in proposing this idea – readers may recall that Andrei Linde was quoted as hinting along similar lines back during the "God or the Multiverse" story in Discover magazine.

Another "All bets are off" theory comes in the form of James N. Gardner's Biocosm, with the long subtitle "The New Scientific Theory of Evolution : Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe".

Again, I haven't read Gardner's book either, but the difference seems to be that while Lanza is suggesting that consciousness itself is a fundamental constituent of reality itself (Shades of Berkeley's idealism), Gardner's suggestion is more of a "Ray Kurzweil to the Nth power" perspective. Our universe was designed by a designer whose universe was designed by a designer whose universe was designed by a designer whose universe was…

Well, you get the idea.

I find both of the ideas interesting, if only because they upend the usual options in the ID debate – and that's enough to catch my attention even if I'm skeptical of the proposals. If Lanza is right, then the standard materialist view of the universe never gets off the ground. Consciousness and mental properties are not things that result from the machinations of the universe – they are fundamental, and you can't have a universe without them. Enter idealism, or panpsychism, or panentheism.

More interesting to me is Gardner's take. Even if his proposal is unfalsifiable or inadequately supported, it still serves to highlight a problem that can pop up in cosmologies where the universe is eternal or extreme (infinite?) in number. Eternity and infinity doesn't only give mindless nature (if there is such a thing, of course) as many chances as it needs to create and orchestrate life – it gives actual minds just as many chances to do the same. And since we're dealing with an eternal regress anyway, we end up with a quandary similar though not identical to Lanza's. This before noting that Lanza and Gardner's ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

So there you have two outlier positions in the great ID debate: On the one hand, the idea that consciousness and the mental are fundamental and bedrock constituents of reality. On the other, the idea that design and designers are the eternal and infinite – design and designers are everywhere, and will always be everywhere, because they are the means by which nature continues.

http://doesgodexist.multiply.com/notes/item/478

biomedical researcher Robert Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he's well-acclimated to controversy. But his book "Biocentrism" is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos.

"By treating space and time as physical things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world," Lanza declares.

Any claim that space and time aren't cold, hard, physical things has to raise an eyebrow. Some of the reactions to Lanza's ideas, first set forth two years ago in an essay for The American Scholar, brand them as "pseudo-scientific philosophical claptrap" or "no better than any religion."

Lanza admits that the reviews haven't all been glowing, particularly among some physicists. "Their response has been much how you'd expect priests to respond to stem cell research," he told me Monday.

Other physicists, however, point out that Lanza's view is fully in line with the perspective from quantum mechanics that the observer plays a huge role in how reality is observed.

"So what Lanza says in this book is not new," Richard Conn Henry, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University, said in a book review. "Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do not say it - or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private - furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!"

The weird twists in our view of the cosmos are hinted at in the scientific speculation over quantum teleportation, experiments in reverse-time causation, the idea that time has no independent existence, and physicist Stephen Hawkings' suggestion that the universe as we know it is generated through quantum interference involving all possible universes.

Lanza and his co-author, astronomer/columnist Bob Berman, try to assemble all those weird little twists into a larger theory. Rather than laying out the big picture here, I'll let them do it in an exclusive online abridgment:

The authors contend that their view of the cosmos can help resolve all the head-scratching over unifying the fundamental forces, or coming up with a "theory of everything" that covers the submicroscopic world of quantum effects as well as the grand workings of gravity.

There are potential pitfalls, of course. If you merely accept that reality works the way it does because that's how our senses and neurons are structured to perceive it, you could run the risk of shrugging off the search for deeper, truer descriptions of that reality.

One route would be to write off the still-mysterious aspects of our universe (e.g., what dark energy is, or how consciousness arises) as an expression of the anthropic principle. In effect, you're saying, "It's that way just because if it weren't, we wouldn't be here to observe it." Another route would be embracing intelligent design ("God did it").

Neither of those routes can be navigated very well using the scientific method, and Lanza and Berman point that out in their book. However, they don't lay out a detailed road map showing how a "biocentric" view of the universe might affect the course of science - other than to say that neuroscience needs more attention and string theory needs less.

Theoretically, one avenue might be to study how our brain organizes the incoming electrical impulses to create the matrix beyond - and tweak that circuitry in different ways. "With a little genetic engineering, you could probably make anything that's red move, or make a noise instead, or even make you feel hungry or want to have sex," Lanza said.

Lanza acknowledges that the step-by-step, objective approach to solving scientific puzzlers is still the way to go when you're focusing on a specific research project, such as turning the medical promise of embryonic stem cells into reality. He knows he's not making all this up.

"Day to day, yes, I can put x number of ml [milliliters] in a Petri dish, and I can predict exactly what the behavior is going to be," he told me.

But Lanza said quantum effects as basic as the two-slit experiment tell us that there's more to life, the universe and everything than milliliters of solution in a dish. "We have this way that we think of space and time on the street. It's day to day, paying your bills," Lanza said. "But when you look at these experiments, that's not what they're telling us. In fact, they're telling us quite the reverse."

Does all this make a difference in daily life, or how you see the world? Take a look at the free sample of "Biocentrism," and feel free to weigh in with your comments below. And if you're looking for more mind-blowing speculation, check out these archived Cosmic Log items: