What happened before the Big Bang? What is consciousness? How can we explain quantum weirdness?

These are all big questions, but in Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, well-known scientists Robert Lanza (biologist) and Bob Berman (astronomer) argue that the universe is created within our minds. It all sounds a little far fetched at first, but this is no mystical, new age pseudoscience.

What they are suggesting is that objective reality, the “external” world we imagine exists is exactly that…imaginery. We each create in our brains our individual view of the world on the basis of simple electrical inputs from our senses, our sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. Logically, the universe for us only exists as the interpretation by our brains of these electrical inputs. Until the point we make the “observation” the universe is simply a vast cloud of fuzzy probability.

Looked at this way, the notions of time and space dissolve, although in Einstein’s theory of relativity they do not exist as entities anyway but simply a mathematical framework on which to hang gravity. Quantum effects such as wave-particle duality and spooky action at a distance too are nothing more, nor nothing less, than artefacts of how we observe the world.

Lanza and Berman summarize their hypothesis in seven principles.

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles – indeed all particles and objects – is tied 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 very 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.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside 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 carry their shells. There is no substance in which physical events occur independent of life.

To be honest, I doubt anyone is actually going to take this theory seriously, but it does offer food for thought. There is definitely something odd about the universe we perceive, that’s beyond doubt. But, why the whole universe should be as it is because of organic molecular soup on a tiny blue planet, orbiting an average star in an everyday kind of galaxy is beyond this book (and beyond any other book to boot). Cracked conjecture or alternative paradigm to religion and modern physics?

What others are saying about Biocentrism

• The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself (discovermagazine.com)
• A Biocentric Theory of The Universe (3quarksdaily.com)
• Summer Science Books (sciencebase.com)