Biocentrism is guilty, from most perspectives, of the circular reasoning found in all other anthropic perspectives: the conclusion is one of the premises of the argument, and without it, the argument fails.This is essentially another version of the "consciousness is the foundation of the universe" theory to be found in panpsychism, Tibetan Buddhism, and a lot of New Age thinking (see Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra, etc.). I don't buy into this model. This is also known as the "strong anthropic principle."
A lot of people who actually understand physics, such as PZ Myers, Vinod K. Wadhawan, and Ajita Kamal, also reject this model - here is just one small part of the rebuttal by the later two individuals to the biocentric model:
That small section of their much longer article is a good place to begin in understanding why biocentrism does not fit the evidence of physics, and why it is also philosophically wrong - I encourage a reading of the whole article.Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe
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Lanza says “Space and time are simply the mind’s tools for putting everything together.” This is true, but there is a difference between being the ‘mind’s tools’ and being created by the mind itself. In the first instance the conscious perception of space and time is an experiential trick that the mind uses to make sense of the objective universe, and in the other space and time are actual physical manifestations of the mind. The former is tested and true while the latter is an idealistic notion that is not supported by science. The experiential conception of space and time is different from objective space and time that comprise the universe. This difference is similar to how color is different from photon frequency. The former is subjective while the latter is objective.
Can Lanza deny all the evidence that, whereas we humans emerged on the scene very recently, our Earth and the solar system and the universe at large have been there all along? What about all the objective evidence that life forms have emerged and evolved to greater and greater complexity, resulting in the emergence of humans at a certain stage in the evolutionary history of the Earth? What about all the fossil evidence for how biological and other forms of complexity have been evolving? How can humans arrogate to themselves the power to create objective reality?
Much of Lanza’s idealism arises from a distrust/incomprehension of mathematics. He writes:
“In order to account for why space and time were relative to the observer, Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to an invisible, intangible entity that cannot be seen or touched. This folly continues with the advent of quantum mechanics.”
Why should the laws of Nature ‘bother’ about whether you can touch something or not? The laws of Nature have been there long before Lanza appeared on the scene. Since he cannot visualize how the mathematics describes an objective universe outside of experience, Lanza announces that reality itself does not exist unless created by the act of observation. Some cheek!
(b) Lanza claims that without an external observer, objects remain in a quantum probabilistic state. He conflates this observer with consciousness (which he admits to being “subjective experience”). Therefore, he claims, without consciousness any possible universe will only exist as probabilities. The misunderstanding of quantum theory that Lanza is promoting is addressed further in the article in the section on quantum theory (Section 4.).
(c) The central argument from Lanza is a hard version of the anthropic principle. Lanza says:
“Why, for instance, are the laws of nature exactly balanced for life to exist? There are over 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random — even if that is exactly what contemporary physics baldly suggests. These fundamental constants (like the strength of gravity) are not predicted by any theory — all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. Tweak any of them and you never existed. “
This reveals a total lack of understanding of what the anthropic principle really says. So let us take a good, detailed, look at this principle.
3. The Planetary Anthropic Principle
And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2007)
The anthropic principle was first enunciated by the mathematician Brandon Carter in 1974. Further elaboration and consolidation came in 1986 in the form of a book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by Barrow and Tipler. There are quite a few versions of the principle doing the rounds. The scientifically acceptable version, also called the ‘weak’ (or planetary) version, states that: The particular universe in which we find ourselves possesses the characteristics necessary for our planet to exist and for life, including human life, to flourish here.
In particle physics and cosmology, we humans have had to introduce ‘best fit’ parameters (fundamental constants) to explain the universe as we see it. Slightly different values for some of the critical parameters would have led to entirely different histories of the cosmos. Why do these parameters have the values they have? According to a differently worded form of the weak version of the anthropic principle stated above: the parameters and the laws of physics can be taken as fixed; it is simply that we humans have appeared in the universe to ask such questions at a time when the conditions were just right for our life.
This version suffices to explain quite a few ‘coincidences’ related to the fact that the conditions for our evolution and existence on the planet Earth happen to be ‘just right’ for that purpose. Life as we know it exists only on planet Earth. Here is a list of favourable necessary conditions for its existence, courtesy Dawkins (2007):
- Availability of liquid water is one of the preconditions for our kind of life. Around a typical star like our Sun, there is an optimum zone (popularly called the ‘Goldilocks zone’), neither so hot that water would evaporate, nor so cold that water would freeze, such that planets orbiting in that zone can sustain liquid water. Our Earth is one such planet.
- This optimum orbital zone should be circular or nearly circular. Once again, our Earth fulfils that requirement. A highly elliptical orbit would take the planet sometimes too close to the Sun, and sometimes too far, during its cycle. That would result in periods when water either evaporates or freezes. Life needs liquid water all the time.
- The location of the planet Jupiter in our Solar system is such that it acts like a ‘massive gravitational vacuum cleaner,’ intercepting asteroids that would have been otherwise lethal to our survival.
- Planet Earth has a single relatively large Moon, which serves to stabilize its axis of rotation.
- Our Sun is not a binary star. Binary stars can have planets, but their orbits can get messed up in all sorts of ways, entailing unstable or varying conditions, inimical for life to evolve and survive.
Most of the planets of stars in our universe are not in the Goldilocks zones of their parent stars. This is understandable because, as the above list of favorable conditions shows, the probability for this to happen must be very low indeed. But howsoever low this probability is, it is not zero: The proof is that life does indeed exist on Earth.
What we have listed above are just some necessary conditions. They are by no means sufficient conditions as well. With all the above conditions available on Earth, another highly improbable set of phenomena occurred, namely the actual origin of life. This origin was a set of highly improbable (but not impossible) set of chemical events, leading to the emergence of a mechanism for heredity. This mechanism came in the form of emergence of some kind of genetic molecules like RNA. This was a highly improbable thing to happen, but our existence implies that such an event, or a sequence of events, did indeed take place. Once life had originated, Darwinian evolution of complexity through natural selection (which is not a highly improbable set of events) did the rest and here we are, discussing such questions.
Like the origin of life, another extremely improbable event (or a set of events) was the emergence of the sophisticated eukaryotic cell (on which the life of we humans is based). We invoke the anthropic principle again to say that, no matter how improbable such an event was statistically, it did indeed happen; otherwise we humans would not be here. The occurrence of all such one-off highly improbable events can be explained by the anthropic principle.
Before we discuss the cosmological or ’strong’ version of the anthropic principle, it is helpful to recapitulate the basics of quantum theory.
Who Are We? Experiments Suggest You're Not Who You Think
Robert Lanza, M.D."Who in the world am I?" asked Alice (in Wonderland). "Ah, that's the great puzzle!" The question may make you wonder about taking time to ponder such philosophical babble. The answer is usually defined by what you can control. A reply might be, "I can wiggle my toes but I can't move the legs of the table." The dividing line between self and nonself is taken to be the skin. This is reinforced every day of our lives -- every time you fill out a form: I am ___ (your name here). It's such an integral part of our lives that the question is as unnatural as scrutinizing breathing.
Years ago I published an experiment (Science, 212, 695, 1981) with Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner (the "father" of modern behaviorism) showing that like us, animals are capable of 'self-awareness.' We taught pigeons to use a mirror to locate a spot on their body which they couldn't see directly. Although similar behavior in primates is attributed to a self-concept, it's clear there are different degrees of self-awareness. For instance, we didn't report in our paper that the pigeons attacked their own reflection in the mirror. Biocentrism suggests we humans may be as oblivious to certain aspects of who we are as the pigeons.
We are more than we've been taught in biology class. Everyday life makes this obvious. Last weekend I set out on a walk. There was a roar of dirt bikes from the nearby sandpit, but as I went further into the forest the sound gradually disappeared. In a clearing I noticed sprays of tiny flowers (Houstonia caerulea) dotting the ground. I squatted down to examine them. They were about a quarter-of-an-inch in diameter with yellow centers and petals ranging in color from white to deep purple. I was wondering why these flowers had such bright coloring, when I saw a fuzzy little creature with a body the size of a BB darting in and out of the flowers. Its wings were awkwardly large and beating so fast I could hardly see their outline. This tiny world was as wondrous as Pandora in Avatar. It took my breath away.
There we were, this fuzzy little creature and I, two living objects that had entered into each others' world. It flew off to the next flower, and I, for my part, stepped back careful not to destroy its habitat. I wondered if our little interaction was any different from that of any other two objects in the Universe. Was this little insect just another collection of atoms -- proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun?
It's true that the laws of chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the carbohydrates, lipids and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understanding of life can't be found only by looking at cells and molecules. Conversely, physical existence can't be divorced from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience (even if these, too, have a physical correlate in our consciousness).
It seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere of physical reality just as I was the center of mine. We were connected not only by being alive at the same moment in Earth's 4.5 billion year history, but by something suggestive - a pattern that's a template for existence itself.
The bug had little eyes and antenna, and possessed sensory cells that transmitted messages to its brain. Perhaps my existence in its universe was limited to some shadow off in the distance. I don't know. But as I stood up and left, I no doubt dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the creature's little world.
Science has failed to recognize those properties of life that make it fundamental to our existence. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are bottom-line in understanding the larger universe -- biocentrism -- revolves around the way our consciousness relates to a physical process. It's a vast mystery that I've pursued my entire life with a lot of help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the most lauded minds of the modern age. I've also come to conclusions that would shock my predecessors, placing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything that has evaded other disciplines.
We're taught since childhood that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities -- ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical. "Self" is commonly defined by what we can control. We can move our fingers but I can't wiggle your toes. The dichotomy is based largely on manipulation, even if basic biology tells us we've no more control over most of the trillions of cells in our body than over a rock or a tree.
Consider everything that you see around you right now -- this page, for example, or your hands and fingers. Language and custom say that it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet we can't see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds our brain. Everything you see and experience -- your body, the trees and sky -- are part of an active process occurring in your mind. You are this process, not just that tiny part you control with motor neurons.
You're not an object -- you are your consciousness. You're a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colors, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist. Indeed, experiments confirm that particles only exist with real properties if they're observed. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of things in place, they can't be thought of as having any real existence -- neither duration nor position in space. As the great physicist John Wheeler said, "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." That's why in real experiments, not just the properties of matter -- but space and time themselves -- depend on the observer. Your consciousness isn't just part of the equation − the equation is you.
After she left the pool of tears, the Caterpillar asked Alice "'Who are you?' This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I--I hardly know, Sir...'" Perhaps the Hookah-Smoking caterpillar, sitting there on his mushroom, knew that this unusually short question was not only rude, but difficult indeed.
Robert Lanza, MD has published extensively in leading scientific journals. His book "Biocentrism" (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out the full scientific argument for his theory of everything.
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