Biocentrism and the illusion of out there

Biocentrism is one of the most important scientific books that has come out over the past decade. It really is a book that looks truthfully at science and what we know to be true.

The truth is there isn't an objective world out there. The world we see is the world we perceive. Again, this isn't something new or groundbreaking, it's just a truth that has been known for years. At most, we can say there's a stream of electrical and magnetic pulses that we convert into the world that we see.

Biocentrism says we try to come up with every theory in the world to explain what's going on out there but we should be paying more attention to how life and the mind perceives the world that we see.

Again, this is just common sense based on what we know about science.

If I look at a brown, round table it's not out there. Light is converted into and electrical signal that's perceived as an image in the brain. We also never touch the table. It's just the force of electrons repelling against electrons. There isn't any objective color brown out there. Different animals will actually see different colors. The human being has this shared experience of the perception of brown and the scientific question that should be asked is why our we tuned to perceive the world that we see.

So a being from another star system could see things differently if his/her/it's biology is tuned differently. Instead of a brown round table, it might see a blue marble table. It might see us as all 10 foot tall beings that look alike.

So Lanza has it right. You need to start with biology and consciousness. We should want to know why are biology is tuned to see universe 107.9 and you can have a biology that's tuned differently and sees universe 105.2. Here's more:

Light allows us to interact with our world. We can see our surroundings because light bounces off objects into our eyes. We are all familiar with visible light, but this is merely a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, there are many different types of light ranging from short wavelengths, like x-rays, to longer wavelengths, like radio waves. These types of light blend together to make a continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. By filtering out various regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, one can receive different types of information.

www.universeadventure.org...

We can even be invisible to some beings out there if their biology isn't tuned to see us. If their biology is tuned to different visible spectrum than our eyes then they will see things differently. Here's an interesting article on how Aliens could be looking at the same things that we look at but if their biology is tuned differently they would perceive a different universe than we do.

We assume that the way humans see the world has some correspondence to objective truth. That’s not necessarily correct. Let's do a thought experiment where we have a quick chat with an alien species to see how mistaken we are about the universe.

The tweaks to their vision might be minor. They might just pick up, visually, on different stars than we do, seeing things in the infrared range or the ultraviolet range. Since we now have plenty of telescopes scanning the skies and picking up on parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can’t see, it would just be a matter of superimposing our visual star maps on their visual star maps to get some common ground.

But what if they don’t see anything remotely within our visual spectrum? Let’s say that they evolved on a planet not powered by light from a nearby star, but from vents from the planet’s core. Light, and vision, might not be a big component of their senses. Perhaps, for whatever reason, they only see ultra-high energy light given off by quasars, which perch at the centers of galaxies. They wouldn't realize there was the possibility of life in the outer reaches of a galaxy before we contacted them. Or they might only be able to see quickly changing light, and can only navigate space by pulsars. There’s even a possibility that they can only, visually, pick up on very faint microwaves, and it never occurred to them that there was life in the universe, because they only saw the faint, homogeneous smear of the cosmic microwave background. Never mind how we’d contact a society like that, how would we even begin to explain who we are and where we came from?

If we sorted through the first contact and they got to Earth, there could be even more problems with light. If they only saw in x-rays, we very well might look like bags of bones with weird, invisible flesh around them. (Also, any prolonged exposure to alien “flashlights” would kill us.) But what, for example, if they only saw polarized light? We know that some animals can see polarized light, and it’s thought that they navigate by the natural polarization that light goes through in the sky throughout the day. But what if a species can see polarized light and nothing else? Because vertical and horizontal surfaces polarize the light that hits them, the aliens would see a multicolored sky, blinding walls of light from windows, the hoods of cars, lakes, and puddles, but wouldn't be able to see any humans. (Although they would, in sunlight, be able to catch the intermittent glare coming from our glasses. How creepy would that be for them?)

io9.com...

Sadly, many try to talk about an objective world out there that doesn't exist without a conscious perception of it. There's no such thing as green leaves if we don't convert electrical signals into green leaves and give it meaning. For instance, some animals don't see a green leaf. So Biocentrism asks and answers the right question which is why do we perceive the universe in the way that we do.

reply to post by neoholographic


Sounds like an interesting book - an author or link would help.

reply to post by neoholographic


I think this could explain strange phenomena such as ghosts and other things.

If there are any Moody Blues fans out there, the In Search Of The Lost Chord album touches on this subject of how we perceive the universe.

reply to post by FyreByrd


Biocentrism is a book by Robert Lanza. A Scientist that U.S News and World Report called a genius, renegade thinker and likened him to Einstein. It's a very good book. I'm reading it now for a second time.

reply to post by ItCameFromOuterSpace


I thought of that as well. Some of these things could just be biologically tuned to perceive the electromagnetic spectrum differently than we do.

reply to post by neoholographic


There could be a being who is made purely of gravitons, who sees and eats thoughts. Forgot where your keys are? That's because SDFDSAF ate the dark energy that housed your memory of key placement.

You never know.


Edit: Where do you see this type of perspective leading us to in the future? What can come out of it? Just a different perspective or something more? A brand new way of thinking for everyone?

neoholographic
Biocentrism says we try to come up with every theory in the world to explain what's going on out there but we should be paying more attention to how life and the mind perceives the world that we see.

Again, this is just common sense based on what we know about science.

The wiki for space observatories lists 9 categories, only one of which is in visible light which humans can perceive.

List of space observatories

1 Gamma ray
2 X-ray
3 Ultraviolet
4 Visible
5 Infrared and Submillimetre
6 Microwave
7 Radio
8 Particle detection
9 Gravitational waves

So we are not limited to human senses in what the space observatories can observe "out there".

Since 8 of the 9 categories of observation are beyond human senses, you could say we are paying less attention to how life perceives the universe, because the perception capabilities inherent to life forms like us are too limited.

So I don't understand what you're getting at with this "should be paying more attention to how life and the mind perceives the world that we see." What does this mean, that we should stop using all the other space telescopes except the ones that use visible light?

That would be a huge step backward for scientific discovery.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


No, no, you totally missed the point this time. It´s not about visible light at all, it´s about the way we perceive reality, and perception, as you state in your own post, is a very broad concept.

Everything we smell, touch, see, feel, think, observe, i.e perceive, is the direct result of a perception and the interpretation of that perception by our brain. This includes the telescopes and other instruments that measure and collect. Instead of looking at the perceived data, we should be looking within ourselves and solve the mystery of why it is that we perceive reality the way we do.

I used to be a fanatic follower/defender of the scientific method, until I read books by Prof. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and realised that absolutely nothing outside of myself can be positively proven true. No matter how you spin it, the only thing I can be sure about is my own consciousness, everything else is a perception or interpretation.

reply to post by neoholographic


A bug without eyes sees without eyes.

reply to post by Bleeeeep


You said:

Edit: Where do you see this type of perspective leading us to in the future? What can come out of it? Just a different perspective or something more? A brand new way of thinking for everyone?

Great questions.

I see it as a brand new way of thinking that could eventually allow us to control what we perceive and it doesn't treat consciousness as a byproduct of materialism but as a creative force that's fundamental to the world that we perceive.

RationalDespair
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

No, no, you totally missed the point this time. It´s not about visible light at all, it´s about the way we perceive reality, and perception, as you state in your own post, is a very broad concept.

Everything we smell, touch, see, feel, think, observe, i.e perceive, is the direct result of a perception and the interpretation of that perception by our brain. This includes the telescopes and other instruments that measure and collect. Instead of looking at the perceived data, we should be looking within ourselves and solve the mystery of why it is that we perceive reality the way we do.

I used to be a fanatic follower/defender of the scientific method, until I read books by Prof. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and realised that absolutely nothing outside of myself can be positively proven true. No matter how you spin it, the only thing I can be sure about is my own consciousness, everything else is a perception or interpretation.

BRAVO!

Excellent post!

RationalDespair
Everything we smell, touch, see, feel, think, observe, i.e perceive, is the direct result of a perception and the interpretation of that perception by our brain. This includes the telescopes and other instruments that measure and collect. Instead of looking at the perceived data, we should be looking within ourselves and solve the mystery of why it is that we perceive reality the way we do.

So I should tell my astronomer friend, "you don't need all those telescopes, just look within yourself?" I'm pretty sure he will give me funny looks if I do that.

I used to be a fanatic follower/defender of the scientific method, until I read books by Prof. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and realised that absolutely nothing outside of myself can be positively proven true.

Richard Feynman said that over five decades ago so I'm not sure why it took you so long to catch on to that idea that science can never prove anything completely true. That's why we call them "scientific theories" when they have a mountain of evidence behind them...because we could still find one more piece of evidence that falsifies the theory. In fact by definition everything in science is falsifiable; if it's not falsifiable it's not science.

However the problem I see with looking within for the answers is that people have been doing this since prehistoric times, and not surprisingly, different individuals come up with different perceptions. This is why the scientific method allowed such advances, because different people could get the same answers to the same questions through independent observations and experiments. Anyway this thread is in the science forum so if this method involves no science, is it in the wrong forum?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


First, he was saying that he's not a fanatic about the Scientific Method, he never said the Scientific Method is meaningless. This is actually a good thing because many people throw around the term Scientific Method whenever they can't debate an issue.

For instance, falsifiability has it's shortcomings. This is because some theories can't be falsified because we don't have the current technology. It doesn't mean they aren't good theories.

For instance, if you went back in time when Democritus proposed an atomic theory his claims were unfalsifiable. He said things like this in 465B.C.:

1.All matter consists of invisible particles called atoms.
2. Atoms are indestructible.
3. Atoms are solid but invisible.
4. Atoms are homogenous.
5. Atoms differ in size, shape, mass, position, and arrangement.

There was no way to test these things.

Today look at String Theory and Parallel Universes. These things are unfalsifiable or were unfalsifiable for the longest time because we didn't have the technology to test these theories and some evidence is gathering either for or against these things.

There's no evidence that consciousness emerges from the material brain. This is unfalsifiable yet many people treat this claim as Gospel.

The point is, if you're a fanatic about the scientific method then you can't think outside the box.

I just watched an episode of Brain Games that talked about this very thing. There was a study that showed pictures to children and adults and they asked what could this be? The adults said a couple of things and then they were stuck. This is because they were trying to fit the picture into a preconceived box. The children would rattle off 7 or 8 things back to back.

The study showed how it's actually important to think like a child at times because you're using your imagination and you're not trying to fit everything into a box. It goes back to Einstein when he said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

It's just another way of saying it's good to think outside the box instead of being a prisoner to a preconceived notion as to how you believe things must be.

Back to Biocentrism. Einstein also said this:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

ALBERT EINSTEIN, The Evolution of Physics

This is Biocentrism in a nutshell. Again, science has known this for years. Also, Lanza backs everything he says up with actual experiments that were performed along with current scientific understanding. The science is very methodical in the book.

Arbitrageur
So I should tell my astronomer friend, "you don't need all those telescopes, just look within yourself?" I'm pretty sure he will give me funny looks if I do that.

I understand what you are saying here, but honestly, looking within ourselves is not a substitution for exploring reality. The point is to try and prove right or wrong the one big assumption that underlies everything in our lives: what we perceive is reality.

Richard Feynman said that over five decades ago so I'm not sure why it took you so long to catch on to that idea that science can never prove anything completely true. That's why we call them "scientific theories" when they have a mountain of evidence behind them...because we could still find one more piece of evidence that falsifies the theory. In fact by definition everything in science is falsifiable; if it's not falsifiable it's not science.

Yes, but at the same time, science and media present everything they discover as fact, never noting what you say above. So to the average layman, like me, science becomes this glorious profession that is slowly unraveling reality for us as we wait. I´m not necessarily blaming science for dishonesty or withdrawing information, but for Average Joe these concepts are not so obvious.

reply to post by RationalDespair

Scientists are candid about the fact they don't understand reality fully, and that there is room for interpretation and in some of their ideas. Maybe you're looking in the wrong places if you're not seeing this. Here's an example:

Quantum Mechanics (an embarrassment) - Sixty Symbols

He says quantum mechanics is a foundation of modern physics and in fact the universe as we understand it, and we can't agree on how to interpret our quantum mechanical observations.

So the one thing that everyone can agree on is the observations.

If you carry this idea into introspection I think you get into the same issue, that different people see different things when they look inside and there's no agreement.

So regardless of who is right or who is wrong, we know that not everybody can be right when they have mutually conflicting opinions, whether you're talking about quantum mechanical reality or Lanza's arguments.

So at the end of the day, when we don't have answers we can all agree on, what we do have are observations we can all agree on. And as the above video shows, scientists don't pretend it's any more than that.

But I do agree with you about media distortion. They don't accurately convey all the qualifiers that are presented in scientific papers, and even worse sometimes the science writers don't even understand the science and get the science wrong. Reading scientific papers can get around the media misrepresentations but they are over the heads of most non-scientists. However the makers of the above video have 226 other videos on youtube and they've tried to simplify explanations for the layman, and you get to hear directly from the scientists, so hopefully you'll watch a few to see if your perception of scientists is misplaced. A lot of the characterizations I hear about science or scientists are apparently from people who don't know real scientists or listen directly to what they say.

reply to post by neoholographic

OK so I cen tell my astronomer friend it's ok to keep using his telescopes, but I'm still uncertain exactly what advice to give him except "be more childlike, think outside the box". In a way astronomers and cosmologists are being forced to do that, because there is no explanation yet inside the box for dark matter.

neoholographic
The point is, if you're a fanatic about the scientific method then you can't think outside the box.

I don't think that is true at all. This is the kind of 'perception' that basically separates a lot of people in places like this, but has not one ounce of truth in reality. I am a scientist as people would have heard me admit. I actively think that out of the box thinking is key to new ideas and finding solutions to problems yet solved. BUT (and it is a big BUT) I also think you can get a more realistic and in tuned with reality idea from having a very strong foundation of what is inside the box.

Now, part of the issue with the inside and outside the box statements is that many peoples boxes are rather small, and so when it comes to grand ideas, they are quick to zoom off into the darkness and basically 'invent' their own reality. This is the birthplace of quackery. Let me put it another way, and please let me assure you, this is not to belittle or insult, but a lot of the time scientists have a box of experience in the understanding of the mechanics and happenings of the world around them which is much bigger than someone who is doing the 'search within for the answers' route. And what people basically do is make the mistake of "I don't understand it, so it is all a lie"

You can point the finger at scientists labelling people as quacks as exactly the same, but this is where there is an interesting difference. That is because a scientist understands many things or at least has some damn good strong theories how this stuff works, when presented with some magical device that apparently gives free energy, or is the basic crap the anti-vac movement spouts or something else... We can identify with a good probability of if it is basically true or false and then do an experiment or two.



Also perception of colours? That one has been explained on a bio-electric level years and years ago. It is almost parallel to the way we colour balance film negatives, where in a negative different layers have sensitivity to different colours and the layer thickness are balanced to give you flat colour of white during exposure to sunlight. It is almost similar except we have a regenerating system of light sensitive cells in our eyes that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light. The biological system is actually emulated in many optical systems. To say (like many do) Oh we think we are so good, but nature did it first... is ignorant of the fact that nature was quite often the reason we developed technology we did by the inspiration nature gave.

Anyway this post is already too long.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thanks for that clear explanation. I will definitely check out these videos and see how they will effect my views!

Arbitrageur
So I should tell my astronomer friend, "you don't need all those telescopes, just look within yourself?" I'm pretty sure he will give me funny looks if I do that.

I agree.

reply to post by neoholographic


Neoholographic, this thread belongs more in the "metaphysic and philosophy" forum than "physics and technology". Biocentrism is an interpretation of an interpretation of a theory in physics.

Now about the OP: biocentrism is not logical. It states that for matter and energy to exist, the observer must exist, since it's the observer who creates al this in his mind. Then how come we came into existence in the first place? For without observers, the universe didn't exist, right? Then how come the Earth existed if there was no minds observing it?

reply to post by neoholographic


Came out in the last ten years? People have been using knowledge of this inner-created world to work on consciousness techniques for millennium. Yogis, recently the Scientologists (many of Hubbards early techniques from the 1950s work with owning the "space" almost everyone believes is 'out there' when it is simply a perceptional illusion), etc. So someone has slapped a new name on it and written a book, very likely not crediting those in the past and present who lapped him quite awhile ago.

reply to post by swanne

swanne
Now about the OP: biocentrism is not logical. It states that for matter and energy to exist, the observer must exist, since it's the observer who creates al this in his mind. Then how come we came into existence in the first place? For without observers, the universe didn't exist, right? Then how come the Earth existed if there was no minds observing it?

There is no object without a subject.

reply to post by swanne



This is what people say who haven't read the book:

]Neoholographic, this thread belongs more in the "metaphysic and philosophy" forum than "physics and technology". Biocentrism is an interpretation of an interpretation of a theory in physics.

Now about the OP: biocentrism is not logical. It states that for matter and energy to exist, the observer must exist, since it's the observer who creates al this in his mind. Then how come we came into existence in the first place? For without observers, the universe didn't exist, right? Then how come the Earth existed if there was no minds observing it?

Of course the first thing they try to say is this isn't science. That's laughable. Like I said, when you read the book Lanza walks you step by step through the science. He walks you step by step through experiment after experiment and scientific study after scientific study. It's not just an interpretation of a theory in physics.

Again this is science whether you like it or not. I know when people can't debate an issue or they don't take the time to actually read the book their debating against, you just get knee jerk reactions saying, "that's not science."

The question I have for you is how can the universe come into being if it didn't know that we would be here to observe it? Experiment after experiment shows that particles behave like a wave or particle based on whether a conscious observer will know which path information and this could occur in what we experience as the future and the past. Here's one such experiment:

According to quantum mechanics, light can be either a graceful rippling wave or a hail of bulletlike particles, depending on how you look at it. Now, an experiment shows that an observer can make the choice retroactively, after light has entered a measuring apparatus. The result shows that reality is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Even weirder still, the choice to allow the waves to recombine or not can be made even after the photon passes the fork where it should have split--or not. Famed physicist John Archibald Wheeler realized that nearly 30 years ago and dreamed up an experiment to prove the point. Now Jean-François Roch of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in France and colleagues have performed the experiment. The researchers shot photons one by one at a half-silvered mirror, or "beam splitter," to cleave the quantum wave describing each photon. After traveling different distances, the two halves sloshed back together at a second beam splitter 50 meters away, which could recombine them. The experimenters could randomly switch this second beam splitter on and off electronically well after the photon had passed the first one.

If the second splitter was on, interference between the two pieces directed the recombined wave of probability toward one or the other of two detectors, depending on the difference in the path lengths. If the second beam splitter was turned off so the waves couldn't recombine, then the photon took one path or the other with 50-50 probability, and equal numbers of photons reached detectors. The results, reported this week in Science, prove that the photon does not decide whether to behave like a particle or a wave when it hits the first beam splitter, Roch says. Rather, the experimenter decides only later, when he decides whether to put in the second beam splitter. In a sense, at that moment, he chooses his reality.

news.sciencemag.org...

These things have occurred in experiment after experiment from Entanglement Swapping Delayed Choice to the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser.

So the particle is linked to whether or not the observer will know which path it took even if the Observer will know which path in what we call the future. This is because of non locality.

So you're question makes no sense. When you say there wasn't any minds observing it, that's looking at the history of our universe through the eyes of locality and ignoring everything we have learned because of quantum mechanics. In fact, you can say a conscious observer is the first cause because the universe came into being because it knew we would be here to observe it.

The only time you need an interpretation is when you don't accept the outcome of these experiments. It's when you say there must be something else because this doesn't make sense. Biocentrism just accepts what these experiments tell us. That particles behavior is linked to what a conscious observer will or will not know about it's state.

This isn't something new and has been around for years. Lanza just adds new information and spells it out in great detail in a step by step fashion using science.

But of course, a person who has never read the book will hear the word Biocentrism and they will have a knee jerk reaction that has nothing to do with the book.