A New Theory of
the Universe
A New
Theory of the Universe
by Robert Lanza*
: “Cogito, ergo sum.” (I think, therefore I am.) In addition to Descartes, who brought philosophy into its modern era, there were many other philosophers who argued along these lines: Kant, Leibniz, Bishop Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Henri Bergson, to name a few.Neuroscientists believe that the problem of consciousness can someday be solved. Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious experience. As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”
Biology is at first glance an unlikely source for a new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and when cosmologists like Stephen Hawking predict that a unifying theory of the universe may be discovered in the next two decades, shouldn’t biology seek to unify existing theories of the physical world and the living world? What other discipline can approach it? Biology should be the first and last study of science. It is our own nature that is unlocked by means of the humanly created natural sciences used to understand the universe. Ever since the remotest of times philosophers have acknowledged the primacy of consciousness—that all truths and principles of being must begin with the individual mind and self. Thus Descartes’s adage
The urgent and primary questions of the universe have been undertaken by those
physicists who are trying to explain the origins of everything with grand
unified theories. But as exciting and glamorous as these theories are, they
are an evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge:
that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer. And
more important than this, that the observer in a significant sense creates
reality and not the other way around. Recognition of this insight leads to a
single theory that unifies our understanding of the world.
Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for
animal life to exist. For example, if the big bang had been one-part-in-a
billion more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies to
form and for life to begin. If the strong nuclear force were decreased by two
percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together. Hydrogen would be the only atom
in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased, stars (including
the sun) would not ignite. These are just three of more than 200 physical
parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that they cannot be
random. Indeed, the lack of a scientific explanation has allowed these facts
to be hijacked as a defense of intelligent design.
Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence
unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived
further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from
biocentrism. Our sense of the forward motion of time is really the result of
an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path.
At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first
described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically
with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that
an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its flight. But if
it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at
every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion
impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion of time
is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within
us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
This paradox lies at the heart of one of the great revolutions of 20th-century
physics, a revolution that has yet to take hold of our understanding of the
world and of the decisive role that consciousness plays in determining the
nature of reality. The uncertainty principle in quantum physics is more
profound than its name suggests. It means that we make choices at every
moment in what we can determine about the world. We cannot know with complete
accuracy a quantum particle’s motion and its position at the same time—we have
to choose one or the other. Thus the consciousness of the observer is
decisive in determining what a particle does at any given moment.
Einstein was frustrated by the threat of quantum uncertainty to the hypothesis
he called spacetime, and spacetime turns out to be incompatible with
the world discovered by quantum physics. When Einstein showed that there is
no universal now, it followed that observers could slice up reality into past,
present, and, future, in different ways, all with equal reality. But what,
exactly, is being sliced up?
Space and time are not stuff that can be brought back to the laboratory in a
marmalade jar for analysis. In fact, space and time fall into the province of
biology—of animal sense perception—not of physics. They are properties of the
mind, of the language by which we human beings and animals represent things to
ourselves. Physicists venture beyond the scope of their science—beyond the
limits of material phenomena and law—when they try to assign physical,
mathematical, or other qualities to space and time.
Return to the revelation that we are thinking animals and that the material
world is the elusive substratum of our conscious activity continually defining
and redefining the real. We must become skeptical of the hard reality of our
most cherished conceptions of space and time, and of the very notion of an
external reality, in order to recognize that it is the activity of
consciousness itself, born of our biological selves, which in some sense
creates the world, once we understand all the synaptic connections in the
brain. “The tools of neuroscience,” wrote philosopher and author David
Chalmers (Scientific American, December 1995) “cannot provide a full
account of conscious experience, although they have much to offer. ...Consciousness
might be explained by a new kind of theory.” Indeed, in a 1983 National
Academy Report, the Research Briefing Panel on Cognitive Science and
Artificial Intelligence stated that the questions to which it concerned itself
“reflect a single underlying great scientific mystery, on par with
understanding the evolution of the universe, the origin of life, or the nature
of elementary particles.”
The mystery is plain. Neuroscientists have developed theories that might help
to explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and
thus succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived
object—such as the shape, color, and smell of a flower—are merged into a
coherent whole. These theories reflect some of the important work that is
occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories
of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of
these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience;
and yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in
this gap in our understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a
physical process. Even Steven Weinberg concedes that although consciousness
may have a neural correlate, its existence does not seem to be derivable from
physical laws.
Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the
corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have
no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions
physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of
consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them. “Let man,” declared
Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart;
this, namely;
that the Highest dwells with him;
that the
sources of nature are in his own mind.”
Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of
consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we
realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the
information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of
themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal
relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience
that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal
logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to
conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as
existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a
spatio-temporal
order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information
leaps into three-dimensional
sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.
We are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time
and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong
to the living. Think of all the recent book titles—The End of Science, The
End of History, The End of Eternity, The End of Certainty, The End of Nature,
and The End of Time. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality
that time and space do not exist, will it feel like madness.
Wired Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology. This essay was adapted from an article published in the Spring 2007 issue of The American Scholar.