Biocentrism: Robert Lanza’s Controversial View of the Universe

Biocentrism

The ‘biocentric universe’, also known as ‘biocentrism’, was a concept proposed in 2007 by Dr Robert Lanza, who works in the fields of regenerative medicine and biology. The biocentric hypothesis states that life and consciousness are fundamental to the nature of the universe – life creates the universe and not the other way around. From this perspective, biology would be considered above and superior to physics because, according to Lanza, these disciplines cannot be understood without an in-depth understanding of the nature of life and consciousness. Lanza insists that a ‘Theory of Everything’ can only be achieved if the basic constituents of nature – matter, space and time – are viewed through a biocentric lens.

Lanza originally published these ideas in an article in The American Scholar in 2007. Then in 2009, Lanza and astronomer Bob Berman published their book, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, in which they fully expanded on this hypothesis. For an abridgement of this book, in which the key points are summarised, check out this article in Discover magazine.

Lanza asserts that time and space do not exist. In an interview with Wired magazine, he says:

There is something very unusual about them [space and time]. We can’t put them in a marmalade jar and take them back to the lab for analysis. Space and time are forms of animal sense perception. Space and time are not objects or things — they are forms of animal sense perception.

This is a very challenging concept for the physicists out there because it would contradict Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which states that time is embedded in the fabric of the cosmos. Space and time are firmly believed by the scientific community to be entwined in something objective called space-time. Therefore the idea that space and time are subjective is very unsettling. Even for the layperson, it is mind-boggling to think that space and time would just be mental constructs which have no independent existence.

However, Lanza points to philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Berkeley and Schopenhauer who stressed the primacy of consciousness. Kant, for example, similarly thought that time was a mental construct – he described it as “the form of inner sense” and argued that it was a priori (it is instinctive and a part of how our mind works). For Kant, time is inside the head, not outside of it. It does not exist in the physical world because it has no physical attributes (i.e. shape, size, position, velocity etc.). There is nothing about it that we can measure. Kant says that:

the mind will trick itself into thinking that objects around it are in time. We think that because we have a word for time, that it exists around us. Time does not exist around us, we merely see things around us in the form of time. Time is a thought.

Likewise, for Lanza, space and time are tools that the mind uses to make sense of the world.

In a sense, then, biocentrism is more like a philosophical concept than a scientific hypothesis. On the other hand, our subjective experience of the passage time can vary, which suggests that time is, in some sense, subjective and dependent on consciousness. Time distortion is a common experience felt under the influence of psychedelic drugs; moments can feel like they last for a very long time, with minutes feeling like months. A feeling of ‘eternity’, the stopping of time, or even the meaninglessness of time can also characterise the more intense psychedelic experiences. Time can also appear to be slowed down during life-threatening situations and let’s not forget the saying: ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’.

Rather than necessarily bolster Kant’s theory on time, and Lanza’s subsequent re-evaluation of it, it is perfectly consistent for there to both an objective and a subjective interpretation of ‘time’. Even though Einstein established that space and time are relative and not absolute (which is what Newton proposed), this does not mean that they have no independent existence. Lanza conflates relativity with subjectivity.

Lanza is convinced that biocentrism can offer valuable insights into many mysterious aspects of physics, such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more accurately we can measure the velocity of a particle, the less certain we can be about its position, and vice versa. Lanza also claims that biocentrism can offer answers to the strange ‘observer’ effect seen in the famous double-slit experiment, where the act of observing the passage of electrons through a double slit can affect their final position. The third puzzle that Lanza believes the biocentric viewpoint could shed some light on is the so-called ‘fine-tuning problem’, in which we find that the forces, constants and laws of the universe seem to be perfectly fine-tuned for the existence of biological life.

Lanza and Bermann’s 2009 book contains seven principles that make up the core of biocentrism. Some of them are fairly uncontroversial, such as the premises that external and internal perceptions are intertwined and that perceiving reality is “a process that involves our consciousness.” But some of the more controversial principles include: (1) the premise that consciousness must exist and that without it “matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability”, and (2) secondly, the idea that the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for life.

With respect to the first premise, one problem is that it assumes that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of reality. There is no basis to make this assumption – what evidence do we have which points to the necessity of consciousness? If anything, it is an extremely anthropocentric assumption. The universe would still exist even if no conscious creatures evolved on one of its planets. Another problem with this principle is that it assumes that matter will be stuck in an undetermined state, in the realm of probability, unless consciousness exists. There is no evidence to back this up. If it were true, it would mean that before biological life and consciousness evolved in the universe, all of the matter would interact in a probabilistic manner. This seems highly unlikely.

Anthropocentrism is at work here once again – Lanza thinks that it simply not possible for nature to run its course without the existence of consciousness. Lanza’s view here is similar to Berkeley’s metaphysical doctrine called subjective idealism, which says that a mind-independent reality does not exist – reality depends on the existence of perceivers. As Lanza said in an interview, “If you divorce consciousness from the universe, there is no reality.”

Lanza has argued that if no-one is there to look at a tree, then the tree will have no definite properties; in his own words, “nothing remotely resembling that tree could exist.” This, I think, is an extreme conclusion to draw. First of all, it rests on a confused understanding of quantum mechanics. It is true that particles behave in a probabilistic manner, but when we look at things on a large scale (such as the size of a tree), matter obeys very deterministic laws. Lanza fails to see how the sum is greater than its parts. Furthermore, Lanza conflates the ‘observer’ with consciousness. In quantum interactions, the observer could equally be the apparatus that records or measures the particles, eventually leading to the collapse of the probabilistic state into a determined state. Consciousness is not required in quantum mechanics – the environment itself can act as the ‘observer’ so that the interaction of matter with matter is sufficient to create objects with definite qualities.

Secondly, even if there were no observers, a tree could still resemble a tree. Although qualities such as colour may not remain (since they depend on sense perception), the tree’s more basic qualities (what John Locke called the primary qualities) would persist. These would be size, position, etc. The New Age ‘guru’, Deepak Chopra, also misuses ‘quantum’ language to support his spiritual view of the universe – but he’s actually talking pseudo-scientific nonsense. He uses terms such as ‘nonlocality’ and ‘entanglement’, which are meaningful on a quantum level, but which do not apply in the realm of big objects (i.e. brains) or complex processes (i.e. consciousness). These concepts do not mean that everyone or everything is interconnected. Chopra sprinkles irrelevant scientific terms over New Age mysticism and his popularity is based on the mistaken belief that he has successfully united the material world with the ‘spiritual’ world.

With respect to the second premise, the ‘fine-tuning’ argument, it is true that the forces, constants and laws of nature enable the existence of life. They would appear to be very fine-tuned because if you changed the value of one of these constants, i.e. the strength of gravity, ever so slightly, biological life would apparently be impossible. This idea of ‘fine-tuning’, however, has been heavily criticised. Computer simulations carried out by the physicist Victor Stenger actually show that stars could form (which are necessary for life, since we are made of star-dust) and could exist over a wide-parameter range. Fred Adams in his paper, Stars in Other Universes: Stellar Structure With Different Fundamental Constants published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, achieved a similar result. According to inflationary cosmology, constants, such as the force of gravity, can change in their value in the course of cosmic evolution.

Others reject the fine-tuning argument by referring to the more robust anthropic principle, which says that the reason we observe the universe to be fine-tuned is that it would have to be fine-tuned for us to observe it in the first place. We should therefore not be surprised or puzzled by the fact that the constants are as they are. This seems almost like common sense, but it is a sufficient explanation – life is fine-tuned to the universe and not the other way around. Life could simply be a happy accident based on the random values of the fundamental constants. In any case, the universe seems like a pretty hostile place – as far as we know, life could actually be an extremely rare occurrence. So if the odds are monumentally stacked against life arising, it could still happen by chance alone. This is a point which Lanza seems unwilling to concede.

Even if we accept that the universe is ‘fine-tuned’, this puzzle could still be solved by using far better explanations than those offered by biocentrism. One of the most promising explanations is the Multiverse Theory, in which there could potentially be an infinite number of universes, each with a different set of parameters. In a variation of this theory, the physicist Lee Smolin has proposed that our universe might be fine-tuned for life due to ‘cosmic natural selection’. In this scheme of things, natural selection would favour a universe which is the best at reproducing. If a brand new universe was contained inside each black hole, then a universe which had the most black holes would reproduce more than those with less black holes. The reason the constants have the values they have is that it is those values which are conducive to black holes, not because life is fundamental to reality. The fine-tuning problem can also disappear if we consider the possibility that our universe was designed, not by a divine author, but by a super-advanced alien civilisation – our universe could be a carefully designed computer simulation that they are running.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has questioned whether biocentrism can be considered a theory at all. As he puts it:

It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn’t explain how consciousness happens at all. He’s stopping where the fun begins.

Biocentrism lacks explanatory power – it does not explain how consciousness creates the universe – so it is not a very useful doctrine. In that sense, it can hardly be considered a theory. Lanza never properly defines consciousness either – he seems to use it in a different sense when it suits him best. What kind of consciousness created the universe? It certainly can’t have been animal or human consciousness if the universe didn’t exist, so where exactly was this consciousness located? Where did it come from? And how could disembodied consciousness create the universe? Lanza gets into very quasi-religious territory on this issue. Lanza’s view is also similar to the philosophical doctrine known as monistic idealism, which says that consciousness is everything.

The famous physicist and sceptic, Lawrence Krauss, has said:

It [biocentrism] may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn’t look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science.

The theoretical physicist David Lindley has also criticised Lanza’s essay in The American Scholar, commenting that Lanza’s concept was a “vague, inarticulate metaphor” and he couldn’t see how it would lead to any valuable scientific or philosophical insights. Lindley’s full response to the essay can be read here.

Lanza and people like Deepak Chopra are using science in a very superficial way in order to promote their own brand of mysticism. They are wrapping spiritual notions up in the language of science, but the scientists are not being fooled by it. It is also worth pointing out that Lanza has not had any work published in a reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal. So as it stands, biocentrism has still not survived the scrutiny of the scientific community. There are also doubts as to whether biocentrism is falsifiable and testable – a true indication of any valid scientific hypothesis.

The Daily Mail has recently published a highly sensationalised article about Lanza’s views, with the headline: Quantum physics proves that there IS an afterlife, claims scientist. The author of this article clearly does not understand what constitutes ‘proof’, but there you go, that’s The Daily Mail for you. Lanza’s biocentric view of the universe does not confirm or even point to the existence of an afterlife. He uses the multiverse idea to argue that even when we die, we could exist elsewhere in another universe. However, this is not the same as saying that our consciousness will travel to a supernatural realm after we die.

Robert Lanza expressed his views on biocentrism and death in an article in Psychology Today. For him, death is an illusion. Based on the multiverse idea and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e. anything that can happen, does happen), he believes that death will not be the end of a particular person’s life. Yet once again, Lanza has misused scientific concepts to support his own spiritual views. He describes life as “like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the universe”. A very poetic statement. However, just because an infinite number of universes may exist, this does not mean that upon death, I will somehow ‘wake up’ in another universe. Death is the end, whether Lanza likes it or not. As far as we can tell, if there are other universes, they are separate and disconnected from each other.

17 Comments

  1. Anonymous
    February 2, 2014 / 2:40 am

    Lanza is right . What ever u measure even by so call scitentific equipments and reading , is still decided by mind and vision which we don't know at all . How they work

  2. wag
    April 4, 2014 / 4:05 am

    Thanks for this. I had to force myself to keep reading after the first premise (tree falling in the woods). Just because we aren't there to translate air pressure into sound doesn't mean that pulses of air pressure don't exist and it certainly doesn't mean that trees don't exist.

    • Amy Luna Manderino
      December 8, 2015 / 9:21 pm

      Wow. That is so not what Lanza says in his book.

    • richard charles forrest
      January 5, 2017 / 6:23 pm

      Yeah I agree kind of missing the point here. The point is that the only thing perceived are perceptions. The only thing measured are measurements. We are inextricably part of the cosmos and the thing we are measuring is our selves. There is no ceiling on this earth just as we are not a self contained bubble universe within our bodies. As Carl Sagan said "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself". We cannot separate the measure from the measured the perception from the perceived. It is fundamentally the same thing. We have totally identified ourselves as a species as the incessant internal awareness of our minds, the concentration point of mental faculties. We do not identify with our unconscious processes anymore than our limbs. If our limbs are cut off we still feel that we ourselves as personalities persist. Yet these processes are guided by the same forces that move all nature. They are part of natures broader dance. This then is the fundamental point. That we are both the observer and observed and that life is bloody mental…and the rest is just in your head!

  3. Anonymous
    April 4, 2014 / 10:30 am

    Reading the points against Biocentrism here to me are not convincing enough arguments. I've read the book and find the points raised in this article don't justify contradiction against Robert Lanza's theory. Robert uses scientific facts to support his theory which makes perfect sense to me, just because direct evidence mathematical or otherwise is missing does not mean it isn't a good enough theory. Anything modeled outside the physics community will never be taken seriously even when half the stuff theorised by physicists themselves is no better. I'm afraid Robert Lanza is fighting a losing battle no matter how tight his work would be. Accepted or not, I think it makes sense.

  4. WizardOfOz
    April 12, 2014 / 3:10 pm

    Lanza's theory is at best philosophy and at worst, pseudoscience. He offers explanations but no rigorous scientifically testable hypothses. Moreover, he clearly misinterprets central concepts and tenets of quantum theory. For example, consciousness is certainly not required for the double slit experiment to work – only a detector that registers the passage of a photon or not is essential. An interference pattern will be produced on the screen whether a conscious observer is there or not. It is the interaction of the particle with the detector that collapses the wave function – the wave function not being representative of the particle itself but rather a probability wave, whose amplitude squared is the observed probabilty that a particle will be in a particular location at a particular time. (There are no such mythical creatures as 'Wavesicles"). Quantum mechanics is a very mathematically rigorous theory that defies easy interpretation. Trying to interpret quantum mechanics with analogies or metaphors without knowledge of the underlying mathematics is neither rigorous nor accurate. It is as misguided as a gradeschooler with commensurate language abilities attempting to write a comprehensive literary critique on War and Peace. Dr.Lanza is a gifted physician and biologist but is way out of his depth concerning the intricacies of quantum mechanics.

    • Anonymous
      March 1, 2017 / 6:04 am

      You offer circular reasoning based on its own presumptions, as does Sam Wolfe in the original critique. You presume "Science"–and by that I mean that you subscribe to the philosophical presumptions of "scientific naturalism"–in which you place faith in the concept that "Science" interpreted through that philosophical filter will, indeed, provide the ultimate answers on the fundamental basis for "reality,"
      even though Lanza (and others) have exposed the weakness of that approach.

      Lanza's is obviously not the last word on the subject and he is not above reproach in his own assumptions, but he does offer an approach to "fundamental reality" in which consciousness itself plays a part, unlike the approach of most scientists who ignore that reality in their hypotheses which, in their bases, is either purely mechanical or dependent on our living in some sort of "simulation" which itself has no reasoned basis as to origin.

      Best that we all stay tuned.

    • Pat White
      February 13, 2018 / 9:04 pm

      It seems to me that Lanza’s theory is neither science nor good philosophy. As Sam says, he is using Berkeley to defend his position and a bad reading of Immanuel Kant. Yes time is a mental construct but Kant has nothing to say about what exactly what exists beyond the phenomenological world of the mind/consciousness. Kant calls the world outside of our sense perception, the Noumenal World which can never be known. He obviously has nothing to say about time outside the mind one way or the other for it is unknowable. The epistemic gap will always be between the perceiver, the representations on objects of sense (ideas)/ and the objects of sense in themselves. It is impossible to know what lies beyond our representations of sense perception, impossible to know what we call the world “out there”. To conclude based on this that the objects of sense don’t exist without a subjective perceiver is not a logically valid conclusion. Berkley tried to address the problem of subjective idealism, i.e. if there is no one there to perceive something it no longer exists. His basic axiom is “To be is To be Perceived.” So he asserts an objective perceiver who perceives everything all the time; i.e. God. The obvious problem with this assertion is that is contradicts his axiom “to be is to be perceived”, for Berekeley, an empiricist, never perceived God to place him in his theory in the first place. Berkeley is guilty of Anthropomorphism. Even if God did exist is it logically sound to assume he would perceive as we do magnified to the level of perceiving everything all the time? No. So, he’s stuck with his subjective idealism “to be is to be perceived”, and the laughable view that when there is no human being is perceiving something it no longer exists. What hubris! And to think this is what Lanza is relying on to assert that without consciousness things do not exist. How could he possibly know this? No one can. So the scientist is left with the only way to address what is unknown: concede that reality may never be known fully but strive forward viewing reality pragmatically, never asserting that any theory or set of theories gives us the truth about reality but that these theories are instruments which can guide our progress. The scientific endeavor as the only meaningful avenue.

      On the matter of fine tuning, Lanza’s simply refuses to believe that the Universe or our world for that matter could have arisen from blind dumb luck. I can just picture him sitting in a corner, back to his peers, saying “no I won’t believe it!” I refuse!” like a child being sent to his room without dinner.
      The idea of or Universe or our world arising out of blind dumb luck is very easy to imagine: Imagine the Universe is a very big cup. the matter contained within it, dice. Put all the dice into the cup, let’s say 5 trillion dice. Eventually give enough time, when they are poured out of the cup again and again and again they will all hit five at the same time. This what we call order but is merely blind dumb luck. In fact, the dice must all land on 5 at the same time eventually. The same analogy could be applied to the Universe and Universes that it came of: The Multiple Universes it came out of this time being the cup and the Universe being the dice. Very simple and logical I would think.

  5. Markus Wolf
    April 24, 2014 / 11:07 pm

    Evidence exist where a sun flower appears yellow to human, brown to cattles and purple to dragonfly; so whats the original color. Yes it is purely subjective. Our science (present competency to observe and experiment) gave us on viewpoint based purely on the pseudo-human senses (telescope, microscope etc). We were enslaved by already five senses, present approach to scientific observation has progressively brought to more pseud-human. Each intermediate observation/instrumentation is adding their transfer function in the so called observation, eventually adding more entropy to the instrumented observations. So question arise what is the true source of observation or perception? five natural senses, hundreds of psuedo-human senses or?

  6. Anonymous
    July 16, 2014 / 5:47 pm

    The measuring device or the observer only collapses particles when there is a conscious observer. This is demonstrated with experiments where the measuring device has a magnetic tape to record the the measurement. With the tape working, the particle collapses, remove the tape and the particle does not collapse.

    • johnandreae
      February 13, 2018 / 9:42 am

      When someone who offers a new paradigm there is always great resistance to it as we tend to stick to our habitual ways of thinking. While I think of physicists as people who think outside the box quite a lot they are still prey to this tendency. Just because only one individual puts forward a new theory it doesn’t mean it’s wrong and it doesn’t have to be completely right to be worthy of respect rather than being rubbished. Galileo was one individual came up with an earth shattering idea!!

  7. Kesther
    September 23, 2019 / 8:00 pm

    I think Chopra, Lanza, and Bruce Lipton ( can’t think of anymore pseudoscientists ), give serious consciousness researchers, and people who are interested in consciousness bad names and reputations.

  8. Kesther
    May 20, 2020 / 10:57 pm

    I actually really wanted to believe in biocentrinism and the Law of Attraction when I was a New Ager years ago.
    I mean, who doesn’t really want to believe in them? They’re very comforting. The idea that the universe is all about you, pays attention to everything you do when nobody else seems to, only thinking positive thoughts to solve your problems and to get what you want without having to get up and do actual work, etc.
    Especially when I was going through hard times.

    But then I realized that non of it was scientific.
    I currently think mainstream and peer-reviewed science are just as, no, more exciting than the New Age beliefs.

    • Sam Woolfe
      Author
      December 4, 2020 / 1:30 pm

      Yeah, all of those beliefs are attractive for exactly those reasons; they can be a massive comfort. For that reason, it’s kind of hard to judge people who hold onto to them so passionately since they can be like a raft helping to keep you afloat in hard times. I don’t think you necessarily need to buy into all those warming New Age beliefs, though, in order to cope with life. There’s plenty of more grounded and evidence-based wisdom out there.

  9. Dr. Pauly Carroll
    July 25, 2021 / 5:06 pm

    You make some valid arguments, however, if we use the criteria of a theory being falsifiable, the multiverse concept is not falsifiable. It is just another philosophical theory trying to fit what we do know into a neat package. After reading Lanza’s books, I don’t think he is trying to fit biocentrism into quantum physics. He uses the language of physics, but I don’t get the idea he is trying to force biocentrism into a falsifiable theory. There are areas in physics that are falsifiable, ie, the slit experiment, but there are as many problems with quantum physics as with biocentrism. Physics is great until it tries to explain the “why”. I don’t embrace Biocentrism, neither do I believe the field of theoretical physics has provided adequate answers to the “whys” of life. When you say “Death is the end, whether Lanza likes it or not,” that is an opinion, just as biocentrism is an opinion. You can no more falsify that statement than Lanza can falsify his.

    • Marcus
      January 6, 2023 / 3:12 am

      Many physicists ridicule multiverse for not being falsifiabe (though some claim that there are ways), difference is that multiverses are directly derived from proven theories or certain interpretations of them.

      Why is not a question you can answer with science by design, teleology have very deliberately been put to philosophy, especially by the natural sciences. This may be the inherent limit of science, or as some have tried to do, we need to integrate the two. But physics shouldn’t be expected to give answes in teleology, it was never meant to and it can’t.

      The difference between QM and biocentrism is that one is tangible, testable and usable. Biocentrism at best provides a philosophy which can never be proven.

  10. Knoxville Socialist
    April 17, 2022 / 1:36 pm

    Wow, what a great article, what a great blog you have, I will put it in my favorites. I love philosophy, science, the search for extraterrestrial life, politics, psychology sociology history etc

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