Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Book Preface

Our understanding of the universe as a whole has reached a dead end. The “meaning” of quantum physics has been debated since it was first discovered in the 1930s, but we are no closer to understanding it now than we were then. The “theory of everything” that was promised for decades to be just around the corner has been stuck for decades in the abstract mathematics of string theory, with its unproven and unprovable assertions.

But it’s worse than that. Until recently, we thought we knew what the universe was made of, but it now turns out that 96 percent of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, and we have virtually no idea what they are. We’ve accepted the Big Bang, despite the increasingly greater need to jury-rig it to fit our observations (as in the 1979 acceptance of a period of exponential growth, known as inflation, for which the physics is basically unknown). It even turns out that the Big Bang has no answer for one of the greatest mysteries in the universe: why is the universe exquisitely fine-tuned to support life?

Our understanding of the fundamentals of the universe is actually retreating before our eyes. The more data we gather, the more we’ve had to juggle our theories or ignore findings that simply make no sense.

This book proposes a new perspective: that our current theories of the physical world don’t work, and can never be made to work, until they account for life and consciousness. This book proposes that, rather than a belated and minor outcome after billions of years of lifeless physical processes, life and consciousness are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the universe. We call this new perspective biocentrism.

In this view, life is not an accidental by-product of the laws of physics. Nor is the nature or history of the universe the dreary play of billiard balls that we’ve been taught since grade school.

Through the eyes of a biologist and an astronomer, we will unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. The twenty-first century is predicted to be the century of biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science, not with imaginary strings that occupy equally imaginary unseen dimensions, but with a much simpler idea that is rife with so many shocking new perspectives that we are unlikely ever to see reality the same way again.

Biocentrism may seem like a radical departure from our current understanding, and it is, but the hints have appeared all around us for decades. Some of the conclusions of biocentrism may resonate with aspects of Eastern religions or certain New Age philosophies. This is intriguing, but rest assured there is nothing New Age about this book. The conclusions of biocentrism are based on mainstream science, and it is a logical extension of the work of some of our greatest scientific minds.

Biocentrism cements the groundwork for new lines of investigation in physics and cosmology. This book will lay out the principles of biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all of which demand a rethinking of our current theories of the physical universe.

Contents
Introduction 1
1. Muddy Universe 3
2. In the Beginning There Was . . . What? 11
3. The Sound of a Falling Tree 19
4. Lights and Action! 25
5. Where Is the Universe? 33
6. Bubbles in Time 41
7. When Tomorrow Comes Before Yesterday 47
8. The Most Amazing Experiment 61
9. Goldilocks’s Universe 83
10. No Time to Lose 95
11. Space Out 111
12. The Man Behind the Curtain 129
13. Windmills of the Mind 135
14. A Fall in Paradise 143
15. Building Blocks of Creation 147
16. What Is This Place? 153
17. Sci-Fi Gets Real 163
18. Mystery of Consciousness 169
19. Death and Eternity 185
20. Where Do We Go from Here? 195
Appendix 1: The Lorentz Transformation 199
Appendix 2: Einstein’s Relativity and Biocentrism 201
Index 209
About the Authors 213