Biocentrism: Does Life Create The Universe?

Exploring Dr. Lanza's 'biological theory of relativity' and it's potential to form a new worldview for a more thriving future.

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What if Life wasn’t some accidental occurrence in a dead universe?  That would make us include biology along with physics at the center of any cosmology – sometimes called Biocentrism.

There seem to be various approaches to Biocentrism online.  I’ve been taken by the views of Dr. Robert Lanza, who wrote a book by that title in 2009.

According to an article written by Dr. Lanza himself, putting observers firmly into any attempted understanding of the universe or reality — is called biocentrism.  The dramatic shift proposed by Lanza’s theory is that Life creates the Universe.

In the article, Dr. Lanza goes through the usual history of the shift in scientific perspective beginning with quantum physics and the recognition of physics and biology to include the observer as part of any modern cosmology.

(Dr. Lanza and Nancy Kress have recently published a novel called “Observer” that dramatizes their current views of biocentrism)

The Branch of Philosophy that Includes the Observer

I first got interested in the role of the observer in college, when I studied phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that suggests that there can be no self without being – being in the world is what is happening and of course, the current trend to nonduality takes this concept one step further – it’s just One and there is no separate self to whom anything is happening.

What interested me, particularly in the article by Dr. Lanza referenced above was his prediction that where the 20^th century was the century of physics, the 21^st century will be the century of biology.

The interesting thing about both Dr. Lanza’s beliefs and the general tenets of phenomenology is that the human body becomes the focal point for reality.  Whatever our view of consciousness may be the obvious reality is that everything we think we know is experienced as the body/mind.

One could say through the body but that might infer that consciousness and the body are two separate things, which is what modern science would have us believe. However, no scientist has ever identified a separate “mind” in nature.

Dr. Lanza points out that everything we know is gleaned through the senses:  those five that we commonly understand; perhaps we can add a mind and any others we may yet discover.  It seems obvious that some people have senses that others do not.

What We “Know” Through the Senses is Often Wrong

The main point is that through our science we have discovered a great deal about how our senses take in and process the information that seems to be coming from “outside.”

And as the allegory of Plato’s Cave pointed out long ago, our sensory capacity is actually quite limited.

Thanks to science and our instruments we have discovered that for example, visually, we only take in a tiny fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

All of our other known senses have other life forms with superior capability in that area; whales and bats exist in a universe of sound that we cannot even imagine.

So it’s not as though we only don’t know what may be “out there” – we have reached the point that we also don’t know what we don’t know.  With instruments and tools like AI our perspective is ever expanding but until we also include ourselves as subjectivity (observer) we can never be certain.

In other words, if everything we know is a function of what we are, to the extent that we have limitations it seems obvious that if there is something that we are not – we can NEVER know it.

Should we raise our hands in resignation at the futility of it all?  No.

So Who or What Are We?

We might instead turn the inquiry around to determine as closely as possible just what it is we ARE. As the Oracle said, “Know Thyself”.

As Dr. Lanza analyzes the situation in the article, he states succinctly:

“Once one fully understands that there is no independent external universe outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place.”

Lanza then compares a few other possible theories before stating, “Biocentrism fits very neatly into the late physicist John Wheeler’s participatory universe belief in which observers are required to bring the universe into existence.”

And how can we possibly participate, except biologically and physically – bodily?

Lanza goes on to suggest that aspects of nature that we believe exist independently are all extensions or projections of our own consciousness or being.

“In reality there can be no break between the observer and the observed.  If the two are split, the reality is gone.  Space, like time, is not an object or a thing.  Space and time are forms of our animal sense perception. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells.  Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.”

Coalescing the Various Branches of Science

“Currently, the disciplines of biology and physics, and all their sub-branches are generally practiced by those with little knowledge of the others. Without symbiosis between them, attempts to unify the universe will remain a dead end.”

People whose knowledge combines multiple disciplines are called Renaissance men or women.  During that period of relative enlightenment great thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci used art, sculpture and architecture to represent a cohesive synthesis of mathematics, astronomy, and all of the known sciences to express a wholistic representation of reality – from their unique perspective.

In fact, as I’ve written about recently, this wholistic synthesis had its source in ancient Greece and Egypt, and there are Egyptologists who have viewed the temples and monuments of Egypt similarly as expressions of a sacred unity between what we know and what we are.

To those who are interested in this line of inquiry, you might look into the work of John  Anthony West and R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz.

Schwaller spent years studying the Temple of Luxor and wrote his seminal work The Temple in Man. John Anthony West amplified in his work, “The Serpent in the Sky”, connecting the relationships between the form within the Temple of Luxor to the basic form of the human body, as a way to evoke a sense of how Life or Consciousness operates within our being.

To Schwaller and West, the human body is a smaller version of the cosmos through which existence (and consciousness) emerges or comes into being.  This is sometimes called the anthropocosmos, putting human biology again at the focal point of reality and in other tropes it is sometimes referred to as “As above so below.”

Lanza’s theory puts these ideas into a more modern context, weaving physics and biology together so as to attempt a unifying theory of reality.  In many ways, this resonates with pantheism or mysticism.

Potentially such a shift in humanity’s perspective could return us to the sort of holistic understanding of our role in nature, from a position of awe and reverence, similar to what was practiced among indigenous people, before our wonderful modern technology severed our sense of interconnection with the universe.

Such a connection between our body/minds and nature or being itself was also celebrated by the American transcendentalists.  Here Thoreau describes the intimacy that is achieved with nature through the bodily act of experiencing wetness and then evaporation:

"What a luxury to bathe now! It is gloriously hot, the first of this weather. I cannot get wet enough. I must let the water soak into me. When you come out, it is rapidly dried on you or absorbed into your body, and you want to go in again. I begin to inhabit the planet, and see how I may be naturalized at last." -From Thoreau's Journal; July 3, 1854.

There is nothing in science that can explain these sensations as a function of material reality.

Whether through self-observation or a survey of ancient wisdom, there are many threads bringing us closer to the sort of synthesis that Lanza is putting forward, but they all involve a dissolution of the modern hubris of science as “objective” and a recognition that ultimately consciousness or reality is something nonmaterial -- a subjectivity.

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(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)