Hi John --
You commented to Andre,
The "world of appearances", to use Hegel's phrase, is experiential
Existence. It is man's experience of "otherness" as a dynamic
cause-and-effect system that is ordered in space, evolutionary in time,
and relative to the observer. I maintain that physical existence is not
ultimate Reality but, rather, the valuistic construction of the
subjective
mind.
Which newly interests me for its proximity to what I'm reading of
biocentrism . . .
I recall your mentioning Robert Lanza, whom I cited on this forum in 2007
after republishing his essay "A New Theory of the Universe" on my Values
page. Dr. Lanza is an executive at Advanced Cell Technology and teaches at
Wake Forest School of Medicine. He has supposedly written some 20 books.
Do you know if any of them lay out the theory of Biocentrism?
According to biocentrism, space and time are not hard, cold physical
objects, but rather forms of animal sense perception. When we speak
of time, we inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not
the same thing as time. Consider Heisenberg's famous 'uncertainty
principle.' If there was really a world out there with particles just
bouncing around, then you should be able to measure all their properties.
But it turns out you can't - for instance, a particle's exact location and
momentum cannot be known at the same time. They're like the man
and the women in the cuckoo-clock - when one goes in the other
comes out. This uncertainty is built in the fabric of the universe, but
no one has a clue why. It only makes sense if we accept the fact that
the universe is biocentric.
In his essay, Lanza says "Without perception, there is in effect no reality.
...Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem
of consciousness." Yet, here is a biologist claiming that "space and time
fall into the province of biology." He quotes David Chalmers as saying that
"The tools of neuroscience cannot provide a full account of conscious
experience ...Consciousness might be explained by a new kind of theory."
This is the aspect of 'biocentrism' I don't understand. If consciousness is
not the function of the brain and nervous system, how can the precept of
space and time be considered biological?
By treating space and time as fundamental and independent things,
we pick a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world.
In fact, new experiments are starting to confirm that quantum effects
apply to the everyday world of human-scale objects.
Biocentrism unlocks the cage we have unwittingly confined ourselves.
A new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within the
existing paradigm. But allowing the observer into the equation opens
new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of
the atom to our views of life and death. Above all, biocentrism offers
a more promising way to bring together all of science as scientists
have been attempting to do ever since Einstein.
I agree with the epistemology; I just don't see how it centers on biology.
If you can explain the conscious precepts-to-biology connection, I might
join in your exploration of Biocentrism.
Thanks, John,
--Ham
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
