Wednesday 16 January 2019

Biocentrism

Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, Biocentrism (Dallas, 2009).

I disagree either with what these authors say or with the way they say it. If they mean that conscious organisms create reality, then I disagree. If they mean that conscious organisms create not reality but appearances of reality, then they need to state this more clearly.

We are used to the idea that reality differs from appearances of it:

the Sun appears to go round the Earth;

an apparently continuous and static solid really comprises many moving particles and is really in orbit around the Sun, the galactic center and other points in space;

a galaxy seen from a distance is a single point of light whereas, seen from within, it is many points of light yet it remains a single galaxy;

the sky that looks blue to us looks different to beings with different sense organs;

when a phone rings in an empty house, air molecules vibrate but there is no heard ring anywhere in the house.

Even if the current understanding of reality differs from earlier understandings, it remains an understanding of pre-conscious reality. An indeterminate reality is a counter-intuitive kind of reality but remains a kind of reality, not nothing.

I will state my understanding of reality and appearance. Reality is one but internally differentiated. Its differentiations include many conscious organisms, each perceiving its environment. By interacting with its total environment, an organism creates an appearance of its immediate environment and thus also of a small part of reality. Each such appearance is an interaction within reality, not reality. Reality becomes conscious of itself because it is internally differentiated into conscious organisms and their environments. It existed, even if indeterminately, before becoming conscious.