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

Consciousness poses the deepest problem for science, even as it resides as one of the key tenets of biocentrism. There is nothing more intimate than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. “All sorts of mental phenomena,” says consciousness researcher David Chalmers at the Australian National University, “have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.”

Many books and articles about consciousness appear continually, some with bold titles such as the popular 1991 Consciousness Explained, by Tufts researcher Daniel Dennett. Using what he calls the “heterophenomenological” method, which treats reports of introspection not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as data to be explained, he argues that “the mind is a bubbling congeries of unsupervised parallel processing.” Unfortunately, while the brain does indeed appear to work by processing even straightforward jobs such as vision by employing simultaneous multiple pathways, Dennett seems to come to no useful conclusions about the nature of consciousness itself, despite the book’s ambitious title. Near the end of his interminable volume, Dennett concedes almost as an afterthought that conscious experience is a complete mystery. No wonder other researchers have referred to the work as “Consciousness Ignored.”

Dennett joins a long parade of researchers who ignored all the central mysteries of subjective experience and merely addressed the most superficial or easiest-to-tackle aspects of consciousness, those susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, which are explainable or potentially explainable with neural mechanisms and brain architecture.

Chalmers, one of the Dennett detractors, himself characterizes the so-called easy problems of consciousness to include “those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli

• the integration of information by a cognitive system

• the reportability of mental states

• the ability of a system to access its own internal states

• the focus of attention

• the deliberate control of behavior

• the difference between wakefulness and sleep”

Recognizing this, Chalmers notes the obvious: “The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations . . . . Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing . . . . It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”

What makes a consciousness problem easy or hard is that the former concern themselves solely with functionality, or the performance aspects, so that scientists need only discover which part of the brain controls which, and they can go away rightfully saying they have solved an area of cognitive function. In other words, the issue is the relatively simple one of finding mechanisms. Conversely, the deeper and infinitely more frustrating aspect of consciousness or experience is hard, as Chalmers points out, “precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions are explained.” How neural information is discriminated, integrated, and reported still doesn’t explain how it is experienced.

For any object—a machine or a computer—there is commonly no other explanatory or operating principle but physics and the chemistry of the atoms that compose it. We have already started down the long road of building machines with advanced technology and computer memory systems, with electrical microcircuits and solid-state devices that allow the performance of tasks with increasing precision and flexibility. Perhaps one day we’ll even develop machines that can eat, reproduce, and evolve. But until we can understand the exact circuitry in the brain that establishes the logic of spatial-temporal relationships, we can’t create a conscious machine such as Data in Star Trek or David, the boy in A.I.

My interest in the importance of animal cognition—and how we see the world—led me to Harvard University in the early 1980s to work with psychologist B.F. (Fred) Skinner. The semester glided away pleasantly enough, partly in exchanging opinions with Skinner and partly in experiments in the laboratory. Skinner hadn’t done any research in the laboratory in nearly two decades, when he taught pigeons to dance with each other and even to play Ping-Pong. Our experiments eventually succeeded, and a couple of our papers appeared in Science. The newspapers and magazines made a happy use of them with headlines such as “Pigeon Talk: A Triumph for Bird Brains” (Time), “Ape-Talk: Two Ways to Skinner Bird” (Science News), “Birds Talk to B.F. Skinner” (Smithsonian), and “Behavior Scientists ‘Talk’ With Pigeons” (Sarasota Herald-Tribune). They were fun experiments, Fred explained on the Today show. It was the best semester I had in medical school.

It was also a very auspicious beginning. These experiments correlated well with Skinner’s belief that the self is “a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.” However, in the years that have passed, I have come to believe that the questions cannot all be solved by a science of behavior. What is consciousness? Why does it exist? Leaving these unanswered is almost like building and launching a rocket to nowhere—full of noise and real accomplishment, but exposing a vacuum right smack in its raison d’être. There is a kind of blasphemy asking these questions, a kind of personal betrayal to the memory of that gentle yet proud old man who took me into his confidence so many years ago. Yet the issues hang in the air, as tangible, if nonverbal, as the dragonfly, or the glowworm, there along the causeway, emitting its greenish light. Or maybe it was the futile attempts of neuroscience to explain consciousness using phenomena such as explicit neuronal representation.

The implication of those early experiments was, of course, that the problem of consciousness might someday be solved once we understand all the synaptic connections in the brain. Yet pessimism always lurked, unspoken. “The tools of neuroscience,” writes Chalmers, “cannot provide a full account of conscious experience, although they have much to offer. [Perhaps] consciousness might be explained by a new kind of theory.” Indeed, in a 1983 National Academy Report, the Research Briefing Panel on Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence stated that the questions with which it concerned itself “reflect a single underlying great scientific mystery, on par with understanding the evolution of the universe, the origin of life, or the nature of elementary particles . . .”

The mystery is plain. The neuroscientists have developed theories that might help to explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain, and thus apparently succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived object—such as the shape, color and smell of a flower—are merged into a coherent whole. For example, some scientists, like Stuart Hameroff, argue that this process occurs so bedrock-deeply that it involves a quantum physical mechanism. Other scientists, like Crick and Koch, believe that the process occurs through the synchronization of cells in the brain. That there is major disagreement about something so basic is sufficient testament to the Niagara of the task that lies ahead, if even we are destined to succeed at grasping the mechanics of consciousness.

As theories, the work of the past quarter-century reflects some of the important progress that is occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. The bad news is that they are solely theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience. And yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap, in understanding how a subjective experience emerges from a physical process at all. Even the Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg concedes that there is a problem with consciousness, and that although it may have a neural correlate, its existence does not seem to be derivable from physical laws. As Emerson has said, it contradicts all experience:

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

What Weinberg and others who have pondered the issue complain about is that, given all the chemistry and physics we know, given the brain’s neurological structure and complex architecture, and its constant trickle-current, it is nothing short of astonishing that the result is—this! The world in all its manifold sights and smells and emotions. A subjective feeling of being, of aliveness, that we all carry so unrelentingly that few give it a moment’s thought. There is no principle of science—in any discipline—that hints or explains how on Earth we get this from that.

Many physicists claim that a “Theory of Everything” is hovering right around the corner. Yet they’ll readily admit they have no idea about how to elucidate what Paul Hoffman, the former publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica, called “the greatest mystery of all”—the existence of consciousness. To whatever small incremental degree its secrets get revealed, however, the discipline that has and will continue to accomplish this is biology. Physics has tried in this area and has decided it is in over its head. It can furnish no answers. The problem for today’s science—as consciousness researchers are continually discovering—is finding hooks or hints, leads to follow, when all roads thus far lead only to neural architecture and what sections of the brain are responsible for what. Knowing which parts of the brain control smell, for example, is not helpful in uncovering the subjective experience of smell—why a wood fire has its telltale scent. It is, for current science, such an extremely frustrating predicament that few bother taking any first steps. It must feel like the nature of the sun did to the ancient Greeks. Every day a ball of fire crosses the sky. How would one begin to ascertain its composition and nature? What possible steps could one take when the invention and principles of the spectroscope lay two millennia in the future?

If only the physicists had respected the limits of their science as Skinner did his. As the founder of modern behaviorism, Skinner did not attempt to understand the processes occurring within the individual; he had the reserve and prudence to consider the mind a “black box.” Once, in one of our conversations about the nature of the universe, about space and time, Skinner said, “I don’t know how you can think like that. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about the nature of space and time.“ His humility revealed his epistemological wisdom. However, I also saw in the softness of his glance the helplessness that the topic occasioned.

Clearly, it is not solely atoms and proteins that hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts and perceptions have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. Even taking cognition to the next step by fabricating a sense of meaning to things necessitates the creation of spatio-temporal relationships, the inner and outer forms of our sensuous intuition. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of interpretation and understanding—the mental logic that molds sensations into 3D objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD. The CD itself contains only information, yet when the player is turned on, the information leaps into fully dimensional sound. In that way, and in that way only, does the music exist.

Let Emerson’s words suffice, that “the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative.” Indeed, existence itself consists in the logic of this relationship. Consciousness has nothing to do with physical structure or function per se. It is like the stem of the ground pine, there reaching through the earth at a hundred places, drawing its existence from the temporal reality of perceptions in space.

And what of that favorite sci-fi theme, of machines developing minds of their own? “Can we help but wonder,” asked Isaac Asimov, “whether computers and robots may not eventually replace any human ability?“ At Skinner’s eightieth birthday party, I was seated next to one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence. During our conversation, he turned to me and asked, “You’ve worked very closely with Fred. Do you think that we’ll ever be able to duplicate the mind of one of your pigeons?”

But Skinner had just gone up to the podium, and the organizers had asked him to give a little talk. It was Fred’s party after all, and it hardly seemed the proper occasion for one of his former students to go into a diatribe about consciousness. But now, I do not hesitate to say that until we understand the nature of consciousness, a machine can never be made to duplicate the mind of a man, or a pigeon, or even of a dragonfly. For an object—a machine, a computer—there is no other principle but physics. In fact, it is only in the consciousness of the observer that they exist at all in space and time. Unlike a man or a pigeon, they do not have the unitary sense experience necessary for perception and self-awareness, for this must occur before the understanding generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every sense experience, before the relationship between consciousness and the spatial world is established.

The difficulty of imparting consciousness to a machine should be obvious to anyone who has attended a birth, when a new being with consciousness enters the world. How does it arise? Hindus believe that consciousness or sentience enters the fetus in the third month of pregnancy. In reality, when we are scientifically honest, we must admit we have no idea how awareness can ever arise—not in an individual, not collectively, and certainly not from molecules and electromagnetism. Indeed, does consciousness arise at all? It’s widely repeated that each cell in our body is part of a continuous string of cells that started dividing billions of years ago—a single unbroken chain of life. But what about consciousness? This more than anything else must be unbroken. Although most people like to imagine a universe existing without it, we have seen that this makes no sense if one gives the matter sufficient thought. How does consciousness ever begin? How could that possibly occur? And is that question any less enigmatic than trying to figure how it might arise at a later date? Is consciousness synonymous with everything?

Lest the reader think this to be idle talk or philosophy, remember that observer-dependent arguments have been raging at high-level ordinary physics circles for three-quarters of a century. Debates about the role and importance of observers in the physical universe are nothing new. Recall, for example, Austrian quantum expert Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, which attempted to show how preposterous were the prevailing alleged consequences of mating mind with matter in quantum experiments.

Imagine a closed box, he said, in which we have a bit of radioactive material that might or might not release a particle. Both possibilities exist and, according to Copenhagen, these potential outcomes do not become real until they are observed. Only then does what later was called the wave-function collapse, and the particle manifests itself . . . or not. Well, fair enough so far. But now place a Geiger counter in the box that can detect the particle’s appearance (if that possibility is the one that materializes). If the Geiger counter feels the particle, it triggers the release of a falling, swiveling hammer that breaks the glass in a vial of cyanide gas.

A cat also constrained in the box would then be killed. Now, according to Copenhagen, the quantum radioactive release of the particle, the detector, the falling hammer, and the cat all have now been unified into a single quantum system. But only when someone opens the box is an observation made, which forces the entire sequence of events to go from a possibility to a reality.

But what could this mean? asked Schrödinger. Are we to believe, if we find a dead, rotting cat, that the animal had been suspended in an anything’s-possible state until a moment ago when the box was opened? That it only appears as if it’s been dead for days? That the cat really was both dead and alive, as Copenhagen would insist, until someone opened the box and therefore established the entire sequence of past events?

Yes. Exactly. (Unless the cat’s consciousness counts as an observation, so that the initial wave-function collapses then and there, and needn’t wait for a human to open the box days later.) Anyway, all this is still believed by a great many physicists even today. Similarly, we can look at a universe that seems to have been started with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and yet that is only what we see now, what seems to have been an actual history. Quantum theory maintains that we can say only one thing for sure: the universe looks like it’s been there for many billions of years. According to quantum mechanics, there are major, irrevocable limits on the certainty of our knowledge.

But if there were no observers, the cosmos wouldn’t merely look like nothing, which is stating the obvious. No, more than that, it wouldn’t exist in any way. Physicist Andrei Linde of Stanford University says, “The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness. I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.”

Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.

In 2002, Discover magazine sent Tim Folger to the coast of Maine to speak to John Wheeler firsthand. His opinions about the anthropic theory and such still carried a lot of weight in the community. He had been saying such provocative things that the magazine decided to title the article “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” based on the direction he’d been going in the tenth decade of his life. He told Folger that he was sure the universe was filled with “huge clouds of uncertainty” that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. In all these places, he believes, the cosmos is “a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past.”

Because your head may now be spinning, let’s take a break and go back to my friend Barbara, sitting comfortably in her living room with her glass of water, certain of its existence and her own. Her house is as it has always been, with its artwork on the wall, the cast-iron stove, the old oak table. She putters between rooms. Nine decades of choices—dishes, bed sheets, art, machines and tools in the workshop, her career—define her life.

When Barbara turns from one room to the next, when her animal senses no longer perceive the kitchen—the sounds of a dishwasher, the ticking clock, the groaning pipes, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into the primal energy-nothingness or waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around. Or, perhaps more graspably, there dwells an eternal correlativity of nature and consciousness.

For each life, or if one prefers, the one life, there is a universe that involves “spheres of reality.” Shape and form are generated inside one’s head using all the sensory data collected through ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and skin. Our planet is composed of billions of spheres of reality, an internal/external confluence, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking.

But can this really be? You wake each morning and your dresser is still across the room from your comfortable spot in the bed. You put on your same pair of jeans and favorite shirt and shuffle to the kitchen in slippers to make coffee. How can anyone in his right mind possibly suggest that the great world out there is constructed in our heads? This takes some additional analogies.

To grasp a universe of still arrows and disappearing moons more fully, let’s turn to modern electronics and our animal-sense-perception tools. You know from experience that something in the black box of a DVD player turns an inanimate disc into a movie. The electronics in your DVD player convert and animate the information on the disc into a two-dimensional show. Likewise, your brain animates the universe. You can imagine the brain as being like the electronics in your DVD player.

Explained another way, in the language of biology, the brain turns electrochemical impulses from our five senses into an order, a sequence, into a face, into this page, into a room, into an environment—into a unified three-dimensional whole. It transforms a stream of sensory input into something so real that few people ever ask how it happens. Our minds are so good at creating a three-dimensional universe that we rarely question whether the universe is anything other than we imagine it. Our brains sort, order, and interpret the sensations that we receive. Photons of light, for example, which arrive from the Sun carrying the electromagnetic force, by themselves look like nothing. They are bits of energy. As uncounted trillions bounce off the objects around us, and some are reflected our way, various combinations of wavelengths enter our eye from each and every object. Here, they deliver the force to trillions of atoms arranged into an exquisite design of several million cone-shaped cells that rapidly fire in permutations too vast for any computer to calculate. Then, in the brain, the world appears. Light, which as we saw in chapter 3 has no color by itself, is now a magical potpourri of shapes and hues. Further parallel processing snaking through neural networks at one-third of the speed of sound makes sense of it all—a necessary step because those who were blind for decades but whose sight was restored gaze confusedly and unsurely at the world, unable to see what we see or to process the newfound input usefully.

Sights, tactile experiences, odors—all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are “out there” except by the convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said Wheeler, “exists until it is observed.”

You can also think of your mind operating like the circuitry of an electronic calculating device. Say you bought a brand-new calculator and have just taken it out of the package. When you punch in 4 × 4, the number 16 pops up on the little display screen, even though these numbers have never been multiplied before on that particular device. The calculator follows a set of rules, like your mind. 16 will always pop up on a functioning calculator when given the input of 4 × 4, or 10 + 6, or 25 - 9. When you step outside, it’s like a new set of numbers has been punched that determines what will be on “display”—whether the Moon will be here or there, blocked by a cloud, crescent, or full.

The i’s and the t’s of physical reality are not dotted and crossed until you actually look up into the sky. The Moon has a definite existence only after it has been pulled out of the realm of mathematical probability and into the observer’s web of consciousness. In any event, the space between its atoms is so huge, it is as correct to call the Moon empty space as to call it an object. There’s truly nothing solid about it at all, it’s just more brain-stuff.

Perhaps you may find yourself trying to catch a quick glimpse of this haze of probability before it bursts into form, like a kid sneaking a peek at the cover of Playboy. The inclination is to dart your eyes or turn your head with lightning speed to catch a forbidden glance. But you can’t see something that doesn’t yet exist, so the game is futile.

Perhaps some readers will dismiss this as nonsense, arguing that there’s no way the brain has the machinery actually to create physical reality. But remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatio-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now. As a medical doctor, I can attest to the fact that the visions and sounds schizophrenic patients “see” and “hear” are just as real to them as this page or the chair on which you now sit.

It is here, at last, where we approach the imagined border of ourselves, the wooded boundary where, in the words of the old fairy tale, the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other. At sleep, we all know, consciousness is diminished, and so too, the continuity in the connection of times and places, the end to both space and time. Where, then, do we find ourselves? On rungs that can be intercalated anywhere, “like those,” as Emerson put it “that Hermes won with dice of the moon, that Osiris might be born.” It is true that consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the Earth, we know only the crust. Below the level of conscious thought, we can conceive unconscious neural states. But these mental faculties, in themselves, apart from their relation to our consciousness, cannot be said to exist in space and time, any more than does a rock or a tree.

How can this be true? How is it managed, as in our actual experiments with electrons, that a single particle can be at two places at once? See the loon in the pond, the single mullein or dandelion in the field, the Moon, or the North Star? How deceptive is the space that separates them and makes them solitary? Are they not the subjects of the same reality that interested Bell, whose experiment answered once and for all whether what happens locally is affected by nonlocal events?

The situation is not unlike the one in which Alice found herself in the Pool of Tears. We are sure we are not connected to the fish in the pond, for they have scales and fins and we don’t have any. Yet, “non-separability,” theorist Bernard d’Espagnat has said, “is now one of the most certain general concepts in physics.” This is not to say that our minds, like the particles in Bell’s experiment, are linked in any way that can violate the laws of causality. We may imagine two detectors situated on opposite sides of the universe, with photons from some central source flying off to each of them. If an experimenter changed the polarization of one beam, he might instantaneously influence events 10 billion light-years away. But no information can possibly be transmitted from point A to point B or from one experimenter to another through this process. It unfolds strictly on its own.

In this same sense, there is a part of us that is intimately connected to the fish in the pond. We think there is an enclosing wall, a circumference to us. Yet, Bell’s experiment implies that there are cause-effect linkages that transcend our ordinary classical way of thinking. “Men esteem truth remote,” wrote Thoreau, “in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. . . . But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”