The American Scholar - A New Theory of the Universe - By Robe...

Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious experience.

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Ever since the remotest of times philosophers have acknowledged the primacy of consciousness—that all truths and principles of being must begin with the individual mind and self.

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Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on > an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath >

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But as exciting and glamorous as these theories are, they are an evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge: that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer.

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And more important than this, that the observer in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around.

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Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality.

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Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

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Return to the revelation that we are thinking animals and that the material world is the elusive substratum of our conscious activity continually defining and redefining the real.

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“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics,” said Nobel physicist Richard Feynman.

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Biocentrism is the only humanly comprehensible explanation for how the world can be the way it is.

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It has been proven experimentally that when studying subatomic particles, the observer actually alters and determines what is perceived.

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time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector.

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Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location in space) belongs to the outer world, and momentum (which involves the temporal) belongs to the inner world.

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Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.

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Instead, the entities we observe are floating in a field of mind that is not limited by an external spacetime.

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If observed, particles behave like objects; if unobserved, they behave like waves and can go through more than one hole at the same time.

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Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material

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“No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

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“If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it, then you end up with solipsism—the belief that your consciousness is the only one.”

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What I would question, with respect to solipsism, is the assumption that our individual separateness is an absolute reality.

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The distinction between here and there is also not an absolute reality. Without consciousness, we can take any person as our new frame of reference. It is not my consciousness or yours alone, but ours.

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non-separability is now one of the most certain general concepts in physics

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We can only imagine and recollect things while in the body; this is for sure, because sensations and memories are molded into thought and knowledge in the brain. And although we identify ourselves with our thoughts and affections, it is an essential feature of reality that we experience the world piece by piece.

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The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human and perhaps even by each animal.

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But before matter can exist, it has to be observed by a consciousness.

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Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the quantum theorist.

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Even Steven Weinberg concedes that although consciousness may have a neural correlate, its existence does not seem to be derivable from physical laws.

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We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into 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.

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Despite such things as the development of superconducting supercolliders containing enough niobium-titanium wire to circle the earth 16 times, we understand the universe no better than the first humans with sufficient consciousness to think. Where did it all come from? Why does the universe exist? Why are we here? In one age, we believe that the world is a great ball resting on the back of a turtle; in the next, that a fairy universe appeared out of nowhere and is expanding into nothingness. In one age, angels push and pummel the planets about; in another age, everything is a meaningless accident. We exchange a world-bearing turtle for a big bang. “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics,” said Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. “Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” The reason scientists go down the drain is that they refuse to accept the immediate and obvious implications of the experimental findings of quantum theory. Biocentrism is the only humanly comprehensible explanation for how the world can be the way it is. But, as the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg admits, “It’s an unpleasant thing to bring people into the basic laws of physics.” In order to account for why space and time were relative to the observer, Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to an invisible, intangible entity that cannot be seen or touched. This folly continues with the advent of quantum mechanics. Despite the central role of the observer in this theory—extending it from space and time to the very properties of matter itself—scientists still dismiss the observer as an inconvenience to their theories.

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