I recently read “Beyond Biocentrism”, by noted physician Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. It’s not particularly well-written, employing a style that is decidedly “populist science”, and making those kinds of deductive leaps that sort of waves the hands and implies the authors either don’t have hard evidence, or don’t want to lose readers trying to explain it. Still, the whole premise is one that has always appealed to me, so it was easy to look past that.
The premise? A sort of mashup of the strong anthropic principle together with the idea that we actually create reality, that the universe exists due to our conscious and unconscious participation in the process. The anthropic principle, for those unfamiliar with it, suggests that the universe has a set of independent constants with values that, if they were only very slightly different, would make life impossible. These are constants as disparate as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the fine-structure nuclear constant, the strength of weak and strong force, and the like. As the book’s title suggests, the authors believe that the universe depends on life to exist, and not the other way around. That existence and consciousness are necessarily interdependent and intertwined.
As interesting as that is, it is set of notions that I have long considered and been interested in, and in fact think highly likely. The reason I am writing this essay is to present a new idea that I had not thought about before reading it in Beyond Biocentrism. Let me explain.
Imagine walking through a city park, or hiking in the woods. Unless it’s late autumn or winter, what is the main color that you experience? Green of course, in a wide range of shades and hues, but basically green. And why do we see all this green? Because all those leaves are green, you answer. And why are they green? Anyone who took high school biology knows that it is due to the chlorophyll present in these leaves, a substance quietly and continuously converting sunlight into stored energy, the sugars and starches that form the bedrock of the entire food chain on this planet. So, it’s the green chlorophyll that creates this green panorama.
But wait, what does it mean to say chlorophyll is somehow “green”? Here’s a funny thing: chlorophyll is everything but green. In fact, chlorophyll absorbs every color of the spectrum other than green. Green is rejected, it’s the color chlorophyll doesn’t use, and so it is the color that is reflected back to our eye, and so we see green. That is what all color perception is: seeing the wavelengths that are reflected rather than absorbed from all the substances in our view.
But wait further. What exactly is “green”? And I’m not talking about the old conundrum of “is the color I perceive as green is the same color someone else sees?” No, the question here is much deeper than whether we all perceive the same colors. Because, green is something more fundamental than a “color”. It is a set of wavelengths, a set of frequencies associated with electromagnetic waves. What arrives on the rods and cones of our eyeballs is not a color, but electromagnetic waves that produce chemical and electrical responses in those rods and cones.
But an electromagnetic wave has no color per se. It is a continuously varying electric field propagated perpendicular to a continuously varying magnetic wave, traveling at the speed of light. In a very real sense, it is not anything at all. Certainly it has no inherent color. To say it another way, there is no color at all “out there” in the world. Whatever color (and shape and texture, etc.) we experience is all constructed within us, within our brain and our consciousness.
This is a deeply profound realization, once you understand the full implication. Look out the window or around the room. Everything you see is not ”there”, at least not in the way you see it. This is not to say there is nothing out there; you walk into a wall, you will experience the solid wall (but more about that later). But what it means is that everything you experience is experienced internally, within the confines of your brain and consciousness. There is a complete representation of the world inside your brain, and that is the ONLY representation you can experience.
There are no colors “out there”, only invisible electromagnetic waves. There are no “smells” out there, only odorless molecules that generate an chemical and electrical response in olfactory neurons. There are no “sounds” out there, only compression waves traveling through the air that create chemical and electrical responses in auditory nerves, which are translated into the sounds and speech we experience. Even touch, which would seem to involve those solid objects that are out there, ends up being a set of nerve impulses that our brains and consciousness translate into “cloth” or “skin” or “smooth” or “rough” or even “a punch” or “a bump”. Everything that we experience is a complicated translation of sense perceptions into images and other constructs, that only exist within our brains.
(This seems a good place to point out that, even those solid objects we all admit are definitely “out there” are entities that we never actually come in contact with. No finger ever actually pressed a keyboard. In the nanoscopic world at the boundaries of physical objects, it is ultimately electric fields that repulse each other. No molecules in your finger ever actually touched molecules in the keyboard. Though that is admittedly splitting a very fine hair :).
The takeaway from all of this is kind of mind-blowing, at least for me. It is that there is nothing in my experience that has an intrinsic quality: there is no color, nor shape, nor sound, nor smell nor tactile essence in the world I experience. All of those attributes are supplied by my brain, and realized in my consciousness. The external world supplies only physical modulations in a variety of mediums: EM waves, sound waves, molecules, field interactions. This is not to say that those modulations are non-existent and can somehow be ignored. Radiation can kill, sound waves can deafen, molecules can poison, field interactions can pierce and maim. The brain and body can, and will, die and decompose.
Consciousness? Well, that’s another thing altogether. And the subject of another essay at another time.
(c) 2020 Chuck Puckett