A Physicist Endorses Biocentrism, But Does He Understand It?

When you do a Google search for "Big Think," the first thing you get is a search result linking to www.bigthink.com, one with a single tagline of "Actionable lessons from the world's greatest thinkers and doers."  Such runaway egotism does not sound like we will read the writings of humble students of nature. It's the same kind of thing you see with the Science 2.0 site at www.science20.com.  When you do a Google search for that site, you get a crowing tagline suggesting that it is written by "the world's best scientists."  You will be unlikely to recognize any of the authors if you do a random check of the site. 

Very recently at the www.bigthink.com site there was an article which does not quite sound like something written by one of "the world's greatest thinkers." It is an  article by physicist Marcelo Gleiser, one entitled "Enlightenment 2.0: We need another Age of Reason to save our civilization." That's a grandiose title that does not closely match the content of the article. Other than platitudes, Gleiser does not seem to offer any tips on how to save our civilization.  He mainly offers a sales pitch for some philosophy he calls Humancentrism. Suggesting the term his own creation, he says, "I have suggested elsewhere that modern astronomy offers a new vision for humanity, which I called Humancentrism." In Gleiser's description of this philosophy, we hear no very interesting or original-sounding ideas. 

First, Gleiser describes Humancentrism as an inversion of Copernicanism, which he describes as something which "states that the more we learn about the Cosmos, the less important we become." Copernicanism does not state any such thing. Copernicanism is simply the belief that Earth is not the physical center of the universe. Later, very strangely, Glesier states that "Humancentrism is a branch of Biocentrism." This statement is rather  laughable, because biocentrism (at least in its 2016 form) is a form of idealism, a philosophy that is the exact opposite of the materialism that Gleiser advocates. 

In his article Gleiser seems to show no understanding of what biocentrism is. "Biocentrism" is a term introduced by Robert Lanza MD in his 2010 book "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe." Biocentrism is described in my 2016 post "The Big Hole in Lanza's Biocentrism," a post I wrote after reading the book "Beyond Biocentrism," by Robert Lanza MD and his co-author Bob Berman. In that book biocentrism was described just as if it is a form of idealism, the belief that only mind exists. 

Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. His classic slogan was: to be is to be perceived.

On page 125 of Beyond Biocentrism, the authors say, “The world we see is the visual perception located in our head.” On page 137 the authors say, “There is nothing 'out there' beyond the reality constructed in our minds.” On page 186 the authors say, “We start by seeing that there is no real world 'out there' beyond us.”  These seem rather clearly to be statements of idealism, the position that only mind exists. The comparison I made in my 2016 between Berkeley's idealism and Lanza's biocentrism is echoed on a page of Lanza's site promoting biocentrism.  In an undated article he wrote in American Scholar, Lanza sounds like an idealist when he states this:

"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."

If you look for a "Look Inside" preview on amazon.com of Lanza's latest book on Biocentrism (entitled The Grand Biocentric Design), you will see on page 16 this statement: "The fact that everything seen, heard, thought about, or remembered is,  first and foremost, a manifestation of human awareness means that consciousness is so close and intimiate it is usually overlooked." This is not a statement of fact, but a statement you might expect from an advocate of the philosophical viewpoint called idealism. The average physicist would deny that the Andromeda galaxy is "first and foremost, a manifestation of human awareness." Later on page 19 Lanza lists as a "first principle of biocentrism" the idea that "space and time are not independent realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind."  On page 20 Lanza lists this as a "third principle of biocentrism."

"The behavior of subatomic particles -- indeed all particles 

and objects -- is inextricably linked to the presence of an

observer. Absent a conscious observer, they at best exist 

in an undetermined state of probability waves." 

On the same page Lanza lists this as a "fourth principle of 

biocentrism": 

"Without consciousness, 'matter' dwells in an undetermined

state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded

consciousness only existed in a probability state."

In the next paragraph he clarifies what he means by referring to "an undetermined state of probability" by mentioning a "

"a sort of blurry probability state that physicists call 

'an uncollapsed wave function.' "

When I wrote my earlier 2016 post on biocentrism, that philosophy was in a weak state. Lanza seemed to be teaching a position of idealism, but his philosophy lacked the key part that allowed George Berkeley to propose a credible-sounding version of idealism. An idealist has to have a good answer to the question: how do I know that the people I see have an existence outside of my mind? If an idealist does not have a good answer to that question, then idealism can lead to the morally disastrous position of solipsism, the position in which someone claims no one exists outside of himself. One problem with solipsism is that you should always expect someone to act immorally once he has adopted that position.  Show me a man named John who does not believe anyone really exists except John himself, and I'll show you a man who may be prone to murder, rape and theft, while believing that he is not doing any real harm by such acts. 

George Berkeley had a pretty good answer to the question, "How do I know that the people I see have an existence outside of my mind?" His answer is that our perceptual regularities come from some divine mind who causes us to perceive certain regularities. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our mind. According to Berkeley, when you see a body corresponding to some person, there must be a mind corresponding to that person, because the perceptual regularity comes from God, and God is not a deceiver.  

Another question that must be answered is: where do human minds come from? An idealist cannot give an answer of "from the brain," because the idealist does not believe in any matter independent of mind.  Berkeley's answer to where human minds come from is that all human minds come from a divine mind (God), not from matter. 

Although it takes some "getting used to," Berkeley's form of idealism or immaterialism was a surprisingly coherent philosophical position. But in his 2016 book, Lanza seemed to be missing the part that won Berkeley many philosophical adherents.  Lanza seemed to be teaching that all that existed are minds, but he seemed to have no explanation for how such minds arose. Nor did he seem to have any explanation for the regularities of human perception. Why would all humans be seeing a sun if the sun did not have an independent material existence? Berkeley had an answer, but Lanza apparently did not. 

What is rather laughable is that in the Big Think article by physicist Marcelo Gleiser, Gleiser (a materialist) tells that his philosphy of Humancentrism "is a branch of Biocentrism." But biocentrism is an idealistic philosophy (or at least it sure seemed to be as of 2016). So we seem to have in the Big Think article a materialist claiming that his philosophy is a branch of biocentrism, a philosophy of idealism. Idealism is the exact opposite of materialism. Materialists say that only matter exists, and idealists say that only mind exists. 

Some questions I have are:

(1) Did Gleiser actually read Lanza's books advocating biocentrism?

(2) If he did read them, did he note well the sentences in which Lanza claimed that matter has no existence outside of mind?

I have not read Lanza's latest book on biocentrism outside of the first twenty pages you can read by using the  "Look Inside" preview on www.amazon.com. But studying that, I seem to detect some evidence that Lanza is kind of waffling around and wavering about and watering down the idealist position he seemed to state in 2016. Now instead of saying that matter did not exist before mind, Lanza seems to be saying that matter may have kind of half-existed before mind as a kind of shadowy not-fully-there "uncollapsed wave function."  

As to the question of whether brains create minds, Lanza cannot seem to get his story straight. In 2016 he seemed to be teaching idealism, saying things such as the quotes I gave above, which included the statement, “We start by seeing that there is no real world 'out there' beyond us.”  But on page 20 of his new book Lanza states that "basic biology make it clear that what appears 'out there' is actually a construction -- a whirl of neural-electrical actvity -- occurring in the brain." Biology does not make any such thing clear, and neuroscientists have failed to provide any convincing evidence for their dogma that minds come from brains, a dogma that is contradicted by very much evidence documented by neuroscientists themselves. On page 17 of his new book Lanza incorrectly claims that neuroscience has "progressed impressively" by "exploring how complicated networks of neurons encode concepts." No such thing has actually occurred, and no neuroscientist has a credible explanation of how concepts are encoded in neurons. Indeed, the utter inability to credibly explain how brains could either give rise to abstract concepts or store abstract concepts are two of the very many reasons for rejecting claims that minds are created by brains. 

On this issue Lanza seems inconsistent and wavering, sounding in one place like he thinks minds come from brains, and elsewhere like he completely rejects such a doctrine. My impression after reading the first twenty pages of his latest book is of a thinker who is awkwardly trying to get something like a shotgun wedding between quantum mechanics and philosophical idealism and the boasts of neuroscientists, without realizing how often he is contradicting himself and failing to advance a position that holds together as an internally consistent worldview.  It is quite possible in the modern age to hold to a consistent, coherent and credible worldview of idealism, but you've got to "break some eggs" to do that, by defying some of the unproven dogmas of scientists, rather than parroting all their speech customs.  

As for Gleiser's use of the term "Humancentrism," it seems like a superfluous attempt to establish a new word that we don't need. There already exists in the English language the word "humanism," which seems to mean the same thing as what Gleiser means by "humancentrism." 

On page 7 of his first book on biocentrism, Lanza stated the 

following:

"Why are the laws of physics exactly balanced for animal

life to exist? For example, if the Big Bang had been one-part-

in-a-million more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and life to develop. If the strong nuclear force were decreased 2 percent, atomic nuclei wouldn't hold together, and plain-vanilla hydrogen would be the only kind of atom in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) would not ignite. These are just three of more than two hundred physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random -- even if that is what standard contemporary physics baldly suggests. These fundamental constants of the universe -- constants that are not predicted by any theory -- all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for the existence of life and consciousness." 

It was good that Lanza discussed such teleological-seeming cosmic fine-tuning. But Marcelo Gleiser is a cosmic fitness denialist, whose misstatements on this topic I discuss in my post "Stubbornly Denying the Evidence For Cosmic Fitness." On page 232 of his book A Tear at the Edge of Creation, Gleiser most incorrectly states, “There is absolutely no evidence that our Universe is fit for life.” This is a statement contrary to the statements of very many physicists and cosmologists who have emphatically asserted the exact opposite. And in his latest Big Think  article Gleiser points out his philosophy has no place for teleology.  So again I may wonder: what is going on with Gleiser claiming that his philosphy of Humancentrism is a branch of biocentrism? Did he actually study Lanza's works? 

I myself think that both idealism (the idea that only minds exist) and dualism (the idea that mind exists apart from and in addition to matter) are credible possibilities, neither of which can be ruled out. I reject materialism (the idea that only matter or only mass-energy exists), for many reasons mentioned on this site and my site here. 

Postscript: In a video link emailed to me by someone at NASA, we hear Donald D. Hoffman (Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California) talking like an idealist around 1:18:09 in the video, and the next two minutes. 

The Big Think site is mainly a materialist indoctrination site. Recently at that site we have another essay by Marcelo Gleiser.  Arguing that life on Earth has no purpose, Gleiser states this:

"If we changed one or more of the dramatic events in Earth’s history — say, the cataclysmic impact of the asteroid that helped eliminate the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — life’s history on Earth would also change. We probably would not be here asking about life’s purpose. The lesson from life is simple: In Nature, creation and destruction dance together. But there is no choreographer."

So from the alleged fact that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid 66 million years ago (something that seems to have been favorable to the eventual appearance of human civilizations) we have a lesson that life on Earth has no purpose? This is some of the worst reasoning I've ever heard.

If the Universe Was Created, Or if Everything Is Mental, Then We Do Not Know How Old the Universe Is

We have long been socially conditioned to accept as gospel truth any statements that scientists keep making again and again. We should not be following such a thought habit, because some of the assertions that scientists keep repeating over and over again are little more than speech customs of a particular belief community, rather than things that have been established by observations or experiments. 

One claim that scientists keep repeating with great confidence is a claim about the age of the universe. We are told repeatedly that the universe is 13 billion years old.  But there are reasons why such claims cannot be made with very much confidence.

Claims about the age of the universe are based on the Big Bang theory. But that theory has not been conclusively proven. One problem is that we can never observe the Big Bang, nor can we even observe the universe at any state within 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Our cosmologists tell us that for its first 300,000 years, the universe was so dense that all light photons were scattered and shuffled every minute. Only when this scattering of light photons ended, at a time called the recombination era, was it possible for light photons to start traveling without being hopelessly scattered. We are told that because of this scattering, it will always be physically impossible to observe what was happening during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. But this means we can never have the direct observation of the Big Bang (or even very dense universe conditions) that we would need to have in order to be completely confident that the Big Bang theory is correct.

Philosophers of science refer to the underdetermination of theory by data. When data does not prove that a theory is true, and does not rule out possible rival theories that can equally well explain observations (called empirical equivalents), such a theory is said to be underdetermined. There is a serious question as to whether the Big Bang theory is doomed to be a permanently underdetermined theory, because of the impossibility of directly observing the first 300,000 years of the universe's history.

There are purely scientific reasons why we cannot be certain about scientist claims that the universe is billions of years old and claims that our planet is billions of years old.  The chains of reasoning used to reach such claims are complex, and involve some not-quite-certain assumptions. Claims that the universe is billions of years old depend on assumptions that the expansion rate of the universe has not changed very much over billions of years. Claims that the earth is billions of years old depend on claims that the decay rates of certain radioisotopes (used to date old rocks) have not changed very much over billions of years. We are not sure that such assumptions are true. 

What is very interesting is that such chains of reasoning depend crucially on a "assume that the physical rates have not changed" principle, but such a principle is not at all consistently followed by modern cosmologists, the scientists who study the universe as a whole.  Most modern cosmologists seem to believe in a cosmic inflation theory which tells us that the expansion rate of the universe has undergone the most drastic change, changing from an exponential rate at the beginning to a enormously lower linear rate after the universe's first instants.  So while the whole chain of reasoning used to establish a universe age of billions of years depends crucially on a "assume the physical rates have not changed" principle, such a principle is violated in the most spectacular manner by cosmologists, who postulate pretty much the most dramatic change imaginable in the universe's expansion rate.  If the universe's expansion rate changed so dramatically near the time of the Big Bang, why should we have any confidence that there have not been other changes in that rate, and in other physical rates such as radioactive decay rates? If either thing has occurred, we can have little confidence in current estimates of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth. 

There is another reason why we do not know for sure the age of our universe. One is that if the universe was deliberately created, then we absolutely cannot tell whether it is actually billions of years old or even older than a million years.  Our universe could have been created much more recently -- in fact, at any arbitrary point in the past. 

There is a line of reasoning that could be used to support belief in a universe 13 billion years old, regardless of whether it was divinely created. The argument would go something like this:

1. The universe appears to be 13 billion years old, based on factors such as the Big Bang theory, the expansion rate of galaxies,  and so forth.
2. A universe creator would not be a deceiver creating a universe younger than it appears to be.
3. So even if the universe was created, we should still believe it is about 13 billion years old.

This argument is not particularly compelling. It seems quite possible that a universe might be created that is younger than it might appear to be under certain calculations. I can give an example helping to support this idea.

Let us imagine a very simple creation scenario. Imagine a deity creates a very simple one-planet universe. The planet has nice grass, very tall trees, mountains and oceans. There is a sun in the sky that provides light. When people on this planet look up at the sky, they see a lovely star-filled sky, with some beautiful astronomical sights. The planet has various types of stones and rocks, including lots of attractive marble rocks. The deity creates a race of people to live on the planet.

Now, most of us would agree that there would be nothing deceptive about such an act of creation. But it could be argued that creating such a planet would be a big act of deception. You could reason that the people on the newly created planet would see the tall trees, and reason that very tall trees take more than fifty years to grow, and the planet must therefore be older than fifty years. You could reason that the people on the planet would reason that marble takes thousands of years to form, and that the planet must be at least thousands of years old. You could argue that the people on the planet would reason that a newly formed planet takes ages to cool, and that a sun forming from gravitational attraction of dust and gas takes ages to develop into a bright shiny star; and that they would therefore conclude that the planet was millions of years old. You could reason that these people on the planet would reason that the distant starlight would take thousands of years to reach the planet, and that their planet must be thousands of years old. Finally you could argue that on these grounds it would be a great act of deception for a deity to create such a world, because it would wrongly give the people on the planet the idea that their planet was old, when it was instead very young.

If we followed such reasoning to its reductio ad absurdum, we might conclude that any honest deity would only create an environment in which every newly created thing looked like it was newly created – and that the entirely newly created planet would therefore be made of gleaming plastic and shiny stainless steel.

But there seems something very wrong with this whole line of reasoning. It does not actually seem to be a real moral principle that honest minds never create things that look much older than they are. For example, you might study the techniques of the French Impressionists, and create some paintings in their style. If you hung such paintings in your home, someone might think that they are very old paintings dating from the time of Renoir and Monet. But you have not done anything dishonest by creating these paintings. Or, you might have a new house built in the Colonial style popular at America's birth, but you are not some deceiver because many might think the house is older than it is.

We really don't have any sound basis for concluding that a created universe would be as old as it appears to be according to certain lines of scientific reasoning. If our universe was created, it could be 13 billion years old, one billion years old, 10 million years old, or only 1,000 years old. A universe could be created in any state of complexity or any state of motion. A freshly created universe might either have some “spanking new” look, or it might appear to be something much older. The fact that we may find fossils that we can radioactively date to millions of years ago does not necessarily  mean that corresponding organisms lived millions of years ago. Such items might be kind of just part of interesting details added to a universe created much more recently.

For some reason we have the idea that if a deity were to create a universe, the universe would always be created in a simple state -- maybe something like the simplicity of the Big Bang, or the relative simplicity of a Garden of Eden. But an omnipotent deity could create a universe that started out in a state of the utmost complexity, such as a state that included minds packed with memories, books packed with words, and freeways packed with moving cars.   Let us consider the complex state of the universe at 3:00 PM EST on June 1, 1950.  Given the existence of a deity of vast power, a new universe could be divinely created in exactly such a state, so that at the moment of creation newly created cars were traveling down newly created roads at 50 miles per hour, and newly created baseballs were traveling between newly created baseball pitchers and newly created baseball catchers, and newly created libraries were packed with newly created books, and so forth.  Persons created in such a universe could be created with memories, so that they were convinced they had lived for a long time, even though they had just been created an instant ago. 

Because of such a possibility, we cannot at all be certain of how old the human species is. Mankind could be 40,000 years old, or 10,000 years old, or 1000 years old, or only 100 years old.  For example, the universe could have started out in the state that it was in on the instant of 12:00 AM EST on January 1, 2019.  Such a creation could have included a very complex planet Earth packed with living things, buildings, technology, moving cars, flying planes and humans with minds already filled with memories. 

The possibility that the human race is much younger than we think is a very interesting possibility relevant to discussions of whether a deity might have permitted the amount of suffering that seems to have occurred on our planet.  History books tell us of enormous human suffering that occurred between 3000 B.C and 2000 AD, but philosophically we cannot be sure that all of this suffering actually did occur.  As I just mentioned, the universe could have been divinely created so that its first moment was a state of very high complexity and order, such as the state the universe was in at 3:00 PM EST on June 1, 1950. 

When we consider the philosophical possibility called idealism, we discover another reason why we cannot be sure about how old the universe is. Idealism is the possibility that nothing exists other than minds. Under this philosophical possibility, things such as stars and planets only exist to the extent that they are observed by minds. To really understand the theory, it helps to read a classic philosophical work such as George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (which you can read online here).

Critics may claim that idealism means believing that matter isn't real. But an idealist will counter that matter is real, but that it exists (really and substantially) not outside of minds, but only inside of minds.  Critics may also claim that idealism requires us to believe in some external ordering reality outside of our minds that is causing all of us to perceive the same things such as the moon and sun we see in the sky. But an idealist would encounter that such a thing is no real difficulty, and that materialism requires us to believe in something similar, since it requires us to believe in intricate fine-tuned laws of nature that make our existence possible. There are actually a great many difficulties involved with the idea that a universe that had no minds for billions of years turned into a universe containing minds. A theory of idealism (that minds are all that exist) is one way of getting around such difficulties.  It is not at all clear that a theory of idealism (that only minds exist) is less plausible or more far-fetched than conventional ideas about the relation of mind and matter. 

Under the theory of idealism, how old is the universe? Apparently only as old as the earliest age of the first minds or mind. If idealism is true, then the age of the universe is very much uncertain.  An idealist will reject the idea that he has to believe the universe has existed for 13 billion years, and will say there was never actually a time when there existed nothing but matter and no minds. The idealist will claim that all that has ever really existed is minds, and that the universe is no older than the oldest mind that existed in it. 

All of these considerations lead to the conclusion that we really don't know either how old the universe is or how old mankind is. We merely have algorithms that allow us to produce calculations about the age of the universe and the age of man, but we don't know whether those algorithms are giving us the correct answer. We can put the matter succinctly by saying that if the universe was divinely created, or if everything is mental, then "all bets are off" regarding the age of the universe and the age of mankind. 

It's More Likely That Everything Is in Consciousness Than That Consciousness Is in Everything

In academic circles it is commonly assumed that consciousness is generated by the brain. But some philosophers have been dissatisfied with this idea. Why is it that some particular arrangement of matter would cause Mind (a totally different type of thing) to emerge from that matter? To many that seems no more plausible than the idea that some particular arrangement of crystals in a rock might cause the rock to gush out blood.

One alternate idea is to assume that we have something like a soul, and that our mental experiences are produced not just by matter (the brain), but something that is itself spiritual. Another alternate idea is the radical notion known as panpsychism. Panpsychism is basically the idea that consciousness is in everything.

A panpsychist might believe that every piece of matter is in some sense conscious. At first this may seem to help in explaining how brains can produce consciousness. If every neuron is a little bit conscious, it might explain why billions of cells in the brain can produce consciousness.

But it does not seem that there is any evidence that little pieces of matter are conscious. Electrons seem to behave with complete predictability according to the laws of electromagnetism, not as if they were semi-conscious little things with wills of their own. And oxygen molecules do not act as if they had some interest in their surroundings. When you enter an empty room, you do not feel a gush of wind coming your way, as you might feel if the air molecules were interested in seeing who was entering the room.

Panpsychism seems rather inconsistent with theism. Consider the moon. The idea that the moon is conscious may have a certain appeal. But imagine all those rocks on the moon's surface, lying there for billions of years. Think of what torture it would be if such rocks were actually conscious – they would have to suffer billions of years of absolute boredom, just sitting there with nothing to observe or experience. It would be hard to think of a reason why any deity would wish to endow such rocks with consciousness, to suffer such billion-year boredom and stagnation. And what about all the rocks and little pieces of matter underneath the surface of the moon and other planets, who would have the dullest experiences imaginable for billions of years?

I'm not sure we would want to believe that all the little pieces of matter around us are conscious. Do you want to believe that every time you walk on the autumn leaves, that you are crushing conscious beings underneath your foot? And if you accepted panpsychism, it would seem that every time you bake some cookies, you would have to worry about slowly torturing the poor conscious little cookies. 

An alternative to panpsychism, and something equally as radical, is the philosophical doctrine of idealism. Rather than maintaining that consciousness is in everything, an idealist maintains that everything is in consciousness.

An idealist maintains that the only thing that exists are different types of minds, and that material things only exist in the sense that they are elements within the mental experiences of minds. Perhaps the best way to explain this idea to the modern person is to consider what goes on in a video game. Suppose you are playing some Star Wars video game in which you are trying to blow up the Death Star. Now to what extent does this Death Star exist? It has no physical existence outside of the game world. The Death Star exists as a shared perception, something that is seen by all of the players of the video game under certain conditions. Similarly, an idealist may believe that Earth's moon has no physical existence outside of minds. According to such a person, our moon only exists as a shared perception within the mental experience of humans. An idealist thinks that if somehow all minds were to be destroyed, there would be no more moon.

So the idealist believes that the sole reality of physical things we perceive is their reality inside our minds. To such a person, the history of the universe is simply a history of mental experiences; and there was no state of the universe in which matter existed before minds.

There is no way to prove this philosophical doctrine, but there are no observations that we could ever have that would disprove this idea. Think about it. Every single observation or measurement we can make can be boiled down to a human experience. If you see a rock, that's a human experience. If you weigh the rock, that's also a human experience. If you measure the rock with a measuring rod, or determine its chemical content using a mass spectrometer, that's also a human experience. There is no way to verify that the rock exists outside of human experience.

Any credible theory of idealism requires a belief in some higher agent that acts to assure that there are certain consistencies in human experiences. But since idealism ends up removing quite a few dilemmas and difficulties in the “first matter, then mind” story of the universe, idealism ends up being at least as credible as any other philosophical worldview. A surprisingly compelling case for idealism was made in the 18^th century by the British philosopher George Berkeley.

Today idealism is rather unfashionable, but in certain circles it is fashionable to speculate that we are just items in some computer simulation created by extraterrestrials. But the underlying concept is quite similar – that the things we perceive do not exist independently of our experiences, and that there is some external reality guaranteeing that we have certain common perceptions (such as the perception of the moon when we look up at night), rather than each of us having totally unique mental experiences.

But if you maintain that we are participants in some computer simulation crafted by extraterrestrials, you haven't removed any explanatory difficulties. The vexing problem is how is it that Mind can arise from matter, a totally different type of thing. With idealism such as advanced by Berkeley, that problem is removed, for you end up with the doctrine that there are only minds. But with some extraterrestrial simulation theory, the explanatory problem becomes twice as bad. For the theory maintains that biological matter gave rise to one type of minds (extraterrestrial minds), and that such minds then produced electronic matter that give rise to our minds. With that theory, you have two types of “Mind from matter” difficulties.

Both panpsychism and idealism are rather radical philosophical doctrines, and we are not forced to choose between the two. But if I had to choose between the belief that consciousness is in everything (panpsychism), and the belief that everything is in consciousness (idealism), I would choose the second of these. I don't care to believe that my cookies are suffering when I bake them.

The Big Hole in Lanza's Biocentrism

In his recent book Beyond Biocentrism, Robert Lanza MD and his co-author Bob Berman offer another case for the philosophy they advanced in their earlier work Biocentrism. Their philosophy of biocentrism is an example of what philosophers call idealism. Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. His classic slogan was: to be is to be perceived.

In order to get a handle on this concept, let's try a thought experiment. Imagine that there exists no Earth at all, and no matter at all. But let's imagine that there exists a particular number of immaterial minds that have a spiritual existence. Suppose that some unknown thing causes these immaterial minds to have a series of thoughts and perceptions and sensations. Suppose also that instead of each of these minds having its own random set of thoughts and perceptions and sensations (like 30 different people having 30 different dreams, all totally different), there is instead a certain degree of similarity, a set of recurring patterns, so that there are various similarities in what goes on inside these immaterial minds. Imagine that all of these minds have somewhat similar thoughts, perceptions and sensations, with these corresponding to earthly experience (such as the experience of seeing it get dark every night, and the experience of seeing a blue sky).

The question then arises: how can you tell that you are not such an immaterial mind living in a universe without matter, in which your sensations of matter are coming from some unknown external source? The answer is: you really can't. There is really no way for you to figure out whether you are a matter person living in a mainly matter world or whether you are a mind person living in a totally mind world. From this standpoint, idealism seems like a rather plausible option, or at least something that is perhaps as likely to be true as not, a kind of 50-50 bet.

But if you are going to be an idealist and not willing to dismiss your fellow human beings as just perceptions in your mind (which would lead you to the morally disastrous position called solipsism), you would need to believe that there is something that causes multiple human beings to have the perceptual regularities and similarities that they have (such as a daily experience of the sky getting dark). Being a theist, George Berkeley simply argued that God was the source of perceptual regularities. If you had asked Berkeley whether the moon will disappear if humans become extinct, Berkeley probably would have said: no, because the moon will continue to persist as an idea in the mind of God. Someone taking a similar approach might argue that we experience sensations of gravitational attraction not because there is really matter undergoing self-attraction but because a divine agent has set up a kind of perceptual rule that all minds will experience perceptions of gravitational attraction.

But what is the philosophy of biocentrism that Lanza has recently been arguing for? It seems like Berkeley-style idealism, but one that is without any core explanation to explain the regularities of human perceptions. It seems like a kind of minimalist, stripped-down, bare-bones form of idealism.

On page 125, the authors say, “The world we see is the visual perception located in our head.” On page 137 the authors say, “There is nothing 'out there' beyond the reality constructed in our minds.” On page 186 the authors say, “We start by seeing that there is no real world 'out there' beyond us.”

This at first may sound like Berkeley-style idealism. But it seems there is a big difference. The biocentrism of Lanza and Berman apparently wishes to reduce the world to what goes on in the human mind, but their philosophy makes no attempt to describe anything that may be the source of human minds or the regularity of human experiences.

This has a certain advantage from the standpoint of simplicity. A typical scientist may want to think the universe is basically matter plus human minds. A Berkeley-style idealist might argue that the correct description of the universe is: human minds plus a divine mind. But biocentrism seems to speak as if the universe is simply: human minds (without any matter). That's simpler than either of the previous two options. But it's not very plausible. Without anything other than human minds, why would there exist human minds that happen to share so many perceptual regularities (such as the experience of seeing the moon in the sky and seeing a blue sky)? If there were just human minds, we would not expect such regularities.

We can imagine how things might be if there was an immaterial universe consisting of only random human minds with random experiences, without some type of cosmic cause of perceptual regularities. Such minds might have conversations like this:

Human #1: Why I had a lovely day today. It was fun watching all those elephants flying about in the green sky above me, and the five moons in the sky made it look even lovelier.

Human #2: My day wasn't so good. There were too many purple fireballs falling from the yellow sky. I much preferred yesterday's chocolate sky, which gave such a tasty rain.

Our experience has hundreds of perceptual regularities, which a non-idealist can account for by assuming matter and natural laws. A theistic idealist can also explain such perceptual regularities by assuming a perception-ordering agent that sets up certain “rules of the game.” But how do we explain the regularities of experience using the “only human minds” kind of thinking of biocentrism? It would seem that this is a big hole in their “bare bones” theory. Lanza and Berman have done nothing to explain the regularities of human perceptions. If we imagine only human minds, and that matter does not exist, we have no explanation of why human experiences are so similar, and why they share so many perceptual regularities. There might be some way for an idealist to explain such a thing in a non-theistic way, but Lanza and Berman have not attempted to do so. By making statements such as “There is nothing 'out there' beyond the reality constructed in our minds, “ Lanza and Berman seem to be advancing a “just human minds” description of the universe, one that is not very plausible because it lacks an explanation for the similarities and regularities of our experiences and perceptions.

We can compare the biocentrism of Lanza and Berman to the idea that our experience is produced by some computer simulation created by an extraterrestrial civilization (an idea that also involves a claim that matter isn't really out there). Such an idea has its own difficulties, but at least it is able to explain the regularities of human perceptions. Just as all players of a video game have certain common perceptual experiences, because the game was programmed with a certain set of rules, under the simulated universe idea we can account for similarities of human perceptions by imagining that it is “part of the programming.” But if we just imagine that the universe consists of nothing but human minds, without attempting to account for why such minds exist, there is no obvious way to account for the similarities of human perceptions.