Reclusland

It has been said that the more you study physics and biology, the more amazing it becomes that anything exists at all.  That the universe exists and that we exist to experience it is seen as a more and more unlikely occurrence.  Once you come to understand how different things would be if, say, the weight of a proton was just a tiny bit heavier, or if the force of gravity was a little more forceful, the more obvious it becomes that there could just as easily be nothing here at all.

However, like a lot of things that seem highly unlikely but still undergo the formality of actually occurring, there’s a different way to look at this that cuts like Occam’s Razor through the unlikeliness: Perhaps things are the way they are because there’s life here.  Perhaps it’s not that consciousness, at some point in the distant past, sprang out of matter.  Instead, perhaps matter exists because of consciousness.

Maybe, as reality came into being (however you want to explain that, be it “fiat lux!” or a BIG BANG), consciousness had to feel things out, had to reach out into the dark and wait until it could grab onto something solid.  In Zen, there’s a saying that enlightenment is like grouping behind you in the dark for a pillow.  I imagine the birth of the universe could have been something like that, a blind fumbling in the dark until suddenly, “ahah!”  consciousness touches space and space wobbles into a wave of energy and vacuum, which them complexifies into matter, then into life, and then into humanity.

A similar comparison would be the tuning of a musical instrument, trying to find the exact right pitch.  Once one string is tuned, you move onto the next one.  Perhaps the laws were kind of like that, with consciousness pushing further into space after each law dropped into place.

Alternatively, it could be said that the universe exists as a broad spectrum of possible laws, and that life only exists within the slices of the spectrum with the laws to support it.  Either way though, whether there’s only one storyline or a whole array of branches, it doesn’t matter because the end result’s the same here: life and the laws that support it are indivisible.  Whether universes exist where the physical laws make life impossible is kind of a moot point, I think, at least while we’re still alive.

The view that the reality exists the way it does because it springs out of consciousness (rather than consciousness springing out of matter at some point), is currently known as Biocentricism, which I first head about this over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension” (thanks Rob!).  Robert Lanza, who first proposed the theory, has 7 main priciples behind it:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Which (as wikipedia seems to suggest) is a bit close to solipsism.  But that’s only the case if:
1) Consciousness only exists inside human beings.
2) All human beings actually are conscious (and don’t just hover on the borderlands of consciousness).

If we don’t accept both those two premises, then those 7 principles deserve another reading…

The point here is that, as recent conversation on this blog have lead me to think, this same urge, this fumbling in the dark, might be what’s responsible for everything.  It’s something we’ve labeled as “evolution” and mistakenly described as the ability for a species to successfully exist and procreate.  There’s never been a “why” behind this.  Why procreate?  Simply to procreate?

Perhaps there’s more to it than this.  Perhaps consciousness is something that has existed all along, somehow apart from the material world, and that as it comes into the material world, it “evolves” the material world  to better allow for the further embodiment of consciousness within it.  When I said above that “consciousness touches space”, perhaps a better way of saying this would be that consciousness and space broke away from each other, so that one could observe the other.  And that since then, consciousness has been trying to build itself back into space, for the sake of interacting with it.

Anyway, what originally got me thinking about this was a comparison between the laws of the universe and karma.  Past behavior creates an inertia that allows for present existence.  Within the human mind, this works as memory, but within  the physical/animal world, it works as DNA.   In the physical/mineral world, it works as molecules/atoms.  Beyond that, it works as the laws of physics.  Each gets locked into place, simply because it has proven, so far, to be the best way for allowing consciousness to embody itself in matter.  And what we are to do every moment with our thoughts is to try to find a way to further combine the two within ourselves.

In a way, it’s like God split in two, and each half is seeking to combine with the other in such a way as to create little pockets of wholeness throughout, to experience wholeness within splitness.  Except that God never actually split, so this whole thing is really more of a game than anything else…

But that’s maybe a little too esoteric for my liking.  So instead, I’ll leave you with a song and a picture.  Because in the end, my attempt here is at a new kind of poetry, not a new kind science.

(cause we all shine on, all the time)