We're living through a paradigm shift. People are going to look back at us and say, 'They used to cut people's legs off.' Then they'll just give an injection and the blood flow will be restored and the limb saved.
— Robert Lanza
The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
We are more than the sum of our biochemical functions. Even the tiniest flea is an incredibly complex living creature, with mouth-parts adapted to feeding on the blood of your cat or dog.
The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence.
Our instinctual understanding of reality is the same as most other animals.
We take for granted how our mind puts everything together.
Religion and science look at reality differently.
Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.
In fact when you combine stem cell technology with the technology known as tissue engineering you can actually grow up entire organs, so as you suggest that sometime in the future you get in an auto accident and lose your kidney, we'd simply take a few skin cells and grow you up a new kidney. In fact this has already been done.
Space and time, not proteins and neurons, 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.
Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist.
Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world - biocentrism - revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life.
We have these words 'space' and 'time,' but you can't touch them. They're not objects, they're not things, they go forever. Space and time are really tools of animal sense perception, the way we organize and construct information.
In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics.
Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability.
Reality is observer-determined - it's a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately means that things must change.
Perhaps, if science is clever enough to see, it will realize that religion may not be too far off with its concrete imagery; and that relative to the supreme creator, we humans are much like the microorganisms we scrutinize under the microscope.
Sometime in the future, science will be able to create realities that we can't even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we'll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time.
I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.
So for instance it becomes clear why space and time and even the properties of matter itself depend on the observer in consciousness. In fact when you take this point of view it even explains why the laws of the universe themselves are fine tuned for the existence of life.
So someday in the near future hopefully rather than having a foot or a leg amputated we'll just give you an injection of the cells and restore the blood flow. We've also created entire tubes of red blood cells from scratch in the laboratory. So there are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline.
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.
Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism.
Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.
We don't have time to wait for President Bush to change his mind. How many breakthroughs have been missed as a result of this policy?
Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.
Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.
Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness.
Our linear concept of time means nothing to nature.
When science tries to resolve its conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the Universe like houses on a Monopoly board, we need to examine our dogmas.
As children we were bombarded by competing answers. Church says one thing, school another. Now as adults it's no surprise that if we discuss the nature of it all, we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our individual inclination and mood.
I think the answer of course is that space and time are not these hard external objects. Again we're, scientists have been building from one side of nature (physics) without considering the other side (life in consciousness). Neither side exists without the other. They cannot be divorced from one another or else there is no reality.
That's absolutely correct and in addition to that life just isn't an accident of the laws of physics. There's a long list of experiments that suggest just the opposite.
Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.
When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability.
For example, if the big bang had been one-part-in-a billion more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies to form and for life to begin.
We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.
I do not think that there is a reputable scientist on this planet who would advocate using this technology to generate a human child as was just announced.
