THE BUTTERFLY DREAM

Once upon a time, Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly, flying about enjoying itself. it did not know that it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he awoke, and veritably was Chuang Chou again. He did not know whether it was Chuang Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or whether it was the butterfly dreaming that it was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chuo and the butterfly there must be some distinction. this is a case of what is called the transformation of things.
Discussion: "This shows that, although in ordinary appearance there are differences between things, in delusions or in dreams one thing can also be another. The transformation of things proves that the differences among things are not absolute "
 The first piece of work that we are going to look at is the paper by Kuang-Ming Wu: Dream in Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu . Even though Chuang Tzu and Nietzsche lived centuries apart, they, nevertheless, have much in common when it comes to dreams. For Nietzsche, reality is subjective and dream is objective. That is, what we see around us and do everyday are all products of our dreams. They are not correct descriptions of reality, but something subjective and illusory. It would be a mistake to take dreams as not dreams but something real.
Chuang Tzu, however, preferred something more compromising: "When I say you are dreaming, so am I." In other words, we are all dreaming. This is best illustrated in his butterfly dream story. 'The passage:
Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, flying about enjoying itself. It did not know that it was Chuang Chou.
tells us that, in the dream, he was perfectly clear about his identity, but after he was awakened, this became uncertain.
Suddenly he awoke, and veritably was Chuang Chou again. He did not know whether it was Chuang Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or whether it was the butterfly dreaming that it was Chuang Chou.
In other words, awakening gives rise to ignorance or uncertainty. Hence, in reality, we are all dreaming. This awakening to ignorance also demonstrates Nietzsche's claim that all cultural activities are nothing but dreams. According to Wu, Nietzsche merely stated this but did not provide any evidence.
Having concluded that reality is subjective and dream is objective, Nietzsche did not say that we should regard dreams as some nocturnal fantasies that we should dismiss. Instead, he advises us that we should use them as a guide in our daily activities. Similarly with Chuang Tzu, having concluded that there must be, ontologically, a distinction between the butterfly and himself, though epistemologically unsure, and that this is nothing more than a transformation of things, he, too, advises us that we must forever live and be content with this constant transformation.
Next, we shall look at the paper by R.E. Allinson: A Logical Reconstruction of the Butterfly Dream: The Case for Internal Textual Transformation. On this occasion, Allinson looks at the ordering of the lines in the original passage. In order to achieve logical consistency, he said, some of the lines in the original passage should be rearranged. For example, the lines
He did not know whether it was Chuang Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or whether it was the butterfly dreaming that it was Chuang Chou.
should be put before the lines
Suddenly he awoke, and veritably was Chuang Chou again.
since the state of uncertainty should be attributed to dreaming, not awakening. Hence, the story should read:
Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, flying about enjoying itself. It did not know that it was Chuang Chou. In fact, it did not know whether it was Chuang Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or whether it was the butterfly dreaming that it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he awoke, and veritably was Chuang Chou again. Between Chuang Chou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is a case of what is called the transformation of things.
 Furthermore, if Chuang Chou was in a state of uncertainty, after he was awakened, then how can he be sure that there must be a distinction between himself and the butterfly, as stated in the last verse.? In other words, the state of the mind should proceed from Uncertain -> Certain, and NOT from, Certain -> Uncertain - > Certain.
It's clear from both the original and the modified version of the story that from Chuang Tzu's point of view, and perhaps from philosophers in general, objects or things should have no absolute representations; under different states of consciousness things look different. To state what consciousness actually is is beyond the scope of this essay. What I would like to say, however, is this: If consciousness is defined as the ability of realisation, then different states of consciousness are just different states of awareness. Using this definition, we can say that there exist two states of consciousness in the passage, namely, dreaming and awakening. But could there be actually three states of consciousness, instead of two, as it's usually interpreted? The first is the normal dream state when Chuang Tzu dreamed about the butterfly, which he thought was himself. The second is what I called the day-dream state - a sort of intermediate metastable state between dreaming and awakening. In fact, it~s during this day-dream state that he was being subjected into not knowing whether he was just now dreaming he was a butterfly or the opposite, the butterfly dreaming that it was Chuang Tzu. It wasn't until he was more or less fully awake, the third state, at the level of the so-called correct philosophical understanding, that he concluded the dream with the idea of transformation of things.
 Rearranging the content of the passage as Allinson has done, would, in my opinion, destroy that essential message that the story is trying to convey, and that is, even when one is awake - in this case partially awake - such transformations are still possible. Based on this argument, the so-called raw version of the story is sufficient as it stands. Furthermore, as pointed out by William James, every great philosopher has his own vision. In order to grasp the philosophy of a Philosopher, one needs to see things from his point of view. If in attempt to explicate philosophy one adopts the attitude based on a particular set of beliefs as a correct format of philosophy, one would inevitably face the consequence of generalisation.
The question why he dreamt of the butterfly and not a tiger, for example, can be attributed to the way the mind functions and the role it plays in dreaming: what's within is manifested without; our personality is a representation of our inner-self. Chuang Tzu was the sort who enjoyed living in total freedom. The butterfly he dreamt of was. therefore, him, or what he wished to be.


-- C.W. Chan

Chuang tzu, a contemporary of Mencius, is universally regarded as the greatest Taoist after Lao Tzu. His butterfly dream is probably the most celebrated dream ever to be recorded in the history of Chinese Philosophy, which makes it almost impossible to omit in any serious expositions of Chuang Tzu's works. Whether or not the dream actually occurred is not a matter of great importance. What is important is that it has captured the mind of generations of Philosophers. My aim in this essay is to discuss a number of views that I find interesting.

How Time Travel Works?

Introduction to how time travel works?

From millennium-skipping Victorians to phone booth-hopping teenagers, the term time travel often summons our most fantastic visions of what it means to move through the fourth dimension. But of course you don't need a time machine or a fancy wormhole to jaunt through the years.

As you've probably noticed, we're all constantly engaged in the act of time travel. At its most basic level, time is the rate of change in the universe -- and like it or not, we are constantly undergoing change. We age, the planets move around the sun, and things fall apart.

We measure the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours and years, but this doesn't mean time flows at a constant rate. Just as the water in a river rushes or slows depending on the size of the channel, time flows at different rates in different places. In other words, time is relative.

But what causes this fluctuation along our one-way trek from the cradle to the grave? It all comes down to the relationship between time and space. Human beings frolic about in the three spatial dimensions of length, width and depth. Time joins the party as that most crucial fourth dimension. Time can't exist without space, and space can't exist without time. The two exist as one: the space-time continuum. Any event that occurs in the universe has to involve both space and time.

In this article, we'll look at the real-life, everyday methods of time travel in our universe, as well as some of the more far-fetched methods of dancing through the fourth dimension.

Time Travel Into the Future

If you want to advance through the years a little faster than the next person, you'll need to exploit space-time. Global positioning satellites pull this off every day, accruing an extra third-of-a-billionth of a second daily. Time passes faster in orbit, because satellites are farther away from the mass of the Earth. Down here on the surface, the planet's mass drags on time and slows it down in small measures.

We call this effect gravitational time dilation. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is a curve in space-time and astronomers regularly observe this phenomenon when they study light moving near a sufficiently massive object. Particularly large suns, for instance, can cause an otherwise straight beam of light to curve in what we call the gravitational lensing effect.

What does this have to do with time? Remember: Any event that occurs in the universe has to involve both space and time. Gravity doesn't just pull on space; it also pulls on time.  

You wouldn't be able to notice minute changes in the flow of time, but a sufficiently massive object would make a huge difference -- say, like the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A at the center of our galaxy. Here, the mass of 4 million suns exists as a single, infinitely dense point, known as a singularity [source: NASA]. Circle this black hole for a while (without falling in) and you'd experience time at half the Earth rate. In other words, you'd round out a five-year journey to discover an entire decade had passed on Earth [source: Davies].

Speed also plays a role in the rate at which we experience time. Time passes more slowly the closer you approach the unbreakable cosmic speed limit we call the speed of light. For instance, the hands of a clock in a speeding train move more slowly than those of a stationary clock. A human passenger wouldn't feel the difference, but at the end of the trip the speeding clock would be slowed by billionths of a second. If such a train could attain 99.999 percent of light speed, only one year would pass onboard for every 223 years back at the train station [source: Davies].

In effect, this hypothetical commuter would have traveled into the future. But what about the past? Could the fastest starship imaginable turn back the clock?

Time Travel Into the Past

We've established that time travel into the future happens all the time. Scientists have proven it in experiments, and the idea is a fundamental aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity. You'll make it to the future; it's just a question of how fast the trip will be. But what about travel into the past? A glance into the night sky should supply an answer.

The Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years wide, so light from its more distant stars can take thousands upon thousands of years to reach Earth. Glimpse that light, and you're essentially looking back in time. When astronomers measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, they stare back more than 10 billion years into a primordial cosmic age. But can we do better than this?

There's nothing in Einstein's theory that precludes time travel into the past, but the very premise of pushing a button and going back to yesterday violates the law of causality, or cause and effect. One event happens in our universe, and it leads to yet another in an endless one-way string of events. In every instance, the cause occurs before the effect. Just try to imagine a different reality, say, in which a murder victim dies of his or her gunshot wound before being shot. It violates reality as we know it; thus, many scientists dismiss time travel into the past as an impossibility.

Some scientists have proposed the idea of using faster-than-light travel to journey back in time. After all, if time slows as an object approaches the speed of light, then might exceeding that speed cause time to flow backward? Of course, as an object nears the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases until, at the speed of light, it becomes infinite. Accelerating an infinite mass any faster than that is impossible. Warp speed technology could theoretically cheat the universal speed limit by propelling a bubble of space-time across the universe, but even this would come with colossal, far-future energy costs.

But what if time travel into the past and future depends less on speculative space propulsion technology and more on existing cosmic phenomena? Set a course for the black hole.

Black Holes and Kerr Rings

Circle a black hole long enough, and gravitational time dilation will take you into the future. But what would happen if you flew right into the maw of this cosmic titan? Most scientists agree the black hole would probably crush you, but one unique variety of black hole might not: the Kerr black hole or Kerr ring.

In 1963, New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr proposed the first realistic theory for a rotating black hole. The concept hinges on neutron stars, which are massive collapsed stars the size of Manhattan but with the mass of Earth's sun [source: Kaku]. Kerr postulated that if dying stars collapsed into a rotating ring of neutron stars, their centrifugal force would prevent them from turning into a singularity. Since the black hole wouldn't have a singularity, Kerr believed it would be safe to enter without fear of the infinite gravitational force at its center.

If Kerr black holes exist, scientists speculate that we might pass through them and exit through a white hole. Think of this as the exhaust end of a black hole. Instead of pulling everything into its gravitational force, the white hole would push everything out and away from it -- perhaps into another time or even another universe.

Kerr black holes are purely theoretical, but if they do exist they offer the adventurous time traveler a one-way trip into the past or future. And while a tremendously advanced civilization might develop a means of calibrating such a method of time travel, there's no telling where or when a "wild" Kerr black hole might leave you.

Wormholes

Theoretical Kerr black holes aren't the only possible cosmic shortcut to the past or future. As made popular by everything from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" to "Donnie Darko," there's also the equally theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge to consider. But of course you know this better as a wormhole.

Einstein's general theory ofrelativity allows for the existence of wormholes since it states that any mass curves space-time. To understand this curvature, think about two people holding a bedsheet up and stretching it tight. If one person were to place a baseball on the bedsheet, the weight of the baseball would roll to the middle of the sheet and cause the sheet to curve at that point. Now, if a marble were placed on the edge of the same bedsheet it would travel toward the baseball because of the curve.

In this simplified example, space is depicted as a two-dimensional plane rather than a four-dimensional one. Imagine that this sheet is folded over, leaving a space between the top and bottom. Placing the baseball on the top side will cause a curvature to form. If an equal mass were placed on the bottom part of the sheet at a point that corresponds with the location of the baseball on the top, the second mass would eventually meet with the baseball. This is similar to how wormholes might develop.

In space, masses that place pressure on different parts of the universe could combine eventually to create a kind of tunnel. This tunnel would, in theory, join two separate times and allow passage between them. Of course, it's also possible that some unforeseen physical or quantum property prevents such a wormhole from occurring. And even if they do exist, they may be incredibly unstable.

According to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, wormholes may exist in quantum foam, the smallest environment in the universe. Here, tiny tunnels constantly blink in and out of existence, momentarily linking separate places and time like an ever-changing game of "Chutes and Ladders."

Wormholes such as these might prove too small and too brief for human time travel, but might we one day learn to capture, stabilize and enlarge them? Certainly, says Hawking, provided you're prepared for some feedback. If we were to artificially prolong the life of a tunnel through folded space-time, a radiation feedback loop might occur, destroying the time tunnel in the same way audio feedback can wreck a speaker.

Cosmic String

We've blown through black holes and wormholes, but there's yet another possible means of time traveling via theoretic cosmic phenomena. For this scheme, we turn to physicist J. Richard Gott, who introduced the idea of cosmic string back in 1991. As the name suggests, these are string like objects that some scientists believe were formed in the early universe.

These strings may weave throughout the entire universe, thinner than an atom and under immense pressure. Naturally, this means they'd pack quite a gravitational pull on anything that passes near them, enabling objects attached to a cosmic string to travel at incredible speeds and benefit from time dilation. By pulling two cosmic strings close together or stretching one string close to a black hole, it might be possible to warp space-time enough to create what's called a closed timelike curve.

Using the gravity produced by the two cosmic strings (or the string and black hole), a spaceship theoretically could propel itself into the past. To do this, it would loop around the cosmic strings.

Quantum strings are highly speculative, however. Gott himself said that in order to travel back in time even one year, it would take a loop of string that contained half the mass-energy of an entire galaxy. In other words, you'd have to split half the atoms in the galaxy to power your time machine. And, as with any time machine, you couldn't go back farther than the point at which the time machine was created.

Oh yes, and then there are the time paradoxes.

Time Travel Paradox

As we mentioned before, the concept of traveling into the past becomes a bit murky the second causality rears its head. Cause comes before effect, at least in this universe, which manages to muck up even the best-laid time traveling plans.

For starters, if you traveled back in time 200 years, you'd emerge in a time before you were born. Think about that for a second. In the flow of time, the effect (you) would exist before the cause (your birth).

To better understand what we're dealing with here, consider the famousgrandfather paradox. You're a time-traveling assassin, and your target just happens to be your own grandfather. So you pop through the nearest wormhole and walk up to a spry 18-year-old version of your father's father. You raise your laser blaster, but just what happens when you pull the trigger?

Think about it. You haven't been born yet. Neither has your father. If you kill your own grandfather in the past, he'll never have a son. That son will never have you, and you'll never happen to take that job as a time-traveling assassin. You wouldn't exist to pull the trigger, thus negating the entire string of events. We call this aninconsistent causal loop.

On the other hand, we have to consider the idea of a consistent causal loop. While equally thought-provoking, this theoretical model of time travel is paradox free. According to physicist Paul Davies, such a loop might play out like this: A math professor travels into the future and steals a groundbreaking math theorem. The professor then gives the theorem to a promising student. Then, that promising student grows up to be the very person from whom the professor stole the theorem to begin with.

Then there's the post-selected model of time travel, which involves distorted probability close to any paradoxical situation [source: Sanders]. What does this mean? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the time-traveling assassin again. This time travel model would make your grandfather virtually death proof. You can pull the trigger, but the laser will malfunction. Perhaps a bird will poop at just the right moment, but some quantum fluctuation will occur to prevent a paradoxical situation from taking place.

But then there's another possibility: The future or past you travel into might just be a parallel universe. Think of it as a separate sandbox: You can build or destroy all the castles you want in it, but it doesn't affect your home sandbox in the slightest. So if the past you travel into exists in a separate timeline, killing your grandfather in cold blood is no big whoop. Of course, this might mean that every time jaunt would land you in a new parallel universe and you might never return to your original sandbox.

Brain Wave Entrainment

Brainwave Patterns

The brain is made up of approximately 100 billion nerve cells called neurons which communicate with each other twenty-four hours a day using electrical signals. The combination of millions of these neurons sending electrical signals at once produces an enormous of electrical activity in the brain and these electrical discharges can be detected by using EEG technology (Electroencephalography). EEG records this electrical activity as ‘Brain Wave Patterns’ – because of its “wave” and cyclic-like nature.

The presence of these electrical discharges indicates the different states, particular your mental state at a certain time. However, these patterns are not random; they are closely correlated with your emotions, your thoughts, your state of being, and every function of the various systems of your body. In short, the entire quality of your life has something to do with these patterns. It also means that what you do to yourself can influences your brain wave patterns. It’s like a meter that displays the state of your consciousness.

Brainwave patterns can be categorized into four main groups according to the frequency (Hz) range that they are in.

Brainwave Range

• Beta (13 Hz – 30 Hz) – The normal state of wakeful consciousness; the state you are now while reading this report. High level of Beta is associated with alertness but it could also be linked to anxiety, uneasiness, stress and panic. At the higher end of beta, at around 38 Hz – 70 Hz, the brain will fall into the Gamma.
• Alpha (8 Hz – 12 Hz) – This is a state of relaxation and self relief. Hypnosis, autosuggestion is done at this level.This state is also known as ‘Accelerated Learning State’ because the brain seems more to be receptive and open to new information, particular suggestion.You normally experience alpha just after you awake and before falling into sleep. It’s the door to the unconscious.
• Theta (3 Hz – 8 Hz) – A deep state of relaxation. Dreams (REM Sleep) and deep meditations are often associated with theta. Access to the unconscious mind.
• Delta (0.5 Hz – 3 Hz) – Dreamless or Non-REM sleep. A state of trance and loss of body awareness. Maintaining awareness during theta could enable one to access to the unconscious and super-conscious mind (exp. people like Yogis and Zen monks who have practiced meditation for decades and attained higher consciousness).

We spend some amount of time in each brain state everyday; it is part of life cycle and most likely the state changes according to the activity that we are engaged in. Either it goes up or down.

If you have glanced through the list above carefully, you would have noticed that each brain state plays a different role in maintaining life’s vitality such as relaxation and self-relief, accelerated learning, accessing the unconscious and etc.

Now here’s the ULTIMATE question: what if there’s a possibility that we can train or induce our brain to go into the different brain states at will (anytime) and utilize the power of the brain state possesses?

For example; by inducing your brain into alpha, you can reprogram your subconscious with new beliefs that serve you and drop those that limit you. And in case that if you are not aware, the biggest obstruction that most people face in ‘self-development’ is having to change the past limiting beliefs. They either do not know how to do it or not knowing that beliefs are held in the subconscious, and again, which could be done in alpha; the path that connects the conscious to the subconscious.

Besides, by tapping into the power of the various state of consciousness, you could easily replicate the mind of a genius; think about Einstein’s or Mozart’s.

…the answer lies in Brain Wave Entrainment

Brainwave Entrainment

‘Entrainment’ is actually a physics term that coined by Christian Huygens in 1665 to describe the phenomena of cyclical energies recalibrating to fall into rhythm with one another. Christian observed that when two different bodies that vibrate at different rates are brought together, they would tend to lock into phase and vibrate in harmony.

For example, if a tuning fork which produces a frequency of 350 Hz is struck and then brought into the vicinity of another 350 Hz tuning fork, the second fork will begin to vibrate as well. Here, the first fork is said to have entrained the second fork.

Entrainment has demonstrated that even very subtle cyclical energies have a substantive impart on their neighboring cyclical energies. It is not a force like gravity but instead, a phenomenon; a conservation of energy that enable two cycles to work more efficiently.

After numerous of extensive researches and experiments, scientists and neurologists have found that this same phenomenon could also be applied in training the brain, (by using exactly the same principle that Christian Huygens discovered).

Brainwave entrainment is defined as any practice with the purpose of causing the brainwave frequency to fall into the same beats of the external periodic stimulus, which is having a frequency corresponding to the intended brain-state (for example, to induce sleep or relaxation).

How It Works

First, stimulus is introduced to the brain, whether through the ears, eyes or other senses. Such stimulus will make the brain responds by emitting an electrical charge, known as ‘Cortical Evoked Response’. This electrical responses travel throughout the brain to become what an individual sees and hears. The strength of this cortical evoked response depends on the type and effectiveness of the stimulus, which is very important in gaining a significant result particular for the purpose of entraining the brain.

When the brain is consistently exposed to periodic stimulus, such as flashes of light or drumbeats and/or chanting, the brain will tend to tune or entrain its electric cycle to match the external stimulus (as described in ‘Entrainment’).

The tendency of the brain to tune in to and match the external stimulus frequency is known as‘Frequency Following Response’ or ‘FFR’ and this phenomenon can be used to effectively alter the brain wave patterns.

Are Dreams An Extension Of Physical Reality?

You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as “just dreams” is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality.

“I am real” said Alice (in Wonderland). “If I wasn’t real, I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

We take for granted how our mind puts everything together. Everything we experience is a whirl of information occurring in our heads. Biocentrism — a new “theory of everything” — tells us that space and time aren’t the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. They’re the key to consciousness, and why in experiments with particles, space and time — and indeed the properties of matter itself — are relative to the observer. During both dreams and waking hours, your mind collapses probability waves to generate a physical reality, replete with a functioning body. You’re able to think and experience sensations in a 3D world.

We dismiss dreams because they end when we wake up. However, the duration of the experience doesn’t mean it has any less basis in physical reality. Certainly we don’t think day-to-day life is less real because we fall asleep or die. It’s true we don’t remember events in our dreams as well as in waking hours, but the fact that Alzheimer’s patients may have little memory of events doesn’t mean their life is any less real. Or that individuals who take psychedelic drugs don’t experience physical reality, even if the spatio-temporal events they experience are distorted or they don’t remember all of the events when the drugs wear off (certainly, anyone they had sex with would confirm this).

We also dismiss dreams as unreal because they’re associated with brain activity during sleep. But are our waking hours unreal because they’re associated with the neural activity in our brain? Certainly, the bio-physical logic of consciousness — whether during a dream or waking hours — can always be traced backwards, whether to neurons or the Big Bang. But according to biocentrism, reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

In contrast to dreams, we assume the everyday world is just “out there” and that we play no role in its appearance. We think they’re different. Yet experiments show just the opposite: day-to-day reality is no more objective or observer-independent than dreams. The most vivid illustration of this is the famous two-hole experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both holes at the same time. This and other experiments tell us that unobserved particles exist only as waves of probability.

Critics claim this behavior is limited to the microscopic world. But this “two-world” view (that is, one set of physical laws for small objects, and another for the rest of the universe) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year (Nature 459, 683, 2009), researchers showed that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of vibrating ions were coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together when separated by large distances (“spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it). “Such situations are not observed in nature,” stated the authors. “This may be simply due to our inability to sufficiently isolate the system of interest from the surrounding environment — a technical limitation.” Other experiments with huge molecules called “Buckyballs” also show that quantum reality extends beyond the microscopic world. And in 2005, KHC03 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges one-half inch high, quantum behavior nudging into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.

Whether awake or dreaming, you’re experiencing the same bio-physical process. True, they’re qualitatively different realities, but if you’re thinking and feeling, it’s real. Thus, René Descartes’ famous statement Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out the full scientific explanation of Lanza’s theory of everything

Link to article in Huffington Post

Can a Tree Consciously Experience the World?

In “Avatar,” humans mine a lush moon inhabited by blue-skinned extraterrestrials, the Na’vi, who live in harmony with nature. Human military forces destroy their habitat despite objections that it could affect the bio-network connecting its organisms. On the eve of the big battle, the protagonist Jake communicates via a neural connection with the Tree of Souls, which intercedes on behalf of the Na’vi.

The movie suggests that we don’t understand the conscious nature of the life that surrounds us.

Although I saw the movie three times, I still cringe whenever someone tells me that a plant has consciousness. As a biologist, I can accept that consciousness exists in cats, dogs and other animals with sophisticated brains. Studies show that dogs have a level of intelligence — and consciousness — on par with a two- or three-year-old human child. In fact, in 1981, I and Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner published a paper in Science showing that even pigeons were capable of certain aspects of self-awareness. But a plant or a tree? To consider the possibility seemed absurd — until the other day.

My kitchen merges into a conservatory, a mini-rainforest with palms and ferns. While having breakfast, I looked up at one of my prize specimens, a Queen Sago tree. For the last several months I’d been watching it send up new fronds, which, since the winter solstice, have been repositioning themselves towards the shifting sun. During that time I also watched it respond to an injury to its trunk by sending out air-roots in search of new soil to re-root itself. It was a clever life-form, but clearly not conscious in any known biological way.

Then I remembered the episode of “Star Trek” called “Wink of an Eye.” In this episode, Captain Kirk beams down to a planet and finds a beautiful but empty metropolis. The only trace of life is the mysterious buzzing of unseen insects. When he returns to the ship, the crew continues to hear the same strange buzzing sound. Suddenly, Kirk notices that the movements of the crew slow down to a stop, as if time itself were being manipulated. A beautiful woman appears and explains to Kirk that the bridge crew hasn’t slowed down, but rather, he has been sped up, having been matched to the Scalosians’ “hyper-accelerated” physical existence. Back in real time, Spock and Dr. McCoy figure out that the strange buzzing is the hyper-accelerated conversations of aliens that exist outside normal physics.

We think of time — and thus consciousness — in human terms. In my mind, I could easily accelerate the plant’s behavior like a botanist does with time-lapse photography. The feathery creature, there in my conservatory, responded to the environment much like a primitive invertebrate. But there was more to it than that. We think time is an object, an invisible matrix that ticks away regardless of whether there are any objects or life. Not so, says biocentrism. Time isn’t an object or thing; it’s a biological concept, the way life relates to physical reality. It only exists relative to the observer.

Consider your own consciousness. Without your eyes, ears or other sense organs, you would still be able to experience consciousness, albeit in a radically different form. Even without thoughts, you would still be conscious, although the image of a person or tree would have no meaning. Indeed, you wouldn’t be able to discern objects from each other, but rather would visually experience the world as a kaleidoscope of changing colors.

Like us, plants possess receptors, microtubules and sophisticated intercellular systems that likely facilitate a degree of spatio-temporal consciousness. Instead of generating a pattern of colors, the particles of light bouncing off a plant produce a pattern of energy molecules — sugar — in the chlorophyll in its stems and leaves. Light-stimulating chemical reactions in one leaf cause a chain reaction of signals to the entire organism via vascular bundles.

Neurobiologists have discovered that plants also have rudimentary neural nets and the capacity for primary perceptions. Indeed, thesundew plant (Drosera) will grasp at a fly with incredible accuracy — much better than you can do a fly-swatter. Some plants even know when ants are coming towards them to steal their nectar and have mechanisms to close up when they approach. Scientists at Cornell University discovered that when a hornworm starts eating sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), the wounded plant will send out a blast of scent that warns surrounding plants — in the case of the study, wild tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) ?- that trouble is on its way. Those plants, in turn, prepare chemical defenses that send the hungry critters in the opposite direction. Andre Kessler, the lead researcher, called this “priming its defense response.” “This could be a crucial mechanism of plant-plant communication,” he said.

As I sat in the kitchen that day, the early-morning sun slanted down through the skylights, throwing the entire room into gleaming brightness. The Queen Sago tree and I were both “happy” the sun was out.

***

Robert Lanza, M.D. has published extensively in leading scientific journals and has over two dozen books, including “Biocentrism,” which lays out his theory of everything. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website at www.robertlanza.com.

Link to article in Huffington Post 

Rethinking the Nature of Life

Is there a higher level of being? Or are we merely a collection of atoms — more dust spinning around the center of the galaxy?

James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, once said: “You’ve got to be prepared sometimes to do some things that people say you’re not qualified to do,” and “Since you know you’re going to get into trouble, you ought to have someone to save you after you’re in deep s–––. So you better always have someone who believes in you.” For me, that someone was Eliot Stellar, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and Chair of the Human Rights Committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

As a student scientist there seemed to be no purpose to the universe. There were no fountains of youth, no lost gardens to explore in far lands. Something was missing, both from my life and from the scientific books in the library. I was also concerned about the failure to use this available know-how to improve the human condition in large parts of the world. This feeling brought me in medical school to compile a book indicating suggestions for necessary changes, thus offering a multifaceted picture of where science stood and where it intended to go. I invited the Secretary General of the UN, the World Health Organization, and Nobel laureates, among others. The response was overwhelming, dispelling any doubt I had about the need for the book.

And that was the problem. I sent the letters from my school mailbox, and the Dean’s office started to receive calls from the U.S. Surgeon General and others trying to locate me. The Dean of Students was convinced the project would fail and upset a lot of important people. But to my mind it wasn’t his concern. I said that in his office when he ordered me to send out letters to the contributors. When I refused, he told me I wouldn’t graduate if I didn’t comply. I told him I already got what I came there for — a medical education, not a piece of paper. When the conversation got heated, he said “I’ve never had a student talk to me like that.” I stood up (and finger pointed) responded “I find it difficult being in the presence of people like you. I’m talking to you as one human being to another.” He told me I’d better find a faculty member to defend me. So I went to Eliot Stellar.

When I refused to obey the Dean, I was summoned before the Student Standards Committee who told me they’d decline recommending me for graduation if I didn’t send out the letters. I was in deep s–––, but Stellar stood behind me. “You shouldn’t be in this alone. They’re bureaucrats — they don’t understand. The new Dean is from the testing agency. He needs to learn that all students aren’t the same.” One night Stellar called me at home. He was putting out the fire, and told me I deserved the MD degree. “The degree isn’t important,” I said “I got the education I came for.” At that point I heard his wife, Betty, say in the background “Tell him to ask his mother what she thinks.” “Shhh!” said Eliot. “It’s his decision.”

Many years later I was riding a trolley into the city and took an empty seat next to a well-dressed woman. She turned to me and said “You’re Robert Lanza, aren’t you? I worked in the Dean’s office and remember the day you had the fight with him. The office staff were all standing outside the door listening, and cheered when you told him off.”

Eliot Stellar died in 1993, my mentor, and one of the greatest physiological psychologists ever to live, and arguably the most decent human being I ever met.

I’ve often reflected upon Eliot Stellar’s place in the universe. This self-less man cared about everyone — his family, his students, and as Chair of the National Academy’s Human Rights Committee — the rest of the world. What greater act of transcendence is there than projecting your love and hope onto others? One can’t but come closer to God or Heaven than to merge oneself with the universal order of things. Eliot Stellar had become part of a greater reality. “The greatest good,” said Spinoza “is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.”

This isn’t idle philosophy. Science, too, is beginning to grasp the non-linear nature of reality. Heisenberg, the Nobel physicist whose uncertainty principle transformed our understanding of the world, once commented: “Contemporary science, today more than at any previous time, has been forced by nature herself to pose again the question of the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes.” Alas! The evidence has the weight of a boulder. Shall our vision forever flow around it? Experiment (PhysRevLett 49, 91, 1982) after experiment (Nature 459, 683, 2009) continues to show that entangled particles act as if there’s no space or time separating them, a result that’s intelligible only if we assume the mind transcends the existence of things in space and time.

From this viewpoint, we’re not just the collection of cells and molecules classical science describes. Heinz Pagels, the esteemed theoretical physicist, once stated: “If you deny the objectivity of the world, unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as many prominent physicists have), then you end up with solipsism — the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” Although Pagels’ conclusion is right, it’s not just your consciousness that’s the only one, it’s ours. “Know in thyself and All one self-same soul,” says the old Hindu poem “banish the dream that sunders part from whole.”

According to biocentrism, the mind transcends space and time in that they’re its tools, and not the other way around. This conception of reality dissolves away human individuality. “Sometimes,” said Thoreau, “as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be.” The walls of space and time are illusory. We’re all ephemeral forms of an individuality greater than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality, and its highest form; we’re forced to recall the words of the English poet John Donne, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” and to understand them in a more scientific way.

Years after graduating from medical school, I ran into the Dean in the hallway. He shook my hand and said, “As one human being to another” (referring to the day in his office). He congratulated me for my book “Medical Science and the Advancement of World Health,” which I dedicated to Eliot Stellar — who taught me that there’s more to life than the dance of atoms described in our science textbooks. I miss him.

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

View article on Huffington Post 

Could This Theory Provide a Glimpse of Our Ultimate Destiny?

Have you ever wondered what it’s really all about? How does this little life of ours fits into the larger picture — into a reality so huge the Universe itself is but a speck?

We go to and fro our affairs, baking cookies and digging up Sarah Palin bikini pictures, unaware of just how massively primitive our understanding of life and existence really is. Biocentrism, a new theory of everything, suggests we’re so far off the mark we might as well be reading comic books instead of textbooks on evolutionary biology or quantum physics. We peer out at the edge of the universe with our radiotelescopes, yet it’s only recently that scientists have started to question a worldview that stretches back to the beginning of civilization. It’s time to say goodbye to this old paradigm.

In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant declared space and time were properties of the mind. More recently, Einstein acknowledged “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” According to biocentrism, space and time arebiological constructs, suggesting there are other information systems that correspond to other realities based on logic completely different from ours. These algorithms are the key to consciousness and why space and time and the properties of matter are relative to the observer. Biocentrism suggests they’re not the only tools to experience reality. Although we experience a world of up and down, these algorithms could be changed so that instead of time being linear, it was for instance, 3-dimensional like space. Your consciousness would move through the multiverse, and you could walk through time like you walk through space.

Everything you experience is information occurring in your head. Space and time are just our way of making sense of things. They’re not objects, but rather the software that like in a DVD player, molds information into multidimensional experience. We take for granted how our mind weaves everything together. Even in dreams, it generates a reality, replete with a functioning body that interacts with a surrounding physical environment. Although a mental fabrication, you’re able to think and experience sensations just as real as you do now.

If you add that everything physically possible has to happen (as many physicists believe), what does that mean about our ultimate destiny? Where does your life and consciousness begin and end? It seems simple invertebrates may only experience existence in one dimension of space. Evolutionary biology suggests that life has progressed from a one dimensional reality, to two dimensions to three dimensions, and there’s no reason to think the evolution of life stops there. Ultimately, consciousness runs upward by insensible degrees from the lowest forms of life through to vertebrate existence, and far beyond us to extracorporeal (transcendental) existences that we can’t even begin to fathom. Although we experience them piece by piece, like the songs on a record, they represent parts of a unitary reality that exists outside the classical divisions of space and time.

It’s time to embrace this broader vision of reality. This became clear to me one afternoon, when as a boy, a small cottontail rabbit ran by me. There was nothing remarkable in that; nor did I think it unusual when he stopped a moment, holding up his paws and looking at me with the curious glance of the White Rabbit, as if to say, “Why, Robert, what are you doing out here?” But when the creature looked into my eyes and twitched its whiskers, I felt the Élan Vital in him, a certain sense of consciousness that cut across space. Then it ran off, and I too. You see, there was a joining, a projection of desires across the species boundary. For just a moment, I could feel the guide hairs on the back of my neck, even as the rabbit might have felt them himself.

Some people will say the sun was hot upon me that day, and that I shouldn’t burden my readers with this affair. They don’t think there’s any other explanation left. However, you’ve probably heard about the two-hole experiment, the quantum Zeno effect, and other experiments that suggest the structure of the physical world is influenced by human observation. The results of these experiments are fantastic, I agree. But when quantum physics was in its early days, even some physicists dismissed the findings as impossible. It’s curious to recall Einstein’s reaction to the experiments: “I know this business is free of contradictions, yet in my view it contains a certain unreasonableness.” Yet later he admitted quantum mechanics doesn’t contain any logical contradictions and is logically unexceptionable. Maybe so, but I’ve spent my entire career studying the basis of life. I have faith in life, not a set of equations.

No doubt the equations are right, but perhaps it’s wiser to interpret nature in terms of life rather than in terms of wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory. As I have grown older, I have found myself puzzling over that little episode. Somewhere in it, I was sure, lay the secret,

It was only with the fall of objectivity that scientists began to consider again the old question of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Einstein, on a walk home, asked Abraham Pais if he really believed the moon existed only if he looked at it. Since that time, physicists have revised their equations in a vain attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that doesn’t depend on the circumstances of the observer. But in these days of disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe can’t be divorced from the nature of life itself. Indeed, quantum theory implies consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. Only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality — to a dandelion in a meadow or a seed pod.

But that’s not all. The late physicist Heinz Pagels once commented: “If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as most physicists have), then you end up with solipsism — the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” This may not unsettle you, except perhaps if you were standing in a meadow when everything was bathed in such pure light. But there I was, the creature a few rods off, its eyes fixed on mine.

I knew then that Pagel’s conclusion about solipsism was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was ours. There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the rabbit. Aye, behind the mind of every creature existing in space and time, and beyond them to intelligences in other realities we can’t fathom. “There are,” wrote Loren Eiseley “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one — all melted together.’”

Yes, I thought, we’re all one. There was a crackling of some twigs, and I jumped up in alarm. In another moment I popped down the large rabbit-hole under the rock. Down, down, down into a world of the unfathomable.

“Biocentrism” (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

Read this article on Huffington Post 

Where Did the Universe Come From? New Explanation of Our Origin

Contemporary science asks us to believe that the entire universe – indeed the laws of Nature themselves – just popped into existence one day out of nothing. How can anyone in their right mind accept such a thing?

We take physics as a kind of magic and don’t question that 14 billion years ago over a trillion quadrillion tons of matter suddenly appeared from – zilch? We’re told that space and time also magically appeared as well.

From the Big Bang to Sarah Palin is an enormous distance. It would be well to remember the experiments of Redi and Pasteur – experiments that put to rest the theory of spontaneous generation, the belief that life arose from dead matter (for instance, maggots from rotting meat, mice from bundles of old clothes) – and not make the same mistake for the origin of the Universe itself. We imagine time extending all the way backwards to the Big Bang, before life’s beginning in the seas. But experiments with real particles show that before matter can exist (or have properties) it has to be observed. Something must sustain it above the void of nonexistence and hold the world together in the midst of change. That something is the human (or animal) mind.

Past generations believed the world was a great ball resting on the back of a turtle; now science would have us believe it’s a fairy universe that appeared out of nowhere and that expands into nothing. Angels used to push and pummel the planets about; now everything is a meaningless accident. We’ve exchanged a world turtle for a Big Bang. By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently ridiculous ‘explanations’ for the nature of the universe as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our respect long enough to pull the old three-card-monte when it comes to these largest issues.

“One does occasionally observe,” Loren Eiseley wrote, “a tendency for the beginning zoological textbooks to take the unwary reader by a hop, skip, and jump from the little steaming pond…into the lower world of life with such sureness and rapidity that it is easy to assume that there is no mystery about this matter at all, or, if there is, that it is a very little one.”

Science has sought to extend space and time beyond our own emergence. It followed our footsteps backwards until they disappeared into the sea. The cosmologists picked up the story of the molten Earth and carried it backwards in time through the lower forms of matter to the Big Bang.

But physics has learned that the world doesn’t exist in a definite state independent of the observer. Tracing life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor of the quantum theorist. I have seen the test-tube-like contraption that’s said to mimic the geophysical environment of the primitive earth, and that attempts to explain the origin of life in mechanistic terms without reference to any observer. While a variety of organic molecules can be synthesized in many ways – and it can even be done in your bathtub – the experiments do not fail to have an animal subject. Our intercourse with the molecules is necessary for them to exist as real objects. Half of the experiment is the scientist, who doesn’t recognize that their consciousness renders possible the space, indeed, the very reality of the vessel itself.

There is no invisible matrix out there that explains our origin. Rather, for each life there is a universe, its own universe. According to biocentrism, each of us generates our own sphere of reality. We carry space and time around us like turtles with shells. The Universe is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking. Strikingly, anything you don’t observe directly exists only as potential – or more mathematically speaking – as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said John Wheeler, the great physicist “exists until it is observed.”

Since time doesn’t exist on any level before observers, traditional pre-Earth explanations of the universe can’t explain our origin. Think of the universe like one of those globes you see in the classroom – it’s merely a tool that represents everything that’s theoretically possible to experience. But like a CD, the music only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs. Instead of the Universe having an absolute beginning, imagine, instead, that existence is like a recording. Depending on where the needle is placed you hear a certain song. This is the present; the music, before and after is the past and future. All songs exist simultaneously, although we only experience them piece by piece.

“Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”

Scientists have failed to see beyond their equations, to see the birds and butterflies husbanding their colors above the grass and trees against the sky. If only, coming home from the laboratory, they would look out upon the pond, and through the bulrushes, watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface to behold that vaster universe of which they are an intricate part.

We’re living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that life is an insignificant part of the physical universe (and sprung into existence from the Big Bang or bundles of old clothes), to one in which we – not the Big Bang – are the origin. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space don’t exist without us, will it feel like madness.

Robert Lanza, MD is author of “Biocentrism,” a new book that lays out his theory of everything.

View this article on Huffington Post