“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.”
–Nobel physicist Richard Feynman
“The late physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), who coined the term ‘black hole,’ advocated what is now called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required to bring the universe into existence.
“…[C]ontemporary science asks us to believe: that the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped into existence out of absolute nothingness. Who in their right mind would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible suggestion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter from–zilch? How any possible natural random process could mix molecules in a blender for a few billions years so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can anyone conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles still spring out of nothingness?
“Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos on its fundamental level? By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim processes and 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 cosmos as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.
“Language is rife with a myriad of contradictions that we merely ignore. Ask someone what he or she thinks happens after death, and one common reply is, ‘I think there will just be nothing.’ Now that seems to be a valid statement but as we saw in a precious chapter, the verb to be contradicts nothingness. One can’t be nothing. Our frequent encounters with the term be nothing or is nothing have numbed us into imagining that it expresses something valid and logical, when in fact it says nothing comprehensible.
“First Principle of Biocentrism: 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.
“Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
“Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles–indeed all particles and objects–are 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.
“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.
“Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe if 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.
“Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive change in the universe.
“Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: 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 to life.”