Ep 23: Waking Up Inside The Cave [Pt 3]: The Flip, Biocentrism, and The Case Against Reality
Get Caught Up
Sources
The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge by Jeffrey Kripal
Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman
The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman
UFO Realism and the Uber-Umwelt by James Madden
Transcript
Welcome back to The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Chase.
Today we’re diving into part 3 of our series inspired by Plato’s allegory of the Cave. As you’ll recall, in the Cave, we are presented with a scenario in which people have spent their entire lives tied up inside of a dark cave looking at a blank wall. Behind the prisoners there is a roaring fire in front of which various objects move, casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners, which they mistake for reality.
It has been the goal of this series to follow in the footsteps of the hypothetical prisoner who has been freed in this story. In part one, we took a deep dive into the “official story of everything”—or the collection of the scientific models and cultural norms that we use to make sense of our reality, from the Big Bang to the nature of consciousness, and quickly found that this core narrative of our consensus reality is little more than a shadowplay on the wall.
In part two, we turned away from the shadows on the wall and looked toward the objects passing in front of the fire, grappling with the apparently synthetic nature of our perceived reality. We asked deep questions about both the nature of the world in which we find ourselves, and who or what might be behind this seemingly simulated reality.
Today, in part 3, we’ll attempt to leave the cave. I say “attempt” because this process isn’t easy, nor is it straightforward. The process of ascending the cave is treacherous and disorienting. The inevitable result of living your life in the dark of the cave is that the light from the world above is blinding. And when you’ve spent your whole life looking at shadows, the process of beginning to see the real shape of things can be confounding.
And, if I’m being honest, that’s about where I am currently with all of this. I won’t pretend to have entirely escaped the cave myself—I’m still existentially groping for the exits. And I fully recognize that what lies outside of the cave is a mystery that I don’t currently have the tools to contemplate in any meaningful way.
So I want to be really clear that what I’m offering here aren’t answers. These are merely my trip notes that I’m putting out into the world to share with my fellow seekers in the hopes that they might be of some use to someone who finds themself on the same leg of the journey. And I’m excited to share what I’ve found.
While I don’t have the answers, the process of waking up inside the cave has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world. It’s taken everything that I thought I knew about how the world works and turned it inside out. And what’s been striking to me is that there seems to be a rising tide of experts and thinkers from all different backgrounds and disciplines who have been coming to roughly the same conclusions about the nature of our reality.
Which begs the question—could we, as a species, be on the verge of a profound shift in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos?
In this episode we’re going to look at the work of three such individuals: Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion, renowned for his research and writings on the intersection of culture, consciousness, and spirituality; Robert Lanza, a medical doctor and scientist known for his work in stem cell research and regenerative medicine; and Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist and professor known for his research into visual perception and consciousness. Though they come from vastly different backgrounds, the work of all three of these men points to a possible new paradigm of reality that has the potential to resolve the many glaring issues of our current “official story of everything” into a more coherent whole.
Is it enough to get us out of the cave? That remains to be seen. But it’s certainly a start. And I’d argue that it’s a necessary one—because what’s clear is that the narratives that we use to make sense of our reality are irretrievably flawed.
A New Paradigm Emerges
As you’ll recall from our discussion in part one of this series, the “official story of everything”—despite allegedly being the “rational” and “scientific” explanation for all that is—actually requires the acceptance of several major miracles to be at all viable.
The first of these miracles is the Big Bang, or the miracle of getting something from nothing. And not just something—but literally everything. Our universe seemingly popped into existence somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago, like a rabbit out of a hat—if the rabbit was all that is or was or ever will be and the hat was an unfathomable timeless nothingness. Though far more impressive, that trick admittedly doesn’t go over as well at children’s parties.
The second miracle we must accept for this story to work is that this impossible universe is somehow, against unthinkable odds, perfectly tuned to support life. All four of the universe’s four forces and all of its constants don’t just allow for life, they seem to be specifically coded to encourage it. And the chances of things just happening to unfold that way are astronomically small. The slightest change in the initial conditions of the universe could have resulted in a version of the universe where life isn’t possible.
For example, if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, it would have expanded too quickly for the galaxies, and therefore life, to develop. If the strong nuclear force were decreased by just 2 percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together, and the universe would be filled with nothing but hydrogen. If the gravitational force were decreased by just a hair, stars (including the Sun) would not ignite.
These examples are just a few of more than 200 hundred physical parameters within the solar system and universe that had to be precisely calibrated for life to emerge. Given that fact, it’s clear that by far the most likely result of the Big Bang would have been a lifeless universe. And yet, here we are on a planet where life has persisted for billions of years—long enough, apparently, for the inert matter on its surface to somehow wake up and start wondering where it came from and what it will have for lunch.
Which brings us to the third miracle of consensus reality which is that, somehow, the inert matter of the universe gave rise to life. Even within a universe that is perfectly calibrated to support life we have no mechanism within our current paradigms to explain how it would emerge in the first place. Even the simplest single-celled organism contains an inner complexity that makes it difficult to imagine how life could possibly emerge entirely at random. The simplest single-celled organism has been shown to require somewhere between 265 and 350 genes to survive and reproduce in a lab. But where did the genes to create the first single-celled organisms come from—much less hundreds of them?
And yet, the most glaring and flagrant issue with the “official story of everything” isn’t even the seemingly impossible things it requires us to believe, but the central mystery that it entirely ignores—consciousness.
Although all of our knowledge, logic, reasoning, and our ability to both observe and relate to the world around us is entirely reliant upon the fact that we are consciousness beings, we not only don’t have a good working definition of what consciousness is, our current scientific models don’t even allow for the existence of consciousness.
The startling reality is that there is nothing in all of our scientific knowledge that can account for what consciousness is, where it comes from, how it works, or how it is that we are able to have a unique subjective experience. We have no idea how physical processes that happen in the brain give rise to the non-physical experience of awareness.
And I want to be clear that it’s not just a lack of knowledge that is the issue here—it’s that our current paradigms don’t give us any mechanism to talk about non-physical processes in any meaningful way.
To return to the metaphor of the Cave, all of our current models were built upon our understanding of the shadows on the Cave wall. But as we become aware that there is more to our reality that both exceeds and transcends the shadow reality that we’ve been presented with, we find that those models fail us.
It’s time for us to find new models—models that have the ability to integrate the full scope of our experience and enable us to ask deeper and more meaningful questions about ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
And luckily for us and right on time, this is exactly the sort of new paradigm that is beginning to emerge from cutting edge thinking and research in a wide variety of fields ranging from quantum mechanics to cognitive science to religious studies. And although the specifics may differ, the top minds in these fields seem to be converging on one larger idea that has the potential to fix what is currently broken.
And all it requires is that we take everything we think we know and turn it on its head. What it requires is a flip.
The Flip
And just such a flip is described by Jeffrey Kripal in his book The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. Kripal is a prominent author and scholar in the field of religious studies. He’s the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University, and his work often explores the intersections between religion, philosophy, and various aspects of culture and consciousness.
In his work, Kripal bucks the traditional materialist view of the world that tells us that anything that can’t be accounted for within physicalist reality doesn’t exist, and instead seeks to reintegrate the so-called “impossible” aspects of human experience into a more coherent and holistic vision of reality. For Kripal, anomalous experiences aren’t erroneous data points to be discarded, but rather they are a sign post pointing us in the direction of our next profound discovery.
And though some might be quick to dismiss him as a scholar of religion, and therefore, as someone who is necessarily working outside of the realm of science, I think it’s important to recognize that this approach is deeply and inherently scientific. Sometimes in science we need to eliminate a rogue data point. Outliers almost always exist, but they aren’t always meaningful. But when the same data point presents itself again and again, a scientist must consider the possibility that the outlier isn’t just statistical noise, but an indication that something within their fundamental assumptions is incorrect.
Here’s an example of what I mean by that:
In 1917 Albert Einstein introduced the cosmological constant into his equations for General Relativity. It was basically a way to fudge the math which seemed to indicate that the universe was expanding, despite the fact that the conventional wisdom of the day was that the universe was static.
However, in 1929, Edwin Hubble’s observations of the redshift of light from distant galaxies provided concrete evidence that the universe was actually expanding. This meant that the cosmological constant was unnecessary, and the universe could be described without it. Einstein reportedly referred to the introduction of the cosmological constant as the “biggest blunder” of his career because it was an ad hoc modification to his equations, made to fit the prevailing wisdom, rather than being driven by theoretical or empirical necessity.
If even Einstein, one of the great minds of his or any time, can fall prey to the human tendency to privilege consensus reality over empirical data, then it’s no surprise that all of us fall victim to that as well from time to time. But what Kripal suggests in his work is a way out of this intellectual straightjacket by looking to the “so-called” impossible aspects of our lived experience—from UFO sightings to synchronicities to precognitive dreams—not as rogue data points to be ignored and explained away, but as windows into a deeper understanding of the nature of our reality.
So, what is “the flip?” In essence, it’s a transformative experience or realization that causes a person to fundamentally alter their understanding of reality. Instead of viewing consciousness as a product of the brain or something confined to the physical body, after the flip, a person begins to perceive consciousness as something more fundamental, even primordial, that exists beyond the physical realm.
And in his book, Kripal delves into the specific experiences and epiphanies that have caused a growing number of highly respected academics and scientists to invert their worldview in this manner, leading them to powerful new insights and discoveries about the nature of reality.
Triggering The Flip
Now, what can cause such a significant shift in understanding? The experiences that lead to the flip can be varied, but they often involve extraordinary occurrences, usually associated with mystical, paranormal, or spiritual phenomena.
For some, it might be a near-death experience that challenges everything they thought they knew about life and death. For others, it might be a profound mystical vision or a synchronistic event that seems too coincidental to be explained by chance alone. These kinds of profound experiences can shatter one’s existing framework of understanding, leading to the flip.
The Impact of the Flip
So, what happens to a person after they’ve experienced the flip? It’s not just a fleeting insight; it fundamentally changes how people perceive reality. Once they’ve flipped, people often view consciousness as primary to matter, not the other way around. This shift can lead to a more interconnected and compassionate view of the world, emphasizing the spiritual or transcendent nature of reality.
This is not merely a philosophical or abstract concept; it often leads to real changes in how a person lives their life, fostering a sense of connection with others and the universe, and a deeper understanding of the self.
Where the Traditional Materialist View Fits
But where does this leave the traditional materialist view, which holds that everything can be explained by physical processes, and that consciousness is just a product of the brain? The flip doesn’t necessarily discard materialism but transcends it.
After the flip, the material world is still there, but it’s understood as part of a larger, more complex reality that includes aspects beyond the purely physical. This new paradigm acknowledges that the materialist perspective has its place, especially in areas like science and technology, but it also recognizes that there are dimensions of existence that materialism can’t fully capture or explain.
The flip allows us to see the world through a wider lens, embracing both the material and the mystical, the scientific and the spiritual.
Full Disclosure
And in the interest of full transparency, I should tell you that I have experienced such a flip myself. It happened one morning almost exactly two years ago after having the most profound anomalous experience of my life. The change in me was instantaneous and far-reaching. It was a seismic shift that obliterated the foundations of my understanding and irreparably upended my worldview. It’s as a result of that flip that I started this podcast a few months later. It caused me to walk away from the corporate career I’d spent 15 years building and replaced all of my former ambitions with a singular desire to help other people experience the same.
But you don’t need to believe me based on my personal, subjective experience. And, as always, I strongly encourage you not to believe me at all. You should be questioning everything that I say, and digging into the data yourself to decide what you believe to be true based on your own research, insight, and discernment.
And luckily, to explore these ideas, you don’t need to rely on anyone else’s experience or personal beliefs. Because as our scientific understanding of reality continues to progress, the thesis that lies at the heart of the flip—that reality is an emergent phenomenon of consciousness and not the other way around—becomes increasingly self-evident in the empirical data.
And we’re going to spend the rest of this episode diving into what that data looks like and what it implies through the work of two well respected men of science, Robert Lanza and Donald Hoffman.
Biocentrism
We’ll start with Robert Lanza.
Lanza is a medical doctor, scientist, and philosopher, best known for his work in regenerative medicine and stem cell research. He is considered a leading figure in the field of bioengineering, particularly for his extensive contributions to human therapeutic cloning. His interdisciplinary approach extends beyond traditional boundaries, merging biology with quantum mechanics to explore consciousness and our understanding of the universe—which led him to create his revolutionary theory of biocentrism.
The theory, outlined in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, turns the whole concept of the Universe as we know it on its head, and presents a surprising—and surprisingly simple—solution to the many problems presented by our current “official story of everything”.
But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily easy to swallow—at least not at first. Biocentrism presents a version of reality that is so different from the paradigm we currently inhabit that it can take a minute to fully process both how it works and what it implies. So let’s start by first talking about what biocentrism is from a high level and then we can dive more deeply into the specifics of what it all means.
Biocentrism argues that life and biology are central to reality, and that the universe is essentially a construct of the mind. This concept breaks away from traditional physics, suggesting instead that our understanding of the universe is limited by our perceptual filters—or the way we process information in our brains. Rather than perceiving an objective universe—one that independently exists and is passively waiting for us to explore it—Lanza suggests our perceptions and experiences actively shape the universe we observe.
At the heart of biocentrism is the idea that the universe and its “laws” don’t exist unless there is a biological entity to observe them. This perspective integrates elements of quantum physics and combines them with a biological viewpoint, going as far as saying that space and time are not independent realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
In other words, reality as we know it does not exist “out there”, independent from us. Instead, we are co-creators of our reality, and as such, are interwoven with the fabric of the universe. This perspective, according to Lanza, holds the key to unifying physics and could potentially pave the way to answering some of the greatest scientific mysteries.
But if you find this idea challenging—or even flat out hard to believe—you’re not alone. It runs so counter to the dictates of consensus reality that it can take a minute to truly grok what he’s suggesting.
And yet, when you look at the evidence, and see how elegantly this theory manages to dispatch the most glaring issues with our current “official story of everything” it’s hard to deny how compelling this theory is.
So let’s explore some of the specifics of Lanza’s arguments in support of his theory of biocentrism—and how this theory might help us resolve some of the fundamental problems with the “official story of everything.”
The Goldilocks Universe
First of all, biocentrism gives us an answer to how it is that we find ourselves in this finely tuned “Goldilocks Universe” where everything seems to be perfectly calibrated to support the existence of life. In our current paradigm, we have to rely on astronomically impossible odds, infinite multiverses, or intelligent design to explain how we got here. And as we’ve seen, all of those answers only lead us to more challenging and perplexing questions.
Biocentrism turns all that on its head. Instead of looking at life as something that just happened to emerge at random in a universe that was incidentally perfectly-calibrated for it, biocentrism proposes that the universe is the way it is precisely because of life.
In other words, the reality we perceive, including the laws and constants of physics, are a result of the way our consciousness interacts with the universe. This is a significant departure from traditional views, which regard the universe as a self-existing entity that would be there regardless of whether there are conscious beings to observe it or not.
But I want to be clear that this perspective does not suggest that we individually or collectively have the power to alter the laws of physics with our minds. Rather, it proposes that the universe and our conscious perception of it are so fundamentally intertwined that they cannot be regarded as separate entities.
This can be a particularly challenging idea to get your head around, because it flies in the face of how we tend to experience and think about our reality. Most people take for granted the interiority of their own subjective experience and the exteriority of the rest of the world. We see our inner space as being separate and clearly defined from the world around us. It’s such an obvious state of affairs that most of us never even think about it. It’s just how things are.
But when you start to turn your attention inward and examine your own interior, subjective experience, the clear lines between your consciousness and the rest of reality quickly begin to dissolve.
If A Tree Falls In The Forest Does It Make A Sound?
To explain what I mean by that, let’s start with a question that you probably first heard on the playground when you were young:
“If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
For most people, the obvious answer to this question is, of course it does. Our most basic meaning-making models tell us that reality objectively exists and continues about its business whether or not anyone is there to observe it.
Now granted, as we’ve talked about elsewhere in this series, the implications of quantum mechanics tell us that, at the subatomic level, the presence of an observer actually does impact the way in which events unfold. And we’ll get to that in just a moment. But for now, let’s just talk about what happens, in the most literal and obvious sense, when a tree falls in the woods.
To determine whether or not a falling tree makes a sound even if there is no one there to hear it, we first need to talk about what sound actually is. The basis of sound is vibration. These vibrations move in waves through the air and other mediums. When a tree falls in the forest, the disturbance that it causes results in waves of vibration that travel outward through the air and through the ground.
However, these vibrations alone aren’t technically enough to make a sound. Vibration may be the basis of sound, but sound itself is a sensory experience. And this sensory experience requires an ear to perceive these vibrations and a brain to interpret those vibrations into the experience of sound.
It’s important to recognize that the vibrations caused by the tree falling and the sound of the tree falling are not the same thing. If there is a person with normally functioning ears nearby, the disturbance caused by the tree will cause their eardrum to vibrate, and nerves stimulated by this vibration will send signals to their brain that are interpreted as sound. However, this process can only occur if the vibrations are between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second. If you’re older than 40 or if you tend to listen to your music too loud, the upper limit on that could be closer to 10,000 cycles per second.
When you break it down like this, it becomes obvious that the sound that is ultimately experienced (or not experienced) depends as much on the person who is experiencing the sound as it does on the vibrations that create it. In short, a vibration without an ear to hear it doesn’t sound like anything at all.
If we struggle with the idea of a tree falling in the forest without making a sound, it’s because we tend to live our lives under the assumption that our senses are giving us a more-or-less objective window into the reality that surrounds us. And we make that assumption because that assumption works for us with stunning consistency. We see that a burner is hot and so we don’t touch it. We hear a car honking and we get out of the way. And so we end up with this idea that there is a 1:1 correlation between our sensory experiences and what actually exists in the world around us.
But that’s not the whole story. For instance, beyond our limited ability to process frequencies beyond our normal hearing range as sounds, humans are only able to see around .0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. And even within that spectrum, there is a wide variation in our ability to differentiate between different frequencies which we experience as different colors.
It’s estimated that a person with normal color vision can see up to 1 million distinct shades of color, but a person who is color blind may see as few as just 10 thousand colors—or 1% of the colors that people with normal color vision can see. But tetrachromats—people who have a genetic mutation that causes them to have four types of cone cells in their eyes instead of the usual three—are able to see up to 100 million different colors, or 100x the number that a person with normal color vision can see.
As counterintuitive and even unsettling as it may seem to us, the reality is that our senses aren’t a window into the objective world—they are barely a pinhole. And even the extremely limited amount of information that we’re able to get through that pinhole is ultimately interpreted by our physical bodies in ways that have a lot more to do with the limitations and peculiarities of our personal hardware than it does with the objective truth of what we’re trying to observe.
So while we tend to think of reality as an objective truth that we perceive through our senses, when we examine what’s actually going on, we begin to see that our experience of reality is actually a process of which we are an integral part. In the purest and most literal sense, you can not be separated out from the sound of the tree falling because without you, there is no experience of sound.
An example that can make this idea a little easier to grok is that of a rainbow.
When we look at a rainbow, we might be inclined to think that the rainbow exists “out there” in the world, independent of our viewing it. After all, isn’t a rainbow simply the result of physical processes involving sunlight and water droplets?
From a scientific standpoint, a rainbow occurs when sunlight refracts and disperses as it passes through rain droplets suspended in the atmosphere, breaking down into various colors due to the differing wavelengths of light. But here’s the intriguing part: there is no pre-existing ‘rainbow’ in the sky. It only manifests when there are water droplets, sunlight, and, crucially, an observer at a specific geometric location relative to the sun. Without these conditions, and particularly without the observer, a rainbow cannot exist.
So we recognize that the rainbow is not an independent, external entity. Instead, it is a phenomenon that arises in our consciousness due to the interplay of sunlight, water droplets, and our perception. The light that our eyes receive is processed by our brains and interpreted as different colors. Thus, the ‘reality’ of the rainbow is a construct of our consciousness.
What’s more, the colors we perceive in a rainbow don’t have an independent existence either. The light itself doesn’t inherently possess color—it is merely electromagnetic radiation with different wavelengths. It is our minds, informed by the particularities of our eyes, that translate these different wavelengths into the experience of color.
When we look at the example of a rainbow, it’s clear how our consciousness plays an active role in constructing the rainbow. In a very literal sense, when you see a rainbow, you are every bit as much a part of the rainbow as the sun or the water droplets. But biocentrism challenges us to recognize that this isn’t just how it works with rainbows—but with everything else, as well.
Biocentrism suggests that all aspects of our perceived reality, from space and time to physical objects and their properties, are not independent constructs but arise from our consciousness. This principle implies that our perception of the universe is not a simple matter of passive observation; instead, our consciousness plays a crucial role in creating the reality we experience.
Where Is The Universe?
And all of this can lead us to some pretty mind-bending questions. For instance, if we play an integral role in constructing our reality, then what is reality? Does some version of the universe objectively exist outside of ourselves, and if so, where is it? Is there really a reality “out there” that we’re interacting with or is it all just in our heads?
The answer is complicated.
The unsettling truth is that, despite the immediate feeling that we are directly experiencing the external world in our day-to-day lives, all of these perceptions are, in fact, constructed within our brains.
Let’s consider our five primary senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Each of these senses relies on various forms of energy in the environment, such as light waves, sound waves, and chemical substances. However, it’s important to recognize that these environmental stimuli do not intrinsically contain the qualities we associate with them. For example, light waves don’t possess color, and sound waves don’t possess notes. These are attributes our brain assigns to these stimuli based on their physical characteristics, like wavelength or frequency.
When light enters our eyes, it strikes the retina, causing chemical reactions that generate electrical signals. These signals are sent along the optic nerve to the visual cortex, where they are processed into the images we perceive. Similarly, sound waves entering our ears cause the eardrum to vibrate. These vibrations are transformed into electrical signals by the cochlea and transmitted to the auditory cortex to be processed into the sounds we hear.
In both cases, the sensory experiences of seeing and hearing are happening within our brain, not in the external world. The external world provides the stimuli, but it is our brain that interprets these stimuli into the images and sounds we perceive.
The same principle applies to the other senses. The sensations of touch, taste, and smell are also based on the processing of external stimuli into electrical signals, which are then interpreted by our brain. The taste of a delicious meal or the scent of a blooming flower is not inherent in the food or the flower; instead, these experiences are constructed by our brain based on the processing of relevant stimuli.
This understanding leads us to a fascinating realization about the nature of touch. When we touch something—say, the smooth surface of a glass or the rough bark of a tree – we feel as if we are directly interacting with these objects. However, the sensation of touch is created by our brain interpreting the resistance experienced by our skin’s nerve endings.
Here, the principles of physics, particularly quantum mechanics, offer an even more intriguing perspective. At a quantum level, atoms—the building blocks of all matter—are mostly empty space. When we ‘touch’ something, the electrons of the atoms in our fingers are repelling the electrons of the atoms in the object. This repulsion is interpreted by our brain as the sensation of touch, but in reality virtually nothing of your hand has actually come into contact with the surface that you’re touching, because there is no real surface to speak of. So, despite our intuitive feeling of direct contact, we never really ‘touch’ anything in the way we conventionally understand it.
All of this points to a fascinating and somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion: we do not, and indeed cannot, interact directly with the world outside ourselves. Instead, we experience a version of reality that our brain constructs, based on the information it is able to receive through our senses.
So does the universe exist in any objective way outside of our experience of it? Maybe. But how do you prove the existence of something that you have no ability to directly interact with? Simply put—you can’t.
As for our reality as we experience it, it’s clear that our internal and external worlds are inextricably entwined. There is no way to separate out what is “in here” from what is “out there”. And in a very real sense it is as accurate to say that you exist inside of the universe as it is to say that the universe exists inside of you.
The Participatory Universe & Quantum Mechanics
And our participation in creating our reality doesn’t just happen at the macroscopic sensory level, but at the quantum level, as well.
As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, including part one of this series, quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the behavior of particles at the smallest scales, has significantly challenged our traditional understanding of reality.
At the atomic level, the idea of superposition in quantum mechanics states that particles exist in all possible states at once until observed or measured. It can be a hard concept to wrap your head around, but in a very real sense this means that an atom could simultaneously be in multiple places at once. However, when we try to measure the atom’s position, we always find it in one particular place. The act of measuring or observing seemingly forces the atom to relinquish all of its possible states and settle into one state. In the context of biocentrism, it is our conscious observation that forces this transition, effectively creating a single reality from myriad possibilities.
Therefore, according to biocentrism, we are constantly and actively involved in creating our reality at the most fundamental level. Our observations, guided by our conscious awareness, are not merely recording an independent, external reality. Instead, they are shaping and defining that reality, moment to moment, at the quantum level.
But quantum mechanics doesn’t just shape our reality at the microscopic level, but at the macroscopic level as well. The atoms and molecules that make up the objects we interact with everyday follow the same quantum laws. The solidity of a table, the warmth of the sun, the image on our computer screens, are all emergent properties resulting from a myriad of quantum events collapsing into the reality we experience.
The strangeness of quantum mechanics is that it implies that we are not passive entities in an independently existing universe, but active participants in an ongoing process of reality creation, instigated by our interactions of our consciousness with the universe at the atomic level.
Space-Time Is Not Fundamental
Another startling conclusion of the biocentric view of the universe is that it implies that both space and time don’t have an objective, independent existence, but rather, they are tools used by the animal mind to make sense of sensory inputs.
Let’s begin with examining the concept of time:
According to Robert Lanza, “our sense of the forward motion of time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a world of infinite activities that only seems to result in a smooth, continuous path.”
To explain what he means by this, Lanza uses the example of a paradox known as “The Arrow” first described 2500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea, which goes like this:
We start with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once. If we then imagine an arrow flying through the air, we can logically conclude that the arrow is in only one location during any given instant of its flight. The problem this presents is that if the arrow is in only one place, it must—however briefly—be considered to be at rest because it is in only one place at every moment of its flight. Thought of in this way, we can see that motion isn’t really what’s happening here. Motion is a perception of the observer that ties these discrete individual moments together, similar to the way that we can create the illusion of motion with a film projector or a flip book.
Another argument against the existence of time comes from the persistence of the present moment. In a very real sense, the future is just a mental construct—it’s an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts and expectations that exist only within the mind. So too it is with the past which exists only in the recollections of the mind. And yet all of our thinking that makes the future and the past feel real to us, only and forever takes place in the “eternal now”. So does it have any real existence outside of our minds?
And perhaps most compelling is the fact that there is nothing within the laws of physics that necessarily requires time. All of our models from Newton’s laws to Einstein’s field equations through quantum mechanics have no need for time. They are all time-symmetrical, meaning that they work the same way backwards as they do forwards.
“But wait!” I can already hear some of you protesting, “What about the second law of thermodynamics?” You guys are smart, and I know I can’t just slide that one past you.
The second law of thermodynamics describes entropy, or the process of going from greater to lesser structure. The traditional wisdom dictates that without time, entropy can’t happen or even make sense.
Let’s take the example of a glass that contains club soda and ice cubes. It has a definite structure. You have ice and bubbles that each exist distinct from the liquid, and the ice and the liquid have different temperatures. But if you leave that glass on the table for long enough, eventually the ice will melt, the soda will go flat, and everything will become the same temperature. The previous structure will be gone and it will be one uniform substance.
And in our everyday experience entropy, this movement from more structure to less structure only moves in one direction. No matter how long you leave the glass on the table the ice and the bubbles won’t reappear in the glass. For many, this is evidence of the forward arrow of time.
However, a growing number of physicists are beginning to question this conventional wisdom. It could just as easily be argued that structure loss and disorganization aren’t the result of the concrete directionality of time, but rather the result of random action.
The only constant is change. Things move, molecules move, and these movements are largely haphazard. Lanza describes it like this:
“Say we have a room full of oxygen, and an adjacent one filled with pure nitrogen. We open the door and come back a week later. Now we find two rooms, each with a well-mixed combination of both gasses. How shall we conceptualize what happened? The ‘entropy’ view says that ‘over time’ there was a loss of the original neat and tidy organization and we now have a mere randomization. It is not reversible. It demonstrates the one-way quality of time. But the other view is that the molecules just moved. Movement is not time. The natural result is a mixing. Simple. Anything else is just human imposition of what we consider to be order. Seen this way the resultant entropy or loss of structure is only a loss in our own minds’ way of perceiving patterns and order. And boom, there goes science’s final need for time as an actual entity.”
Now let’s turn our attention to space.
Probably the best indication that we have that space exists only as a mental construct comes from general relativity. From relativity we learn that space is not a constant or an absolute. For example, extremely high-speed travel makes the space in between even very distant objects shrink to nothingness.
If we headed toward the star Sirius at 99% of the speed of light, we would find that it was barely more than one light-year away, and not the 8.6 light-years that people on Earth would measure it to be. Now light-years can be hard to conceptualize so let’s put this in more concrete terms.
If we crossed a room that was 21 feet long going at 99% of the speed of light, every instrument and human perception would show that it was only 3 feet in length. And in both the cases of going to Sirius and crossing the room, it’s important for us to recognize that the intervening space isn’t shrinking as the result of some illusion. Sirius would literally be one light-year away and the room would literally be 3 feet long. And if we were able to up our speed from 99% of the speed of light to 99.99999% of the speed of light, the room would be barely larger than a period at the end of a sentence.
So if space is relative, then we know that it can’t be fundamental or absolute.
So while the conventional wisdom tells us that everything that exists plays out on the stage that is space-time which is the fundamental substrate of reality, we have plenty of evidence that this may not actually be the case. And in many ways, it makes more sense to look at both space and time as mental constructs that are the product of our own perception.
As Robert Lanza argues, “We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells.” And in the biocentric view, “there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.”
The Case Against Reality
Alright. So now that we’ve explored Robert Lanza’s theory of biocentrism, let’s turn our attention to another emerging theory presented by Donald Hoffman.
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist and a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
Hoffman has worked extensively on the interface between visual perception and evolutionary game theory. He has a unique perspective, suggesting that our perceptions of an objective reality are just subjective adaptations to help us survive. According to his ideas, what we perceive is not necessarily a reflection of an objective truth, but rather a user interface that guides our interactions with the real world.
One of his best-known books, which we’ll be diving into today, is “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes.”
How Evolution Hides The Truth
When we think about evolution and the impact that it’s had on our perception, it’s easy to assume that the forces of natural selection have caused our sense to evolve in a way that provides us with a fairly accurate representation of the world. It makes sense that we would need to perceive things more-or-less accurately in order to be able to avoid dangers, seek out the right kinds of food, and find a mate.
But Donald Hoffman makes a very compelling argument that because our perceptions are fitness-driven, they have developed to enhance survival by providing useful, though not necessarily truthful, information.
Hoffman’s central claim is that what matters in evolution is not the truthful representation of reality but rather the fitness that such representations confer. In other words, if a perception helps an organism survive and reproduce, it will be favored by natural selection, even if it is entirely false.
He builds this argument on computer simulations and mathematical models that demonstrate how organisms with truth-driven perceptions are less likely to survive compared to those with perceptions tuned to fitness. In these models, organisms that see the world as it is are outcompeted by those that see the world in a way that is tailored to their specific needs.
A vivid example Hoffman uses to illustrate this point is the case of the male Australian jewel beetle, which has evolved to be attracted to large, glossy, and brown objects. This attraction once directed them toward female jewel beetles for mating. However, this adaptation was far from perfect, and the beetles began to mistake brown beer bottles for potential mates.
The beer bottles, with their glossy, dimpled surface, reflect light in a way that is even more appealing to the male beetles than the females of their species. In this case, the perception that once aided in mating became a liability, leading the beetles to attempt to mate with inanimate objects. The truth of the object (whether it’s a female beetle or a beer bottle) is irrelevant; what matters is the perception’s alignment with evolutionary drives.
For example, seeing a snake might trigger an immediate fear response, even if it’s a non-venomous species. This reaction is a fitness-driven perception that errs on the side of caution, as recognizing a snake’s venomousness instantly might have survival value, even if it sometimes leads to false alarms.
The Interface Theory of Perception
Hoffman likens human perception to the icons on a computer desktop. Just as the trash bin icon on a desktop doesn’t look like the complex series of binary code it represents, our perceptions are not true reflections of underlying reality. They are simplifications, shaped by evolution to provide us with practical information about the world.
When we interact with the trash bin icon, we aren’t engaging with the intricate operations happening within the computer; we’re using a simplified interface designed for functionality. Similarly, when we perceive an apple as red, we’re not accessing the actual complex properties of light waves, atomic structures, or the biochemical reactions in our eyes; we’re interacting with a “user-friendly” version of these phenomena. This idea is referred to as The Interface Theory of Perception.
The idea that perceptions are merely icons extends beyond just visual experiences. All our senses, from touch to taste, are part of this interface, providing functional insights rather than truthful revelations. For example, when we feel warmth from a fire, that sensation doesn’t reveal the complex molecular motions causing the heat; it gives us information that guides our behavior—by keeping us from getting too close.
The Interface Theory of Perception aligns with Hoffman’s evolutionary argument, suggesting that our perceptual interface evolved not to show us the truth but to guide adaptive behavior. The interfaces that proved most effective for survival became the ones used by organisms. For example, seeing a ripe fruit as colorful and appetizing provides an efficient cue for nourishment without needing to reveal the underlying nutritional content.
Objects As Mental Constructs
What this example of the red apple suggests is that objects, at least in the way that we perceive them, are a part of our mental interface. They aren’t fundamental features of reality, but rather emerge from our interaction with it.
We perceive the apple as red, but the color is not an inherent property of the apple; it’s a result of the interaction between light, the apple’s surface, and our eyes. In Hoffman’s view, even the apple itself is not an independent, objective entity but a symbol our mind uses to represent complex underlying processes that we can never entirely understand or access.
If objects are not primary features of reality, this has profound implications for our understanding of causality. Normally, we think of objects as causes that produce effects. For example, a billiard ball hitting another causes it to move.
But in Hoffman’s view, this causal relationship is another aspect of our mental interface, a way of organizing information rather than a reflection of objective reality. Objects don’t cause effects; rather, they are symbols representing more complex processes that we do not, and can not, directly perceive.
Hoffman’s perspective on objects resonates with certain philosophical ideas, particularly those of Immanuel Kant, who argued that we never know things in themselves but only as they appear to us. In this view, our perceptions, including objects, are shaped by the mind’s structure and are not direct representations of an external reality.
Space-Time Is Doomed
And this leads us, finally, to one of Donald Hoffman’s most provocative assertions which is that “space-time is doomed.” What Hoffman is pointing to here is a radical rethinking of the way we perceive reality, specifically the ideas that space and time might not be fundamental structures of the universe but rather emergent properties of deeper, more fundamental phenomena.
Just like with the example of how the red apple is an icon in our user-interface that represents a much more complex underlying process, Hoffman posits that space and time might be part of a user interface that our minds use to interact with a more complex reality. From this perspective, space and time are not fundamental aspects of the universe but convenient ways for our minds to organize information that don’t necessarily correspond to an objective, external reality.
Putting It All Together
So, I just threw a lot of different ideas at you. Let’s take a minute to put them all together and see what these ideas suggest about the nature of our reality—and the nature of the cave in which we all find ourselves.
Recognizing Our Uber-Umwelt
First of all, when we consider the ideas of Lanza and Hoffman, a startling realization emerges which is this—the world as we perceive it does not represent the world as it is.
Everything that we perceive is both shaped and constrained in our awareness by a combination of our conscious minds and our physical bodies. Our perceptions are a construct that have evolved, imperfectly, to give us the information that is most important to keep us alive—not to give us an objective window into things as they actually are.
Beyond just the profound philosophical implications of this realization, we are confronted with the somewhat alarming possibility that there are—without question—things that exist in the world around us of which are completely and totally unaware.
I want to share an excerpt from a conversation that I had with my dear friend, Dr. James Madden, in episode 18 that deals with this very concept.
[The excerpt is from 1:39:31—1:45:00. The video is cued up to the beginning of the except.]
Crazy, right? I’ll share the article that Jim is referring to in the episode brief. And, as a side note, that article will be a chapter in an upcoming book by Dr. Madden on UFOs to be released in the next couple of months. That book will be the first book published by my new publishing house, and I could not be more excited for you guys to read it. So stay tuned for that.
Consciousness—Not Space-Time—Is Fundamental
Another startling conclusion that becomes inevitable if we accept the ideas presented by Robert Lanza and Donald Hoffman, is that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality—not space-time.
Lanza contends that space-time is a conscious construct, secondary to life, whereas Hoffman sees space and time as mental frameworks our minds use, akin to the icons on a computer desktop. Both views disrupt the conventional wisdom. We tend to think of the universe as existing within the fabric of space-time. But, although they may differ on the details, both Lanza and Hoffman converge on the argument that space-time does not exist as an independent, fundamental entity. Rather, it is a dependent, emergent phenomenon that springs from consciousness itself.
Despite differences in their approaches, the commonality in their theories opens up vast and profound new possibilities with regard to the nature of our reality. By casting doubt on the fundamentality of space-time, they challenge deeply held assumptions and contribute to a growing body of thought that seeks a more complex understanding of the universe.
Let’s consider some of the implications of a universe where consciousness does not emerge from reality, but reality emerges from consciousness:
A Conscious Universe
First of all, if consciousness is the fundamental fabric of reality, it means that everything we observe, from galaxies to particles, is a manifestation of consciousness. This would mean that, in a very real sense, the universe isn’t just conscious, but it is consciousness. If true, this would obliterate the traditional view of a cold, mechanistic universe governed only by chance and the laws of Newtonian physics, and would replace it with something infinitely more complex and nuanced.
Mind-Matter Connection
If consciousness is fundamental, it would also require us to recognize that there exists a profound connection between mind and matter. Thoughts, emotions, and intentions might not be confined to our brains, but could have a more direct influence on the physical world. If the mind can directly affect matter, it opens up possibilities for things like healing, telepathy, or even psychokinesis. These phenomena, often relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, might no longer be seen as absurd and impossible, but as the natural and intuitive result of the very structure of reality itself.
Unity and Connectedness
It would further imply that everything is interconnected at the most fundamental level. The idea that is at the center of most of the world’s religions and spiritual practices—that we are all one—could no longer be dismissed as mere sentimentality or wishful thinking, but would be discovered to be an expression of the fundamental nature of our reality. The act of loving one another and caring for our environment would no longer be just a moral imperative emerging from subjective and ultimately relativistic ideals, but would be the logical response to the recognition of what could one day be a scientifically provable reality.
Unifying Physics
And finally, recognizing the primacy of consciousness would also radically transform our understanding of physics. Perhaps most notably, it might offer us a pathway to reconciling the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics—something that has eluded scientists for a century.
Conclusion
So where do we go from here?
The truth is that I don’t know. Like I said earlier, I have not escaped the cave. I don’t know what lies outside of it because I’ve never been there. What I’ve shared with you here is just what I’ve learned so far on my climb that has helped me begin to make sense of some of the contradictions and inconsistencies of the shadow reality that I spent most of life thinking was real.
I can say with confidence that I think these new ideas are better than the ideas that I had before. But do I think I’ve arrived at the final answer? Not by a long-shot. And don’t expect that I ever will.
The more I learn about the Cave, the more I begin to suspect that it isn’t a place that we are trapped and could therefore escape, but rather, it’s a thing that we are. It’s a function of what it means to be a conscious being that is having a human experience. And, to borrow a phrase from Robert Lanza, we carry our caves around with us like a turtle with its shell.
Which doesn’t mean that attempting to leave the cave is an exercise in futility. In fact, I’d argue that the climb toward the light of a transcendent reality is the most important work that we can engage in as human beings. Because while we may not be able to escape the Cave entirely, we can change it. We can shift the walls and raise the ceilings. We can open it up to allow more of the light to enter. And sometimes, when enough of us engage in that work together, we can transform our shared cave into something entirely new. Something better. Something more real.
And what could be more important—or more beautiful—than that?
Until next time.
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