RYviewpoint

Here is an idiotic piece of philosophizing by a biologist, Robert Lanza, about the nature of the universe. He presents his theory of "biocentrism", which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. Here is the key bit:

Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

I fall out of my chair laughing when I read this stuff. This is an excellent example of a specialist going outside his expertise to philosophize. But once he does that he is no more than another citizen like the rest of us bantering about his opinions. He has no facts, no theory, and no expertise in this new domain beyond what you or I or the guy down the street has. He may be smarter than us, but "smarts" isn't the same as "street smarts" and opinions outside your domain of expertise have no special claim.

So... just how credible are his claims? Here are a few points:

• He cites quantum physics as his basis that life is somehow essential to the existence of the universe. That is leveraging one interpretation of quantum physics well beyond what most quantum physicsts would do.


• Arguments like "can you have a web without a spider" sound to me suspiciously like the Intelligent Design arguments which flout the extensive science of evolution in favour of an argument "from design" which has no evidence other than wishful thinking. You can have biological diversity without a designer because natural selection is the mechanism which creates the illusion of design. Can you have a universe without biological beings? Well, the stone cold reaches of space convince me that you can. As far as we can tell only this tiny, tiny corner of the universe has sentient life. That to me is convincing evidence is that biology plays no role in creating or sustaining the universe.


• The appeal to the idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley is laughable. Again, Lanza is an amateur playing as if he were a philosopher. There are precious few modern philophers who would claim to be idealists. Superficially the argument sounds persuasive: all we have are sense perceptions so the world must be created by "mind". This is nutty. First, modern understandings of cognitive neurology is a better starting point than simplistic "sense impressions". We don't have the "impressions" that Bishop Berkeley theorized over. There is no homunculus sitting in our brain collating "sense impressions" to build up an external world. Instead evolution arms us with a naive physics. Further, as the philsopher Wittgenstein points out, much of our cognitive furniture is not "private thoughts" but in fact behaviours and verbalizations based on our social interactions. We are not passive receivers of sense impressions. So the idea that our mind is key to creating the universe "out there" is quite silly.