Thursday, October 8, 2009

Biocentrism and anthropocentric fallacies

Simply because our experience and mechanics may be central to how we experience the universe, does it follow that the universe itself takes any particular notice of us, this particular form of sentience?

Does it exclude or preclude other kinds of sentience, for instance, some sort of hive mind built up of much more diffuse operations in the universe at large. If they were going on around us, would we even recognize that they were happening?

I shouldn't post this, in particular because I have yet to give this article its due, or even begin to comprehend it in the ordinary human sense of that phrase. But the wording here is disquieting to me, to say the least. And so I am putting this out there, hoping for comments, hoping to understand, and also hoping to get across what I think probably needs to be a rather vague sense of description of some of those other forms of "consciousness" and other, possibly "transcendent" processes in the universe, both within and among organisms, structures and "clouds" of "stuff."

This came to me from a conversation Wednesday at the Psychoanalytical Round Table, in Second Life.

in reference to:

"Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.
We need a revolution in our understanding of science and of the world. Living in an age dominated by science, we have come more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness."
- A New Theory of the Universe: an article by Robert Lanza about biocentrism building on quantum physics by putting life into the equation | The American Scholar (view on Google Sidewiki)

1 comment:

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