I read this and think it is philosophy, not science. It boils down to getting the meaning clear. Does falsifiability matter here? It all links to Korzybski too, this sort of radical phenomenology involves learning to speak in a new way.
A previous reviewer draws a distinction between Robert Lanza’s biocentrism and Stephen Hawking’s sense of the “RWOT (Real World Out There).” However, from a recent article on Dr. Hawking’s latest thinking, it appears that Lanza and Hawking may actually be converging on the same point. Hawking is quoted in the July/August 2009 issue of Discover magazine as follows (“Return of the Invisible Man,” pp. 50-51):
“Hawking’s most recent work explores the implications of the notion that the universe is a giant quantum phenomenon. The problem with conventional attempts to understand the cosmos, he now believes, is that researchers have failed to appreciate the full, bizarre implications of quantum physics. These efforts to create a unique theory that would explain all the properties of the universe are therefore doomed to fail. Hawking refers to such attempts as `bottom-up’ theories because they assume the universe had a unique beginning and that its subsequent history was the only possible one.
“Hawking is now pushing a different strategy, which he calls top-down cosmology. It is not the case, he says, that the past uniquely determines the present. Because the universe has many possible histories and just as many possible beginnings, the present state of the universe selects the past. `This means that the histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured,’ Hawking wrote in a recent paper, `contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history.'”
Dr. Lanza insists that future theories of the universe will be biocentric in nature. That Dr. Hawking might agree, in a complete reversal from his past writing about this, certainly raises the most intriguing of possibilities, does it not?
Hi Walter. Happy new year. I come here because of a google alert on the tag biocentrism | Lanza.
I’ve been tracking biocentrism for various reasons. The main one is: I’m interested in the varieties of thought forms’ on offer about “vertical” meaning schemas that obtain a cosmic scale.
Seeing Lanza’s schema as really being a phenomenology gets at my point of departure. Since I trudged through his book, I can verify that it would seem his idea was evoked from, in effect, his narrative, Although, he doesn’t state this himself because he understands his insight is objective.
Yet, the idea is objective in the light of his idealized subjectivism. (As far as science or philosophy, Victor Stenger, has provided two “take-downs.”)
Okay, for me, the various schemas constitute a landscape of verticalized ideas. This would be true for the new atheists too. It’s all very imaginative, blinded, and, usually, masculine. Yang!
I know you know what I mean by this last qualification! (hoon)
Thanks for the comment. Great to get. Vertical schemas… as in layers of the onion? We seem to inhabit one such layer of skin in the noosphere, as if we live in the same neighborhood.