i think ----- therefore i am ?

"What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" is a book by H.R. Maturana that discuss how our sensory apparatus effect our knowledge of the world. As others in these comments have said "Nothing new here". By the way, the issue of quantum "weirdness" is still open since the loophole of detector efficiency has not yet been closed. Hence to generalize concepts in quantum mechanics that use the "observer" to biology is very questionable.

I think all the comments are written by Christian? Ask a buddist (the real one please), it'll all make sense. To venture further, read "What the Buddha Taught). Everything in impernanent. Just my 2 cents. Thanks.

   Yeah, the theory of everything should include biology physics and chemistry and everything else that may have effect on life and what we know as non-life.

My opinion is that Mr. lanza is contributing to the truth by adapting this theory of everything thing.

I mean the truth as whole is what we perceive and what we don’t. Even if Mr. Lanza thinks that the theory of everything is the truth of everything, he still at least discovering a drop of that truth, if not an ocean of it.

The only part of the truth that we know is what we experienced so far (all the humans and animals together).Remember the saying: all roads take to Rome that is true all roads take to the ultimate truth. Whether you do what you do or don’t, what you do think or don't think are part of the truth. The truth is that we do exist and that we contribute to making the road to that truth everyday. Here is the truth; the truth is what we know ,what don't know, what we think we know and what we think we don't know. The truth is an idea and a process. The truth is not completely determined by us , yeah we contribute to making truth of the universe but my be to a very small extent.

Here is the thing; Mr. Lanza is contributing to making our part of the truth which matters most to us. I mean we can not talk about us taking over the truth of everything, that won't happen until we first conquer our own truth; our everything truth not the whole universe’ everything truth.

We can summarize our truth in our imagination or idea. Our truth is our ideas and thoughts, therefore we will not workup our truth until we experience everything we can think of. For example if you die your thought are a part our truth unless another person that lives after you experience those thoughts in reality. I know there will be repetitions in thoughts but regardless of that everyone's thoughts has to be materialized or realized that's a requirement for our everything truth to be fully met.
Now we've met our truth and we experienced everything went in our minds, we will obviously start comprehending the universe's truth. But since we a part of the universes truth we are in game already, so our truth contributes to the universe's truth they go along together.

We do not need "time". It is the comfort food of physics. Consider our desire for "real time" information. Is the alternative "fake time"?

As beings who call themselves human we would still "be" without time. I do think we need space to be. In fact I am sure of it.

I am still wrestling with the necessity of Zero. Is there always something there? Today I think there is always something there, so the null set and/or zero really are something.

Think how much more clearly we could conceive of the fabric of space and the interconnectedness of it if we did not demand to know when. No beginning, no end. Same as it ever was. Life is, no comprehension or perception needed.

Please let me live And enjoy the mystery and awe of life. I am still trying to figuer out infinity.

If Abbott was implying that we are the two-dimensionally imprisoned flatlanders, how are we to progress in our comprehension of the great mystery of existence? Refer to the written legacy of Rudolf Steiner and Max Heindel for the conceptual road map. What is to be found beyond the empirically observable universe and why "nearly" all of us are not currently experiencing this reality in our conscious day-to-day existence? How far into the future you wish to travel is a function of how much isolation you can endure and how much you wish to serve others in an anonymous manner. Each on of us makes that choice consciously or otherwise.

The higher cannot be created by anything of a lesser nature. It seems that science, religion, and philosophy are beginning to merge to bring mankind to the true reality. Quantum Physics has taken us to the beginning of all creation. Vibrating strings of energy create our reality as a manifestation of matter. Consider the possibility of these vibrations as being the Mind activity of a Supreme Power, Mind is creative and precedes every manifestation within the physical world that we occupy. Ervin Lazlo wrote the book “Science and the Akashic Field, an integral theory of everything,” which has taken us a step closer to a Universal Mind. It seems that science is dancing all around the acceptance of a Deity. Consider the possibility of a Spiritual interaction with the human brain which produces the consciousness that appears as our means of perception. Far out ? Maybe not.

An open mind allows for learning. Stop pushing your agendas!

Why does it always come back to how significant man is in the universe. I think the universe would be just fine without us and without us that theory is nothing. We are insignificant but we don't like to think that way.

The challenge present physics has that Robert Lanza points out is that we're here but remain - in terms of our awareness and, further, consciousness - almost scrupulously written out of physics. Present understandings of quantum mechanics notwithstanding. Any complete theory of everything is not going to be a theory of EVERY thing, thought, thema, and thrust (action) if its foundations do not give rise to an explanation of our organization, our cybernetics, and our sensation, perception, awareness, consciousness, self-consciousness, and  super-consciousness. Is it? It'll be close if it covers everthing BUT us, but that's not quite the same claim to fame.

Decades ago Arthur C. Clarke made a prediction that the Nobel Prize in the year 2000 would be awarded for "The Study of Consciousness." His timing is off but I think his targeting is dead on. If Physics finds the will and courage to make, as it one day must (or cease to be physics), another leap into the abyss beyond, it will 'grow up'. And out. Again. And if that leap is great enough perhaps we'll have to rename it. But as Kuhn observed there's the friction of paradigm inertia and resistance to change. Quantum mechanics took the slow passing of a past generation before it made it out of the womb of daring minds, and, roughly,  another 40 years (1927~67) before it got up a head of steam on ever younger shoulders.

Speaking of QM, it's interesting to read about the important-sounding condemnations of Lanza's grasp of QM from those who seem, from their own comments (and in my limited opinion), rather clueless themselves!  John von Neumann summed quantum logic (the descriptive framework for QM) this way: "A state of being is an experience. A description of a state of being is a symbol. Symbols and experiences do not follow the same rules." In 1936, Von Neumann, along with Garrett Birkhoff, published a paper that, in laying the grounds for quantum logic - along with a later reformulation of quantum mechanics done with Wigner - disproved the universality of both classical Aristotelian logic and its modern symbolic form, which until then had been accepted without question as a natural reflection of the nature of reality. The rules that symbols follow they called classical logic. The rules experience follows they called quantum logic. It seems to me that when JVN spoke of "experience" he was talking about 'us' (as 'observers'). Or, as Richard Feynmann wrote in 1981, " NATURE ISN'T CLASSICAL, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better MAKE IT QUANTUM MECHANICAL, and by golly it's a wonderful problem because it doesn't look easy." Last time I checked humans are still considered part of nature and any theory that (finally) claims to explain nature had better not write us out of its descriptions!

Deeper still in QM and often underappreciated it seems, from some of the comments made here, in its implications for an intrinsic relatedness in "Physics as Consciousness" is Bell's Theorem.  In 1964, John S. Bell, a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, proved a theorem that zeroed in on a a strange connectedness among quantum phenomena that is becoming one of the central preoccupations of early 21st century physics. Bell’s theorem proves that if the statistical predictions of quantum theory are correct, the “principle of local causes” fails. That is, in plainer terms,  no theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent. If so, then at a deep and fundamental level the “separate parts” of the universe are connected in an intimate and immediate way, and some of our commonsense ideas about the world are profoundly mistaken, and in a way that those commonsense ideas are inadequate even to describe macroscopic events, events of the everyday world! Forty-five years of reformulations and stringent real world tests verify Bell’s theorem that projects the “irrational” aspects of subatomic phenomena squarely into the macroscopic domains of trains and television. And of you and I.

The early part of the 20th century rewove the fabric of our understanding of the universe to include a fundamental uncertainty on which - with electronics, atomics and computers - we have built the modern world. More recently, information physics, chaos, complexity and other theories rationally demonstrate and have begun to experimentally confirm that this uncertainty scales, and is in fact implicate in all structures and processes, and in the very fabric and process of 'reality' itself. There is now a growing realization albeit a slow visceral acceptance, that not only is reality not classical, but it is increasingly evident that macroscopic phenomena on every scale, and in every place reflect, embody and enact detectable information states, quantum traits and stochastic behaviors heretofore unsuspected. A strange, vibrating unity seems to underlie existence. And the world is not as it seems, nor as it popularly, or otherwise appears.

To paraphrase John Charles Webb Jr (formerly of Flatland) writing up above and before me: The questions physicists long to answer about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics as it stands, even with the rustlings of the relationist interpretations of QM or the exciting explorations of Matti Pitskanen (Quantum Geometrodynamics) can presently furnish no final answers for them. Somewhere, already I suspect, some new giant as we'll come to see her (ah! or him) (or a group of them) is playing in plain sight with the equations out from which information, mass, and energy are intrinsically related as different forms of something deeper and in a manner that speaks a natural dialect of self-organization and awareness. Will it, or whatever constitutes the next revolution ever really be a "Theory of Everything"? I doubt it. As Terence McKenna is quoted as saying “As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes." And a large darkness I think it will remain for sometime to come. Ever more exploration, experiencing, becoming!

If everything is nothing more than a construct of our mind then nothing that we perceive is real. If we are not real, how can we know it?

Pretty interesting theory

I agree with Flora B. Wading River, NY.

As humans we are always trying to assign relationships to causalities. It is in our nature to look for order. However, if the universe was just a random occurrence and we are random products then why do we look for these rules, and arrangements of relationships into what we classify as order. Unless there is order and was order before the beginning of all that we know. In which case we must ask do we see and look for order because there was order. So, was man created by a random universe or was the universe created for a man that believes there is more than random that are rules that govern the universe by someone outside the universe whose arrangement of this universe(s) points to Him as the author of the order.

If self consciousness remains after the organism dies as memory then is true that we make our own reality.

Personally I think he is trying to get more funding for his biology works here. Humans have been perceiving the same reality for quite some time. The earth does not look square to some people and everyone has their slight differences in how they interrept such things but the fact is reality comes from the environment we live in. Luckily enough we adapt to such environments and survive. Over the past 100 years physicists have not made a big leap? Albert Einstein died in 1955. If I recall he was definitely the biggest contributor to physicists of his time and of ours still today. His work may of not discovered what the "foundation" of the world is but he advanced the understandings of what really goes on in the every day world.

Lanza's thesis is a restatement of the idea that solipsism is the only ultimately defensible philosophy.

There is a basic fallacy in his assumption of a causal relationship between our ability to observe the world and the rare set of conditions that permitted the development of life and consciousness. That these should co-occur is unremarkable; it would be much more surprising if one were to occur without the other. There is no lucky fortuitiveness.

An analogy to predicting future price movement of a stock might help illustrate. Suppose you send a stock newsletter to 1,024 people; in half the newsletters you predict that a specific stock will increase in price and in half you predict that it will decrease in price. You will thus be correct for 500 of the recipients. You repeat this process a total of 7 times. For 8 of the recipients, your predictions will have been 100% correct. For 512, you will have been right more often than wrong. Most will rationalize the errors and become true believers. So given large enough of a population, you can appear to be a genius to half the population by relying on a short chain of random, meaningless events. The development of life and consciousness is perhaps no different. While we may not currently understand the processes that resulted in our existence, that speaks more to the primitive state of our knowledge and mental development than the necessity for an unspecified set of magical or spiritual forces. It doesn't that the scenario Lanza describes cannot exist, just that his thesis is little more than idle speculation in an absence of facts.

I thought Mr. Sagan called this the "Anthropic Principle" Since we perceive both possibilities then somehow we're the link.  

I'm Spartacus!

No!..I'm Spartac..

...

I'm going to read this over again.

Reality is the intersection between our perceptions and the unlimited possibilities of the multiverse.

Alan - I read and re-read Lanza's theory and I'm still not sure if this is more philosophical grist for our mental mills or hard scientific observations.  Any observer must put himself outside his observations or risk becoming part of the observed.

A lot of his examples are not applicable in this instance, I fear.  Descartes, to prove his separate existence, said "I think, therefore I am" but he did not include the universe; the rock at his feet remains a rock, unthinking but still existing.

"Moving" pictures are a series of photographs projected in sync with the retention qualities of human eyes; birds, insects, other animals can see the individual pictures, but we "see" motion.  Lanza's Arrow cannot be stopped in the momentum applied to it by the bow which launched it by observation, but only by recording it mechanically. Our observations of the nebulae far off in space (and time) appear stationary but we know absolutely that they are maelstroms of activity, roiling and turning, becoming new suns and planetary systems.

I, too, can 'prove' that you and I can never 'meet' whether we are across the room or across the continent from each other. Before we can shake hands we must somehow divide the distance between us in half; then we must repeat the procedure, cutting the distance remaining in half again.  And no matter what the remaining distance becomes, it will always be something, preventing us from ever touching each other's hand.

Macro and micro worlds aside, two Hydrogen atoms will join one Oxygen atom whenever the opportunity arises  and form water. The individual atoms do not observe each other and make choices, and neither do we.  If stem cells propagate their own neurons, it's because that is what they are supposed to do.  Man then intervenes and makes those cells into blood or skin or bones; if left alone in the body which made them they will naturally become the blood and skin and bones of their host.

Finally, it was the Montreal poet Leonard Cohen who wrote about the cracks in the world being there to let in the light.  Another philosopher, not a scientist, and just as necessary as Robert Lanza for a more complete understanding of conscious life and why we  have always sought knowledge of everything surrounding us since we left the Garden of Eden.

Strange, I've had these conversations before, as I am having them now, and will in future. There seems to be only very slight change in my perception of these events as they have occurred in this space-time continuum as expressed by the E=MC2 triangulation of events theorized in Einstein's equation, however, I feel as we ARE a part of all existence, we impart our reality ON existence, as we OBSERVE existence, and thus EXIST. We are that we are, thus we are, we ARE one, and thus all things thought to exist are brought into existence by our thinking, I AM that I AM.

How did this make the news - complete bunk. The journal that published this should be imbarressed

Ever since I heard of the experiment at the University of Illinois where they built a quantum calculator that can work even when it's "off" I realized that impossible/quantum events can happen at the macro level. This, plus some very difficult-to-ignore evidence of human psycho-kinetic abilities, and the simple observation that some people are luckier than others has led me to a simple theory: Living creatures draw on some power (possibly the energy from the sun) to increase their own chances of survival. I like to call this the "lucky" gene, and I do believe it exists. It won't be long before physicists begin pursuing this avenue of inquiry. There is a generally agreed-upon principle that the possibility of life anywhere is so remote that it approaches impossibility. But if stars and other high energy systems bathe chemicals in some sort of quantum "luck", then good things happen to those that want it most. The observer, then, makes his own luck by his very existence. Life wants to live, and those critters that draw upon that invisible but undeniable power the most get to survive. Call it a genetic-quantum interaction. Stem cells certainly are remarkable, and I'm sure they somehow are involved. Mostly, such cells are wonders of creation and amazingly unlikely...yet they exist. Don't give me this "it's just statistics" clamor. Something in the universe likes to cheat the odds, and we well know that that something exists at the quantum level. We have no reason to believe it does not spill over into our own mere 4 dimensional existence.

Hmmm... The universe is here for my benefit. Zafod Beeblebrox would agree. Certainly dubya would agree. A lovely metanoia - opposite of the ultimate paranoia. I picture a behemoth "ZOT!" frying Mr. Lanza to a cinder, reminiscent of Johnny Hart's comic 'B.C.'

11 dimensions aside, most of our species walks blindly backward into the future. Mr. Lanza's theory must therefore only be a reflection of a shadow of what actually is. I cannot help suspecting there is some serious conflation in his argument.

While an interesting article, it still doesn't answer the question of why there is something as opposed to nothing. Lanza seems to claim that the reason why physicists haven't solved everything is due to their insistence on objective reality as opposed to subjective. However, we have defined our physical laws based on objectivity, and in order to satisfy those laws we should be able to come up with an objective answer. Just because an observer may in fact determine his own reality, even on a physical level and not just mental, does not mean that objectivity is invalid, all it means is that an observer defines his reality, these are not contradictory. A common notion is that the absence of everything is nothing, as this is how we have defined it. What if, however, our definition was invalid. What if the absence of everything wasn't nothing. What if the reason why there is something instead of nothing is because nothing is invalid, that the null set doesn't exist. Physics has yet to answer the question, as has all science, even this very clever essay only says that things exist because we exist to make them exist, but why do we exist? why does existence exist? The only answer to this is that something exists because nothing isn't an option, otherwise there would be no reason for something, because if at any point there was nothing, then there would have been no randomness to produce something, since randomness can't exist if nothing exists. so something must exist eternally, outside of our observational limits, or outside of any limits, comprehensible or incomprehensible. You can believe this "something" to be whatever you want. I believe that it is God, and that His Word, the Bible, explains the answers to all these questions and more if you allow His Spirit to show you truth. If I have convinced anyone, all you need to do to secure your eternity with Him is repent, meaning change your thinking and behavior to agree with His Word, and believe, rely on, and trust in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. I am a physicist, biologist, chemist, and mathematician, having a bachelors of science and working towards a PhD, and I have studied heavily most aspects of science, and while they all astonish me to great degree, none can compare to the amazing revelation that God has shown me through His Word, a working, practical understanding of how everything works. I don't claim to know it all, in fact what I do know is that I know little compared to what He still has to show me, but everything He has shown me is far greater than science, as cool as it is. And He is so exciting, to know Him IS eternal life, so says His Word, look it up for yourself, its in John, in red letters.

Isn't this something we all knew a little about already?

how about "time seems to fly us by in happier times and moves ever so slowly in lesser fortunate time" that is our own perception of time,isn't it?. And retrocausality? isnt that what we common folk refer to as wisdom? "in the end ,it happenned for a good reason" . that's how we retrospectively try to view many of the bad situations in life,trying to learn something from them. While I liked the essay, it does seem like giving age-old philosophy a new "reality"(read "perception"):-) and wouldn't you love to say to your boss "I forgot you existed since you went out of sight"..hmmm that reminds me of another old saying.."out of sight,out of mind"..Does that apply here too?

Theories, non-theories. There are as many of these as there are egoes in this sea of illusion and that is my theory LOL - love to you all xxx

The author is not saying that we manufacture what ever is feeding our senses. Rather, we understand reality to be our brain's processed output of these sensory inputs. We create collections of rules based on our measurements of the changes in our sensory input information that many times do allow us to create other informational inputs that we desire. But we still have no way of knowing what is actually feeding this information to us. Our reality is based on change in changes, where _everything_ is change relative to another change.

The term "sensory input" refering to a difference between the current sensed change and the last sensed change. All sensory input is measurement, and measurement is change caused by difference between two other changes.

The term "information" refering to a measured change in sensory input using memory as the reference changes to compare against.

Term "sensed" refering to what ever "we" are. And the term "create" refering to "we" being able to change the probability that incoming sensory changes will change in some desired way.

In fact, there is no one single reality because reality is simply the interpretation of some unknown external process that is sending changing changes (information) into our sensory system. The interpretation function built into our biological systems in this reality should by no means be the only one. And the true nature of the unknown thing(s) sending changes into our reality can probably never be known or understood. And notice that we interpret reality as changing changes (second order differential) which may have something to do with why we see 3-dimension "space" and also live in "time".

It is obvious from the many rather extreme opinions about this article that it strikes a nerve. Theories of Everything usually do. In fact, any time an attempt at reconciling what appear to be contraries or polar extremes of life, as in physics vs. biology and mind vs. body--passionate debate follows. What frustrates many is the suspicion that in the end, it's just talk, more metaphors, more opinions. The promise of actually grounding proposed theories in demonstrable, repeatable, scientific experiments is rarely fulfilled. In this regard, the eminent scientist J. A. Scott Kelso and I have recently written a book called "The Complementary Nature" (published by MIT Press, 2006). In it, we give many historical examples of contraries and their attempted reconciliations, that lead to what we call the "philosophy of complementary pairs." But then, most relevant to the current discussion, we GROUND our philosophical stance in an on-going theoretical~experimental science of coordination called "Coordination dynamics". Coordination Dynamics is an active, interdisciplinary field of science pursued in many labs around the world. I think that most of the people responding to this current article, and certainly Robert Lanza, might find this book quite useful in the context of the current discussion, and others like it. It is our hope that "The Complementary Nature" is even now inspiring change in real observers, real human beings--as it discusses polarizations and reconciliations of human thought, and the coordination dynamics of human brain~behavior, about what might actually be going on in the head of a real observer, really observing!

He's on track as far as what I call individual Viewport theory. Actually this type of theory was batted around allot in the 1990s with books like The Emperor's New Mind and Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics; but now we realize that the combination of general and special relativity would need to create a stable universe because of the conservation of mass law.

Pallavi, Reality and perception are two different things. By the time we perceive an action, it has already occured. To illustrate, we won't see a solar flare from earth until eight minutes after it's happened. Wisdom comes from remembering what's happened before and attempting to anticipate what may happen based on previous experience. That is precisely what I mean by walking blindy backwards into the future. Most of us don't actually look in the direction of the future - we use previous experiences to compensate for that blindness.

It's also the reason why science will continue only be another religion or philosophy until we are capable of actually facing the future - and other axes of reality. It has its precepts, priests, prophets and pariahs, just like any other religion or philosophy. Theories are just that. Theory. Lanza proposes that theory creates reality. There are older conflicting theories that still hold water: some gnostics might suggest that we are simply born knowing and that as we grow up, our intuitive grok is compromised by - you guessed it - theory. While we can amuse ourselves with such mental masturbation, let's not confuse it with reality.

Baffling and challenging. As a Christian, we face many baffling mysteries - as baffling as the two-holes theory and more. One of them is trinity or triune divinity. As we are told we are in this divinities image, we expect to be triune in our nature - perhaps like our divinity ("I am who am - I am being who is being): being conscious (Father), observing (Word),interpreting which gives the reality (the Holy Spirit). I am grappling not to justify my belief but to see if there is anything to it). I am thanking you ....

Triunity of us: being/am-ing/ia-ing needs a triunity of acting: the act of being, the consciousness or recognition of our being and the interpreting of our observing to conclude that we are being.

There's one thing that can be said about Mr. Lanza's article, it was thought provoking (as shown by all the comments).  Of course we all make our own reality.  What we perceive with our senses is the world we each individually live in.  Some people see the world around them and say "I'm here by accident and therefore I have no purpose in life."  And in their own reality, that may be true.  Others look from behind their eyes and see wonder and grandeur in the world around them and think, "I'm not an accident, I'm here for a purpose."

As has been discussed in past discussions here on your website, science and philosophy don't mix.  Adding religious beliefs in only confuses the matter.  Articles like this one are good in that they stimulate critical thinking and make us all focus on what is real and important in our lives.  Understanding the how we got here is interesting,  but for me, understanding the why is what brings happiness and enjoyment to my life (reality).  Im on a journey that will end all too soon, but while I'm here on this earth, I'm going to Enjoy The Ride....

Enjoy The Ride by Jana Stanfield

Life is a fast train through peaks and valleys, streets and alleys, and countryside.

You never know just how far you’re going, the trick is to learn to enjoy the ride.

We have our baggage packed in childhood, it holds us back ‘til we let it go.

But on this journey of a lifetime, you can go fast or you can go slow.

So why do I scare myself like a backseat driver, thinking of train wrecks most of the time.

But as I analyze, theorize, philosophize, the trick is to learn to enjoy the ride.

Ahh...  "donde comenzar?"

Forgive me, being the ardent amante of mathematics and physics that I am, but some of our biology friends are forgetting the history of science: the driving achievement of modern science is that we look always for more ELEMENTARY structure.  I.e. we don't settle for Aristotle's four elements, when we can resolve water into more elementary subunits, the molecule, the atom, the nucleus, proton, quark, etc.

While Lanza may have some interesting stuff to say, the question is always this: will it help quantitative science?  Or waste time?

He's not making friends very quickly with some of us with statements like: "Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to an invisible, intangible entity" (referring to Gen. Relativity).  A fear of mathematics is a big red flag for "fear of science/reality" - just as it is with Darwinists and other psuedo scientists who want to talk in nice, fuzzy terms.

-exno.blogspot.com

AWESOME - some one on the right track. Yes we are all one even if you don't want to see or believe it. It is truth and there is nothing anyone can do about it even in death you will still be one with all life. We are all one Light just millions of different rays on our own pathes.  What comes down must go up, yes thats right you heard it gravity may say what goes up must come down but it is really the other way around we all came down from the light so therefore we must all go back up into the light.  I hate to say it but it is some of our highest religious figures that have know this but have keep it from us, for if everyone new and believed in this They would lose their hold on our thoughts and then who would follow them.  

Flora: grow up, you don't need Daddy (or Mommy if you want to posit that God has a female gender) anymore, leave the nest, get over it. If you believe God created everything, then ask yourself who created God. That starts you down that slippery slope akin to the position where you have the world on the back of a horse, standing on a giant turtle, floating in an ocean ad infinitum. If you say no one created God and that(S)He is self existant, then neither do you have to say that anyone created the universe. The Law of Economy, Occam's razor, and lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness or parsimony) suggest the simplest explanation is usually the best.

You don't need Daddy (or Mommy if you want to posit that God has a female gender) anymore, leave the nest, get over it. If you believe God created everything, then ask yourself who created God. That starts you down that slippery slope akin to the position where you have the world on the back of a horse, standing on a giant turtle, floating in an ocean ad infinitum. If you say no one created God and that(S)He is self existant, then neither do you have to say that anyone created the universe. The Law of Economy, Occam's razor, and lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness or parsimony) suggest the simplest explanation is usually the best.

He's right, but then this is what the mystics have bene telling us all along. I must say I enjoyed reading his essay, in fact it made me laugh out loud with pleasure every time he connected the dots.

From my own experience I've noticed more than once that the power of visualisation, when applied consistantly, has an amazing ability to shape reality.  

Warning: Use with Caution, Kids.

'I y'am what I y'am and thats all that I y'am"

-Popeye

Ah, consciousness. Supposedly so necessary, but so impossible to define. This is because it's a subjective phenomenon, and therefore has no place in science. As a neuroscientist who has interacted with all manner of people who have for the last decade attempted and failed to define it, much less study it, I can tell you I have had my fill of all the "Yeah, but!" baseless hypothesizing.

There is an enormous universe out there, and the vast majority of it goes its merry way carrying out physical processes without any observation being involved. It certainly got an awful long way in its evolution before anything developed a light sensitive organelle with which to detect what was supposedly created by itself for its own benefit.

I studied under Karl Pribram, who developed a theory with the help of physicist David Bohm (and still works on it with Bohm's partner Basil Hiley) which said that the mathematics developed by Dennis Gabor to describe a hologram could be used to describe the highly complex and dynamic interaction of electrical fields created by neurons in the brain. Others took this to mean that the brain was a hologram, and still others extended it to say that the holographic brain created a holographic universe because we are, after all, the observers the universe requires and was built for and by. This is most assuredly not what was intended by Pribram and Bohm, yet far more people have read and believe the clap trap inventions than the original work. Very few CAN read the original work. It is very difficult science. All the rest is just moths who just happen to be flying through the light and pay it little attention, and understand it not at all, nor care to.

For an instructive exercise of what happens to theories such as this, I would like to recommend adding Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" to the Used Book Of The Month Club. Lanza's theorizing will be remembered less than Penrose's after a like amount of time because at least Penrose padded his book with lots of material irrelevant to the supposed subject at hand, but the very engaging collection of his other lines of intellectual exploration.

The theory of the "dead" universe arises from the idea of momentum. If we intend to say all momentum was imparted at the moment of the Big Bang, and all the rest is just billiards banging around, we are with the rock-hard dead universe. Life is just some more banging around. Consciousness is some pretty impressive banging around. Until recently, we humans reverved actual consciousness, along with real feelings, care, sadness, happiness, etc. to ourselves. Attribution of "human-like" feelings to animals was a scientific crime. This is no longer the case. In fact, where we have ever assigned ourselves a special place in the universe, the discovery we were not so special, now refered to as "growing up", has liberated us to be more than we had previously been. Perhaps, if we stop congratulating ourselves on our own importance, we will be liberated enough to see the other consciousness around us. Perhaps consciousness is more prevalent than we imagine. Isn't it even possible that a universe which could make life so abundantly here, has allowed it elsewhere. How about everywhere? And, how long has this been going on? Is it possible we have more to learn, if we give ourselves time?

I'd give it a solid 9! My insight is that the more I try to understand my existence through science, the more facinated and confused I become, and the more absurd it all seems to be...But that gives me comfort

Science is incapable, by itself, of undertanding consciousness. That's a far cry from dismissing it as a way to move positivly toward a knowledge of it. My problem with Mr. Lanza is that he appears closed-off from this approach. Many on this, to me, exhilarating thread, believe we have a higher consciousness and I'm sure are saddened to learn that others do not share that. However I do not think this will prevent them continuing to look for a greater discernment, in every venue.

Seems I have found someone who is in same line of thinking as myself...To Mr Lanza's point...ever wonder why time seem to accelerate as we get older?  It is our perception.  1 year to a 6 year old is 1/6 his life.  The comparable time frame to a 60 year old is 10 years.  I have made many other similar observations that match Mr Lanza's theory.  Have you ever heard the phrase "I reject your reality and insert my own"?  In this case I accept your reality....

But this is what they do on their own without any external signals.

This is where creationism comes to play.

"Walk around me, go ahead, walk around me, clear around..."

Interesting to note stem cells generate neurons 'on their own', a factoid that'll be sopped up like gravey with a fried biscuit by the creationist types who rail against stem cell research. Also the bit about laws conspiring to create 'the observer'--that would be us I presume? I guess I'm just too dumb to perceive how this relates to a TOE. I don't think our species will ever understand that. The evolutionary merry-go-round will have to twirl several more times before some future species will grab the brass ring and have that 'eureka!' moment.

We discussed the tree and the sound thing in philosophy class not science class as I remember. There is science here with a twist of philosophy, but it prsents as pure science, or at least that is my reality. Lanza is way beyond my comprehension. But, a few thoughts- Thomas says the rabbit tracks are there though no one saw the rabbit-and in my invisible kitchen my invisible stove cooks my invisible chicken-as someone else opined here-the energy we perceive is there perceived or not-yes- we perceive our reality but our reality is not the only reality-the true reality exists outside our perception-flowers grow and forests burn and no one saw it happen-why doesn't Lanza comment on this-but very interesting-

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