Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
By Robert Lanza and Bob Berman
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.
In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universeour ownfrom the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of lifetime and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.
The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.
Robert Lanza
Robert Lanza is an American scientist and author whose research spans the range of natural science, from biology to theoretical physics. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World, and Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 “World Thinkers. He has hundreds of scientific publications and over 30 books, including definitive references in the fields of stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. He’s a former Fulbright Scholar and studied with polio-pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman (known for his work on the biological basis of consciousness) and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and co-authored papers in Science on self-awareness and symbolic communication) with noted Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. Dr. Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo, the first endangered species, and published the first-ever reports of pluripotent stem cell use in humans.
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Reviews for Biocentrism
11 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Picked this book up because I love reading about science, especially when it involves new theories. Overall I would say its interesting but in some parts it feels more like an autobiography, especially when the author tries to explain something. But for the most part the book was good, after finishing this book it had me thinking a bit more out of the box.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enlightening but I can't say I was able to completely wrap my arms around it. Well-written and well-edited, with a good review of the history and current status of our understanding of the nature of the universe. That part I understood, as well as the problems with the current theories. Understanding how the entire universe in "all in the mind", along with the concepts of space and time, was much harder to grasp. Gave me a lot to chew on.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5one of the most mind expanding books ive encountered. take this new form of study seriously. the simple logic is the universe is witnessed by biology and therefore we must treat other sciences through a biological filter.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5As a book that makes you think, this one was ok, but It felt awfully patronizing that there were no references provided for all the crucial scientific studies that Lanza relies on in his text to support his arguments. His arguments tended to skip logical steps that made the proofs he tries to construct weak or virtually meaningless, and his basic assumptions seem hardly solid enough to make the sort of leaps he makes in constructing his theoretical system. In addition, it seems Lanza's biocentrism is untestable, and he uses terms like space, time, solid, and consciousness without providing adequate operational definitions. I felt like I was reading an attempt at reconciling modern science with that of the nearly retired generation, not so much because the result makes sense, as just because the author cannot quite wrap his head around modern science concepts without automatically referring to the outdated concepts and definitions he learned as a young man. While I have met many excellent working physicists and philosophers who are doing this same sort of thing, this book was frustrating to read.
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