This theory is parallel to Nexus and I'd like to share
Everything is made out of consciousness there no such things as real IMO. This is the death of reality!

http://www.youtube.com/w...KDSM&feature=related

Isn't this just a continuation of the debate between the primacy of matter vs the primacy of consciousness?

We need to explore these theories if we are ever going to find the true nature of the universe and beyond. We can’t ever know the true nature of infinity, but we need to keep chugging along. Robert Lanza does as good a job as anyone I guess, but until we can back it up with math, it is all philosophy. The only part I absolutely disagree with is when he suggests that we need to switch the perspective of the universe from physics to biology. This objection is purely subjective however, as I am not a biologist.
As to the OP’s assertions that there is no reality, this is a dangerous train of thought. If there were no reality, there would be no real consequences to our actions. There are consequences to everything and therefore some reality, even if we can’t begin to comprehend what it may be.

At least now the consciousness interpretation has a serious voice meaning Robert Lanza is one of the brightest scientists known today. The real world will unmask only when consciousness will be scientifically get matched with quantum physics. Then we might get a glimpse of the real world, learn to free our consciousness and practically I would not be so much surprised if we approach some kind of ancient knowledge. Then again maybe it’s all utopian or we will never be let to know.

Sorry but acctually I'm angry of our modern world reality and it's aftereffects which IMO degrade human consciousness.

Hi ckld,
I didn't mean to suggest that reality is the reality proposed by western civilizations. I don't believe we can ever find a true reality (not because it doesn't exist but because it is too big to perceive in its true form). The deeper we get, more and more questions emerge about the true nature of reality. Lanza mentioned how when you observe a very small particle, it stops behaving like a wave and behaves like matter. This directly shows that there are consequences to our actions in that if we had not observed the particle, its model would not have collapsed from wave-like to particle-like behavior. Even Buddhism has the concept of Karma which, as I understand it, suggests consequences.

Also, I believe that there is absolutely a way to free your consciousness. That would be through learning as much as you can about the TRUE nature of things. The more you learn, the more liberated your consciousness can become. It's just that this is a tedious process and it is much more fun to speculate on what could be.

This theroy reminds me of a David Icke video I watched recently where he talked about hypnosis
and a mystic who was apparently immune to the effects of lsd.

He said the mystic was able to alter his reality whenever he wanted so he could ignore the
effects of heroic doses of lsd if he chose to do so.The scientist who was giving him the lsd was
baffled.

He also told the story of a man who was hypnotized and told he would not be able to see
his daughter in a room full of people at a party.The daughter was placed directly in front
of him.When he woke up looking directly at her belly he could not see her.Not only that
the hypnotist put something behind her back and asked him to identify it which he correctly did and even able to read an inscription off the watch looking straight through his daughter.

I believe the point to his video was a holographic universe and how atoms were not really solid and its all in our heads.

I love these type of theories they really make you think.

I usually need a whole session on psychedelics to free my consciousness an feel the 4D space and time. I mean imagine past, future and present exist at the same map but in different locations, there are infinite maps which a few trillion perhaps have you and me taken different routes in what's called life.
Space between subatomic particles is similar to space between the stars so everything is actually made out of nothing and we now try to fill this nothing with human consciousness. WOW.

Some of the core ideas expressed here is nothing new. The impulse to see human life as central to the existence of the universe is an old and boring one. As science and reason have perpetually dismantled such ideas, the emotional response is (not surprisingly) to resort to finer and finer misinterpretations of science in order to keep on painting over the gaps in our knowledge of the universe with the same old mystical mumbo jumbo. It's getting sickening, and few scientists take these ideas very seriously, including myself. Let's take a look at a few of Robert Lanza's claims to see why.

He claims there is a staggering list of experiments that suggests life is not "an accident" of physics, but this is flat out wrong. What experiments is he talking about? Can he give some references? Chemistry, biology and physics keeps showing us to a greater and greater extent how life is "an accident" of physics, or to put it in more neutral terms; a consequence of physical laws. Exactly how life came to be on earth some three to four billion years ago, we do not know, but there is nothing to suggest it was not subject to perfectly well defined, easy set of physical laws. I suspect his claim is pulled straight out of his ass.

He claims that the laws of the universe are fine tuned for life, but this is also fallacious. First of all we don't know exactly why the physical laws are the way they are, and secondly we don't know if they have to be they way they are, or if there are many, perhaps an infinite set of variations possible in other universes (theoretical physics suggests this). That the physical laws are such that complex structures in the universe is possible, is of course undeniable. But to go from there to claim that the laws are fine tuned for us is to commit several logical fallacies at once. It is, for instance, more valid and plausible to say that we are here because the laws allows us to be, rather than to say that the laws are created so that we can be here. Life is pretty obviously fine tuned for the universe, not the other way around. Lanza got it all backwards.

Furthermore there are, shortly speaking, room for great variations in the constants of physics that have an impact on life without making life as we know it impossible. Read "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning" by phycisist Victor J. Stenger to get a thourough explanation and a long list of serious arguments for why the universe simply isn't fine tuned for us. Lanza is again pulling claims out of his ass.

He goes on to talk about for example colors and temperature to assert that these things have no reality outside your mind. There is only some partial truth to this. In the case of color, they are certainly an experiental truth, i.e a descriptive phenomena that lies outside of objective reality. No one have ever denied this. But, and here is the nail in the coffin, the physical properties of light that gives rise to the qualia of color in our mind is natural, objective characteristics of our universe. The sensory experience of color is subjective, but the properties of light giving rise to such perceptions are not. There is no foundation for the claim that the mind creates the natural phenomenon itself, but that the mind creates a representation of it.

In the same way the perception of temperature certainly varies among individual to individual, and in between different species, because it is subjective, but the property of matter that gives rise to these perceptions is objectively real; temperature is determined by the average kinetic energy of the molecules of matter - it's nothing subjective about that.

Let's for the sake of argument talk about something else that he doesn't spesifically mention, but that his logic would encompass. Take, for instance, the whole of our physical laws. What we read on the paper is certainly explanatory models, and subjective to our species in that way, but the models themselves represents something that is not dependent on subjective perceptions. Newtons second law of mechanics, F = ma or equivalently F = dp/dt, is not a subjective consideration; it is not open for guesses either between humans or species. The matter of fact is that Newtons laws follow directly from the conservation of momentum, which is a direct result of translation symmetry and rotation symmetry - i.e, the laws of physics is independent of who is observing from where (Noethers theorem). This is called point-of-view invariance by many physicists. Now of course you may say that the formulation of physical laws are made by us and are subjective in this way, but what the laws tries to describe is still completely independent and free from the human mind. Our experience of natural laws can very well vary, but not the laws themselves. If they did, reproduction of experiments and peer review - two very important tools of science - would be rendered meaningless.

When it comes to all of this quantum woo woo that he advocates I have already made extensive commentary in other threads before, and I honestly don't have time to get into it again tonight (and this post is long enough already). But for some stuff to read I can refer you to some articles;

http://web.archive.org/w...FLB-311/aflb311m387.pdf
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/quantum_quackery
http://www.colorado.edu/...uantumConsciousness.pdf
http://www.danko-nikolic...ness-Annalen-Physik.pdf

And a splendid quote by Victor J. Stenger;

"The overwhelming weight of evidence, from seven decades of experimentation, shows not a hint of a violation of reductionist, local, discrete, nonsuperluminal, non-holistic relativity and quantum mechanics - with no fundamental involvement of human consciousness other than in our own subjective perception of whatever reality is out there. Of course our thinking processes have a strong influence on what we perceive. But to say that what we perceive therefore determines, or even controls, what is out there is without rational foundation. The world would be a far different place for all of us if it was just all in our heads - if we really could make our own reality as the New Agers believe. The fact that the world rarely is what we want it to be is the best evidence that we have little to say about it. The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world."

I don't have time to go into more right now, except to say that the approach of biocentrism doesn't provide any new information about the nature of consciousness, and relies on ignoring recent advances in understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective. It just doesn't provide us with anything. And for reasons argued above, among others, it doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. I would stay clear from Lanza, Chopra & co. and perform some real science instead, because they are some goddamned cheeks

Thank you for that great post Citta! You penned down my thoughts exactly and shaped it far better than I could've said it.

Anytime, VoidTraveler. I just get so sick of all of this nonsense that completely belittles proper science and its greatest heroes that are responsible for so much way too many take for granted in their lives (technology, medicines, understanding etc).

Yet these are real questions. All to the greatest heroes of science since the formation of quantum theory have asked these questions. The math is such that it does not give any answers as to how observing a particle will collapse its waveform. This will inevitably lead to the question "why". Einstein asked this question many times and always came up with the answer that he could not know. Newton asked why an apple fell on his head and found that F=MA. Later Einstein found that gravity was the distortion of space-time, and that F=MA was not totally correct. I suppose that, in time, science will prove that relativity is not exactly perfect (but only if people keep asking "why". Granted, asking why observations collapse waveforms is mental masturbation without first learning everything you can about waveforms. But many people have not been able to go to school for many years to learn these things and are still curious. I don't see how chastising people for curiosity can be of use. I believe if you can help people to understand, even just a little, you should try.

I am not arguing against asking questions, Slappy White. I've been asking questions since I was a little kid looking up at the night sky observing the stars. This is why I chose to walk the path of a physicist. I keep asking questions to this day, and in doing so I am also led to address people like Lanza. I am perfectly well aware how the greatest heroes asked fundamental questions and sought out to answer them, and how science generally develops and works (one remark here though, the falling apple Newton stuff is a myth. Newton used 20 years of his life to find the complete formulation of his laws, it didn't happen in an instant).

We should always ask questions, and this mentality is exactly the one I am trying to advocate here by showing the lack of proper foundation for many doubtful claims that run around. Namely by asking questions can you think, and by thinking yourself you may see how some claims doesn't add up and others actually do - and not to say the least, understand that we know so little and that fantastic claims of revolutionary knowledge requires fantastic evidence to be passed on.

Besides, asking questions and answering them is two very different things. Robert Lanza is not really asking questions, he is trying to show how he has the answers to the greatest problems in modern science, and how every one else has got it wrong. Without having a proper foundation for his claims, as I have tried to show, he is just belittling science and spreading misinformation and misinterpretations. He's a cheek, and I want people to exersize some critical thinking and ask questions even though the claims sound cool and scientific.

You say that I should try to help people understand, and actually this is what I am trying to do. I am advocating proper science and critical thinking, and arguing through our best scientific understanding why certain claims are doubtful and should be taken with a grain of salt and healthy skepticism.

Reality is a thought, and we are Solid state beings.

Is it really? Why? What do you mean by "Solid state beings"?

Excuse me but I was misunderstood. First of all I am surely not a physicist but my hobby is astronomy and cosmology, I've read some books, mostly Stephen Hacking’s and seemed to find out that although modern science has made miracles come true it is impossible to prove or unify some of the latest theories and that is because there is no way we could reach so far in space or so deep in matter. Therefore there is space to play, actually to play with our imagination. I don’t think there is something wrong with that. The chance of living with other dimensions right in front of us and therefore an alien being passing by or even a copy of your self placed on Obama’s chair structure only a very small probability which cannot be proved or unproved but even a small percentage is countable in science. Or should I say odds must be science's best friend.
I placed this link with a feel of humor to parallelize it with the DMT experience, of course our world is very different than we see it but we don't actually make it, we kind of see it as we where dots on a flat paper. Think it's nice some time to dream a couple or more dimensions.

You pretty much explicitly said in the opening post that "Everything is made out of consciousness there no such things as real IMO. This is the death of reality!". How can that be misunderstood? This is pretty much what biocentrism is advocating as well, and they are serious straight out truth-claims that breaks under the weight of objective evidence and proper science. If you were just kidding a bit, then sure you were misunderstood, but I wasn't really criticizing you anyway, but Robert Lanza.

Even though we cannot unite general relativity with quantum mechanics (combining the equations gives nonsensical answers), it doesn't open up for all kinds of weird ideas being true. And no one here have argued against the idea of several dimensions or parallell universes, in fact much of our best theoretical physics and extremely beautiful mathematical poetry suggests this, so you are arguing against a straw man there. There is absolutely space to play in, and ideas to entertain, but luckily the good ones don't fall apart upon careful analysis. Robert Lanza's ideas do, however, fall apart.

I meant death of reality as we know it. I do hope cosmology will work with psychology to unveil the consciousness we've added to all things. I do hope one day we see the cosmos raw.
Sorry again for the hyperbole

What do you mean by "the consciousness we've added to all things?". All of our best current scientific understanding of the universe bears no reference to consciousness at all. Consciousness is simply left out of all the laws and equations, and they are formulated extremely precisely without the need for it.