In a 2007 experiment, scientists shot photons into an apparatus and showed they could retroactively change whether they behaved as particles or waves. The particles had to “decide” what to do when they passed a fork in the apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. It turns out what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle had behaved at the fork in the past.
You may be wondering, “What’s this got to do with me?” Consider a modification of Schrödinger’s experiment. Replace the radioactive source with an entangled particle in the measuring device. If the detector registers a particle, the poison is released and the cat dies. Now put your cat in the box with lots of food and water. By activating a scrambling device in the path of the particle’s twin (like in the 2002 experiment described above), you’d have the power in the future to decide whether or not Paws lived or died in the past.
If biocentrism is correct, future experiments will confirm the world is indeed influenced by the future. The past, present and future are inseparably entangled. Spinoza’s genius sensed this back in the 17th century. To be conscious of space and time, he explained, is to transcend them. The mind transcends space and time in the sense that they’re for it and it’s not in them. Consciousness can’t exist simply in space and time, and at the same time be aware of the interrelations of all parts of space and time. In order to have knowledge of objects, it must somehow be part of them.
Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler (who coined “black hole”) insisted when observing light from a distant quasar bent around a galaxy, we’ve set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on incoming light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago. This mirrors the results of the actual quantum experiment described above, where an observation now determines what a particle’s twin did in the past.
In 2002, Discover magazine sent a reporter to the coast of Maine to speak to Wheeler firsthand. Wheeler said he was sure the universe was filled with “huge clouds of uncertainty” that haven’t yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. In all these places, he said, the cosmos is “a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past.”
This logic applies not just to events that took place billions of years ago. What you do today could influence past events say, at the building of the Great Pyramids, the birth and death of Christ, or landing on the moon or events that will occur millions of years in the future when the Sun’s dome obscures the heavens.
As The Time Traveller in H.G. Wells’s story pointed out, our ideas about time are founded on a misconception.
“The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment… It may be that he swept away into the past…Or did he go forward…?” ( H.G. Wells, The Time Machine)
What would The Time Traveller find? It may depend on what you do after reading this article. And BTW, make sure you don’t let your cat out of your sight.
Is This All We Are, Is There Nothing More?
We all know the biological reason we age and die. Our bodies break down and are discarded like an old car or a worn-out pair of jeans. No one escapes the ravages of time. Or do they?
Why out of all of existence do you get to be, say, just a plumber or a hairdresser followed by nothingness for the rest of eternity.
The big question is why is the universe this way to begin with? Of all of the possible ways the universe could be structured, why are the laws of nature the way they are? Why do things become less ordered (second law of thermodynamics), rather than more ordered? Why do systems deteriorate and life die rather than stay the same?
Equally relevant, is the question of why out of all of existence out of everything possible in the universe all you get to be is, say, a plumber or a hairdresser. And that’s it! followed by nothingness for the rest of eternity. You’ll never get to travel in a spaceship to distant stars, or to live in a world without cancer or war. Scientists say it’s all an accident. If you’re dealt a bad hand, oh well, it’s just tough luck. You’ll die soon enough.
Our inability to comprehend the true nature of life shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering our DNA differs from apes and monkeys by less than 2 percent. We primates whether scientist or macaque have significant cognitive limitations. Like a mouse or a gerbil, we open our eyes and the world as if by magic is just there. We think it’s a thing, a hard object. But this is inconsistent with hundreds of experiments carried out in the last century.
Reality is observer-determined it’s a spatio-temporal process, which fortunately, means that things must change. Could you imagine always and forever being a toddler? Diapers and lollipops would grow tiresome. Or forever being a senior? The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence.
That part of the equation is easy to understand: First we experience life as children, then as middle-aged adults, and finally, as senior citizens. But we can’t connect the dots beyond that. You’re a shoe-maker for a few years and then it’s into the void of nothingness forever. Stephen Hawking summed this viewpoint up quite accurately: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers.”
This is the limit of our primate comprehension. Still, at some point, virtually everyone has wondered: “Is this all we are, is there nothing more?”
Fortunately, there is more. In Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the great philosopher explained how space and time are forms of human intuition. Indeed, everything you see and experience is information in your mind. If space and time are tools of the mind, then we shouldn’t be surprised that at death there’s a break in the connection of time and place. Without consciousness, space and time are meaningless; in reality we can take any time or any spatial plane and estimate everything against this new frame of reference.
Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness. Indeed, biocentrism suggests it’s a manifold to all dimensional potentialities (see “What Happens When You Die?”).
Time is the inner sense that animates existence, not just our thoughts and feelings, but the spatial representations we experience from birth until death. It’s just the way we connect things, not an invisible, continuous matrix with people and particles bouncing around in it. Consciousness isn’t created or destroyed it only changes forms. It’s like a bubble machine that creates spheres spheres of space and time, which we carry around with us like turtles with shells.
Physics tells us observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Rather, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability. According to one interpretation, each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the “multiverse”). There are an infinite number of universes (including our own) that comprise everything that can possibly happen. Thus, death doesn’t exist in any real sense, since all possible universes exist simultaneously regardless of what happens in any of them.
True, you age and die, but there are always bubbles (universes) spanning the breadth of eternity. Some may not travel very far, but others will float off into the horizon. Perhaps you’ll get that space-trip to the stars after all.
“The first step to eternal life,” said Chuck Palahniuk “is you have to die.”
