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A recent paper by Robert Lanza and others suggests that physical reality isn’t independent of us, “objective,” but is the product of networks of observers…

Is there physical reality that is independent of us? Does objective reality exist at all? Or is the structure of everything, including time and space, created by the perceptions of those observing it? Such is the groundbreaking assertion of a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The paper’s authors include Robert Lanza, a stem cell and regenerative medicine expert, famous for the theory of biocentrism, which argues that consciousness is the driving force for the existence of the universe. He believes that the physical world that we perceive is not something that’s separate from us but rather created by our minds as we observe it. According to his biocentric view, space and time are a byproduct of the “whirl of information” in our head that is weaved together by our mind into a coherent experience.

His new paper, co-authored by Dmitriy Podolskiy and Andrei Barvinsky, theorists in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, shows how observers influence the structure of our reality.

According to Lanza and his colleagues, observers can dramatically affect “the behavior of observable quantities” both at microscopic and massive spatiotemporal scales. In fact, a “profound shift in our ordinary everyday worldview” is necessary, wrote Lanza in an interview with Big Think. The world is not something that is formed outside of us, simply existing on its own. “Observers ultimately define the structure of physical reality itself,” he stated.

How does this work? Lanza contends that a network of observers is necessary and is “inherent to the structure of reality.” As he explains, observers — you, me, and anyone else — live in a quantum gravitational universe and come up with “a globally agreed-upon cognitive model” of reality by exchanging information about the properties of spacetime. “For, once you measure something,” Lanza writes, “the wave of probability to measure the same value of the already probed physical quantity becomes ‘localized’ or simply ‘collapses.’” That’s how reality comes to be consistently real to us all. Once you keep measuring a quantity over and over, knowing the result of the first measurement, you will see the outcome to be the same.

“Similarly, if you learn from somebody about the outcomes of their measurements of a physical quantity, your measurements and those of other observers influence each other ‒ freezing the reality according to that consensus,” added Lanza, explaining further that “a consensus of different opinions regarding the structure of reality defines its very form, shaping the underlying quantum foam,” explained Lanza.

In quantum terms, an observer influences reality through decoherence, which provides the framework for collapsing waves of probability, “largely localized in the vicinity of the cognitive model which the observer builds in their mind throughout their lifespan,” he added.

Lanza says, “The observer is the first cause, the vital force that collapses not only the present, but the cascade of spatiotemporal events we call the past. Stephen Hawking was right when he said: ‘The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.’”

Could an artificially intelligent entity without consciousness be dreaming up our world? Lanza believes biology plays an important role, as he explains in his book The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, which he co-authored with the physicist Matej Pavsic.

While a bot could conceivably be an observer, Lanza thinks a conscious living entity with the capacity for memory is necessary to establish the arrow of time. “‘A brainless’ observer does not experience time and/or decoherence with any degree of freedom,” writes Lanza. This leads to the cause and effect relationships we can notice around us. Lanza thinks that “we can only say for sure that a conscious observer does indeed collapse a quantum wave function.”…

Another key aspect of their work is that it resolves “the exasperating incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity,” which was a sticking point even for Albert Einstein.

The seeming incongruity of these two explanations of our physical world — with quantum mechanics looking at the molecular and subatomic levels and general relativity at the interactions between massive cosmic structures like galaxies and black holes — disappears once the properties of observers are taken into account.

While this all may sound speculative, Lanza says their ideas are being tested using Monte Carlo simulations on powerful MIT computer clusters and will soon be tested experimentally.

Is the physical universe independent from us, or is it created by our minds? “Is human consciousness creating reality?” @RobertLanza

We might wonder, if this is so, how reality emerged at all. Perhaps one possibility is implied in “Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”

* Stephen Hawking

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As we conjure with consciousness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 (the same year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics) that Ernest Rutherford announced in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter. The following year, he, Hans Geiger (later of “counter” fame), and Ernest Marsden conducted the “Gold Foil Experiment,” the results of which replaced J. J. Thomson‘s “Plum Pudding Model” of the atom with what became known as the “Rutherford Model“: a very small charged nucleus, containing much of the atom’s mass, orbited by low-mass electrons.

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