Robert Lanza doesn't seem to be kidding

In a nifty Q&A on Wired News today, Aaron Rowe talks to Robert Lanza, CEO of Advanced Cell Technologies and one of the most interesting biologists working today. Wired gave Lanza a Rave award a couple years ago for his aggressive work with embryonic stem cells, and he's also been involved in various human cloning attempts.

So the Q&A—and the article Lanza wrote in the American Scholar to which its pegged—are interesting because they manage to make Lanza seem, well, kind of dopey. In both, Lanza attempts to find a unified theory of space and time not in physics but in biology—not coincidentally his specialty. Now, there's a long history of physicists and chemists dropping down on the biologists to help them out with wee problems, like when Linus Pauling started mucking around with figuring out the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick thought they were racing him to the finish line. So maybe it's turnabout-fair-play for a high-level biologist like Lanza to take a crack at the physicists.

But if you're going to play, you have to bring your A-game. Lanza does not.

More after the jump.

Here's Lanza's billboard graf:

Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.

So...okay. Let's say I'm willing to play along. The quantum mechanics and string theorists are all wrong, we're about to find out. Consciousness is at the center of reality. I'm starting to vaguely remember some hazy, late-night dorm-room conversations that may or may not have been influenced by controlled substances of various types, but hey, they were fun and Lanza's a smart guy. So why not?

Then there's a few hundred words of throat-clearing like the following:

We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature. The ether of the 19th century, the “spacetime” of Einstein, and the string theory of recent decades, which posits new dimensions showing up in different realms, and not only in strings but in bubbles shimmering down the byways of the universe—all these are examples of this speculation. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to a hundred in some theories) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled up like soda straws at every point in space.

Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science—to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.

Ooh. Accusing scientists of being like the Laputans. They hate that.

But here comes the good stuff.

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. For example, if the big bang had been one-part-in-a billion more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies to form and for life to begin. If the strong nuclear force were decreased by two percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together. Hydrogen would be the only atom in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased, stars (including the sun) would not ignite. These are just three of more than 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that they cannot be random. Indeed, the lack of a scientific explanation has allowed these facts to be hijacked as a defense of intelligent design.

Well, he's right about the creationists loving this kind of exceptionalism. But it's misguided for other reasons. For one thing, it's entirely possible that if the laws of our universe were different, there'd be a totally different kind of life here to observe them. And if the universe was made of nothing but hydrogen, no one would be around to care. Lee Smolin, the theoretical physicist and string theory attacker, has an interesting idea that universes evolve in the hearts of black holes, and the ones that produce more black holes are more evolutionarily "fit"—ie, they breed more—which means the laws of physics have to tend toward black hole production, which means universes tend to look a lot like this one. But I digress.

Next point:

Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism.
Our sense of the forward motion of time is really the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion impossible?
Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

Zeno's Paradox? You're really going with Zeno's Paradox? The same one that calculus explains? Newton dispatched this one, baby. You don't need quant for it.

I edited a Josh McHugh story for us a while back about a guy who said much the same thing about time—that it's an illusion of consciousness. Everyone—Lanza included—always points at Einstein's breakthrough idea, that time and space depend on the position of the observer. That was his big triumph over Newton, who thought time must be absolute. But the thing about Einstein's point is not that time is an illusion—it's that it's different depending on how you look at it. When you're not looking at it, there's still something called time.

Lanza then takes a tour through all the things quantum physics either can't explain or is really weird about. Wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, observer dependent experimental outcomes...it's like he read our What We Don't Know issue (which I appreciate).

But here's the big jump Lanza wants us to make:

As unimaginable as it may seem to us, the logic of quantum physics is inescapable.
Every morning we open our front door to bring in the paper or to go to work. We open the door to rain, snow, or trees swaying in the breeze. We think the world churns along whether we happen to open the door or not.
Quantum mechanics tells us it doesn’t.

The trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The kitchen disappears when we’re in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness—or into waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe.
We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human and perhaps even by each animal.

Now this, clearly, is the marijuana talking.

No, I kid. That was ad hominem of me, and I apologize. What I should have said was: Dude! What? Lanza's conclusion here is that we need to understand the mysteries of consciousness so we can explain how individual clumps of neurons produce—from what he does not say—little slivers of illusory universe.

Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, I think. Those neurons might not be the end of the story on how consciousness is produced (another question from What We Don't Know, I might add) but they are at least the beginning. And those neurons are made of molecules, which are made of atoms...which churn away quite happily without anything observing them, just sitting there being brains and stuff.

Here is the bulk of Lanza's penultimate graf, and I think it's intended to deal with the problem I just raised. I'm not sure, though, because I don't really understand it:

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order.

I've read this a few times, and I'm having the same tautology problem. Spacetime produces consciousness, because neurons create spatio-temporal relationships, which are subject to the laws of neural logic.

Nope. I'm missing it still. Someone has to help me with this.

Thing is, I have a lot of respect for Lanza. His biology is really interesting and cutting edge, and I find it admirable that he's trying to tackle the problems on the border of physics and philosophy. They're the fundamental stuff of reality, and they are what we should all spend some time thinking about—addled by dorm-room smoke or not. What bothers me is that he seems to have been a little lazy about it, and for a scientist of his caliber...that's just weird.