Scan barcode
jfields62's review against another edition
3.0
Although I enjoyed the way Dr. Lanza presented his work, I felt that he was often long winded and randomly inserted personal anecdotes that didn't have to do with consciousness or Biocentrism.
Overall, it was an interesting take on consciousness and how physics will never be able to fully describe it.
Overall, it was an interesting take on consciousness and how physics will never be able to fully describe it.
alaskuh's review against another edition
3.0
Very interesting subject. The author is clearly a genius but I think I'm definitely too 'dumb' to understand most of what was written in this book. There were also a lot of math or physics formulas that just made me all ????. I would probably feel more ok with giving this book a higher rating if it had been easier for a 'normal' person to read and understand it, if you know what I mean.
george_salis's review against another edition
1.0
This book is pseudoscience veiled as science. Many of the claims (when he is making claims and not just digressing with irrelevant anecdotes), are disproportionate to the cited evidence, the main claim being that the universe is a projection of consciousness and only exists within the brain--when we look away from the moon, for example, it ceases to exist. The analogies he employs are quite shaky, too. The overall tone is, ironically, hostile to science, and bombastic regarding his own theory. In the chapter that claims to speculate on the question of an afterlife, we get, after yet another anecdote, this embarrassing sentence regarding his deceased sister: "It's going to be hard to wait--I have to admit--but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in [her earrings] the next time I see her...in whatever form she and I and this amazing play of consciousness assume." Aside from embarrassing, coming from a scientist with so many credentials (and he never lets us forget these credentials), it is utterly unfounded. Trying on earrings from a past life? Come on. This is piffle. Why should consciousness, something we know can be altered, diminished, and is found in rudimentary form in the 'lower' animals, be eternal? If consciousness can be dampened, as with sleep or drugs, it can be extinguished. And don't get me started on the seemingly dual consciousness of patients whose corpus callosum has been severed to prevent seizures. All the evidence points to the brain as the inextricable foundation of consciousness, and when it dies, the 'self' dies with it.
On the front cover, Deepak Chopra, master of word salads and pretending-to-know-what-one-doesn't-know, praises the book. For me, this was a red flag in and of itself, but I like challenging my beliefs and changing my mind...when the evidence is convincing and proportionate to the claims, yet not when it is used as a springboard for the fantastic.
On the front cover, Deepak Chopra, master of word salads and pretending-to-know-what-one-doesn't-know, praises the book. For me, this was a red flag in and of itself, but I like challenging my beliefs and changing my mind...when the evidence is convincing and proportionate to the claims, yet not when it is used as a springboard for the fantastic.
birdlaw91's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
archytas's review against another edition
4.25
This is a trippy, wild and ultimately enjoyable ride of a book, one that makes a mockery of Goodreads star system, as I could have easily given it 2 stars or 5 stars - it's a collection of ideas thrown out surrounded by anecdote and with passion, and often without systematisation or thorough refutation of critics.
Reading it, I kept being reminded of the writings of medieval scholars like Giordano Bruno - it has that feel of heady mix of philosophy and science that defies any attempts to keep religion apart, and is driven by a passion to look at the world through a different lens.
All of this is one way to say I have no idea if Lanza is a genius or a madman, the-only-one-who-sees or the-one-who-cant-see-the-obvious - but I think if you are trying to work that out, then you are denying yourself a treat. The book demands you consider the impossible, and in doing so, you can step to Lanza's side for a moment, and glimpse this pulsating world as he sees it, inextricably entertwined with our conciousness, not for us, but by us. It's a fascinating shift to make.
The book's thesis is actually pretty simple - it's padded out with outrage about the direction of modern theoretical physics and wonderfully written if frequently-too-perfect-to-be-true anecdotes about Lanza's life. (The stories are important, they are both illustrative and representative of how Lanza draws his worldview from all inputs around him, refusing the typical 'objectivity' or isolation of science.) Anyway, his thesis: that the reason physics tells us that the world doesn't exist until observed is because, well, it doesn't exist until observed, by a never-defined 'consciousness', which may be one or many. Until then, it simply remains a series of possibilities, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Lanza views existence as created through interaction, without a conscious being to interact with, there is simply nothing there.
Lanza spends a fair bit of time explaining the evidence for this in quantum physics, and is not above criticising the greats in doing so, but really his basic contention is that Science has found this so unbelievable that it has gone to enormous lengths to come up with alternate suggestions, ones which preserve an 'objectively existing' universe.
I kinda loved reading the book, and not really because I think Lanza is right. I distrust any grand theory, and this is absolutely in that category. The evidence is also a little thinner than the enthusiasm, although Lanza's strongest ground is that physics is actually pretty crazy, and no-one's theories really make much sense outside mathematical modelling. But I loved the book simply for Lanza's courage to seek a worldview in a holistic sense, barging through philosophy, religion and the basic tenets of capital-S-science to do so, and even drawing simply on the way the world feels on a still morning near a lake. I am highly skeptical these days of the lines, the rules, that are drawn around science, as if it exists in a vacuum from the world we live in, as if peer review eliminates human bias and perception, and as if religious/philosophical ideas can be isolated somehow from paleontology or evolutionary biology, or even theoretical physics. By denying the assumptions, the worldviews, the concern over implications of this, we denude science, make it weaker, than if we acknowledged that our understanding of the world has many inputs, and they all impact each other.
In short, I admire the Brunos, the Abelards, the al-Farghanis not because they challenged 'religion' but because they argued for the right to draw on all the tools at their disposal to understand the world and how it worked. There are moments when Lanza, drawing on biology and physics, and in demanding that taken together, they insist we look at the world through a different lens, invokes this spirit of pushing orthodoxy back so we can *see* differently. That's a kind of science we could use a little more of, even if I'd like it with a little more detail and a little less skimming over the contradictory bits
Reading it, I kept being reminded of the writings of medieval scholars like Giordano Bruno - it has that feel of heady mix of philosophy and science that defies any attempts to keep religion apart, and is driven by a passion to look at the world through a different lens.
All of this is one way to say I have no idea if Lanza is a genius or a madman, the-only-one-who-sees or the-one-who-cant-see-the-obvious - but I think if you are trying to work that out, then you are denying yourself a treat. The book demands you consider the impossible, and in doing so, you can step to Lanza's side for a moment, and glimpse this pulsating world as he sees it, inextricably entertwined with our conciousness, not for us, but by us. It's a fascinating shift to make.
The book's thesis is actually pretty simple - it's padded out with outrage about the direction of modern theoretical physics and wonderfully written if frequently-too-perfect-to-be-true anecdotes about Lanza's life. (The stories are important, they are both illustrative and representative of how Lanza draws his worldview from all inputs around him, refusing the typical 'objectivity' or isolation of science.) Anyway, his thesis: that the reason physics tells us that the world doesn't exist until observed is because, well, it doesn't exist until observed, by a never-defined 'consciousness', which may be one or many. Until then, it simply remains a series of possibilities, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Lanza views existence as created through interaction, without a conscious being to interact with, there is simply nothing there.
Lanza spends a fair bit of time explaining the evidence for this in quantum physics, and is not above criticising the greats in doing so, but really his basic contention is that Science has found this so unbelievable that it has gone to enormous lengths to come up with alternate suggestions, ones which preserve an 'objectively existing' universe.
I kinda loved reading the book, and not really because I think Lanza is right. I distrust any grand theory, and this is absolutely in that category. The evidence is also a little thinner than the enthusiasm, although Lanza's strongest ground is that physics is actually pretty crazy, and no-one's theories really make much sense outside mathematical modelling. But I loved the book simply for Lanza's courage to seek a worldview in a holistic sense, barging through philosophy, religion and the basic tenets of capital-S-science to do so, and even drawing simply on the way the world feels on a still morning near a lake. I am highly skeptical these days of the lines, the rules, that are drawn around science, as if it exists in a vacuum from the world we live in, as if peer review eliminates human bias and perception, and as if religious/philosophical ideas can be isolated somehow from paleontology or evolutionary biology, or even theoretical physics. By denying the assumptions, the worldviews, the concern over implications of this, we denude science, make it weaker, than if we acknowledged that our understanding of the world has many inputs, and they all impact each other.
In short, I admire the Brunos, the Abelards, the al-Farghanis not because they challenged 'religion' but because they argued for the right to draw on all the tools at their disposal to understand the world and how it worked. There are moments when Lanza, drawing on biology and physics, and in demanding that taken together, they insist we look at the world through a different lens, invokes this spirit of pushing orthodoxy back so we can *see* differently. That's a kind of science we could use a little more of, even if I'd like it with a little more detail and a little less skimming over the contradictory bits
cid's review against another edition
2.0
This is a topic I am considerably interested in and I found this book very disappointing. It starts with the Biocentric wordlview, then haphazardly attempts to cram arguments into this preconceived reality tunnel. The end result is a cheer-leading showdown between the Biologist good guys versus the Physicists with their damned shortsightedness and reductionist approaches.
The main foundation of Biocentrism is based on quantum theory and more specifically on the double slit experiment - of which there is an excellent explanation (the highlight of the book for me). The author should have just stuck to that as the case for Biocentrism instead of inventing additional principles via circular logic.
On top of that, the book is quite repetitive with big chunks of the author's autobiography, all crammed into 200 pages, which leaves the end product lacking depth and breath. In the end we're left with a "feels good" theory that has no impact on our day to day lives, but is just another attempt at coming up with a Grand Unified Theory which doesn't take us much further past our intuitions.
The main foundation of Biocentrism is based on quantum theory and more specifically on the double slit experiment - of which there is an excellent explanation (the highlight of the book for me). The author should have just stuck to that as the case for Biocentrism instead of inventing additional principles via circular logic.
On top of that, the book is quite repetitive with big chunks of the author's autobiography, all crammed into 200 pages, which leaves the end product lacking depth and breath. In the end we're left with a "feels good" theory that has no impact on our day to day lives, but is just another attempt at coming up with a Grand Unified Theory which doesn't take us much further past our intuitions.