Dr. Robert Lanza has an MD. He is a medical doctor who works with stem cells and came up with the theory of biocentrism. He has a number of accomplishments, such as:
In 2014 he appeared on TIME’s list of the hundred most influential people in the world.
In 2015 he was selected as one of Prospect Magazine’s “World Thinkers 2015,” and he has been voted the third most important scientist alive by NY Times.
Dr. Lanza has posited that what we think of as "me" is just electrical energy in our brains. And since energy can't be created or destroyed there is life after death (biocentrism goes more into depth about viewing space-time but I won't get into that here). What do you guys think? Are we really just a watt of energy that will always exist?
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@burningiris: what we think of as "me" is just electrical energy in our brains.
Our consciousness isn't just energy in our brains. It's a pattern of energy that depends on the structure of the brain. After death, the brain will lose heat as the tiny amount of energy generated slightly warms the surrounding environment. However, the energy that leaks into the environment will not carry any pattern of consciousness, since the organizing structure will have ceased functioning at the moment of death. As a result, the information that makes up the pattern will be lost.
Life is here and now. Make the most of it.
@burningiris: He's a moron. The only thing he can posit is that there is energy after death. He is an MD and not a physicist. Anything at all he asserts about "Space-time" is suspicious. "Is energy really alive?" should be the obvious question being asked. Heat energy is coming off my cup of coffee so the coffee is alive? Electrical energy is running my computer so my computer is alive? My toes can wriggle, that does not mean they are conscious. The idea sounds retarded on its face.
Lanza's book Biocentrism has received mixed reviews. It is not a peer reviewed hypothesis.
1. What we observe is dependent on the observer. (Reality is a process that involves consciousness.)
2. External and internal perceptions are intertwined.
3. The behavior of particles are linked to the presence of an observer.
4. Consciousness must exist and without it matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability.
5. Laws, forces and constants of the universe make it seem "FINE TUNED FOR LIFE." (Anyone heard this before?)
6. Time has no existence outside of animal intuition. (I'd like to see that one proved.)
7. Space like time does not have an independent reality.
Robert Lanza it a theist apologist and he makes the same dumb-shit errors all apologists make regardless of the initials behind their name.
Biocentric Take on the Cosmos:
There’s no separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness. Nothing is real that isn’t perceived. There was never a time when an external, dumb, physical universe existed, or that life sprang randomly from it at a later date. Space and time exist only as constructs of the mind. Experiments in which the observer influences the outcome are easily explainable by the interrelatedness of consciousness and the physical universe. Neither nature nor mind are unreal, both are correlative. No position is taken regarding God.
Biocentrism’s Answers to Basic Questions:
What created the Big Bang? A: No ‘dead’ universe ever existed outside of mind (“Nothingness” is a meaningless concept)
Which came first, rocks or life? A: Time is a form of animal intuition
What IS this universe? A: An active life-based process
http://www.robertlanzabiocentrism.com/religion-vs-sciences-answers-to-th...
Smatterings of L. Ron Hubbard or John Smith here. Inane assertions without facts of evidence to back them up.
I just had a steak dinner. I'm sure that the cow has been dead for a long time.
@Dio Re: "I just had a steak dinner. I'm sure that the cow has been dead for a long time."
But cows don't matter, remember? Because cows have no souls..... *look of sudden realization*... OH! Unless you are in India, in which case you could have just eaten one of your ancestors. YOU CANNIBAL!
Tin-Man,
I was hoping to get a rack of baby-back Jesus ribs but they all got burned up in the Notre Dame fire. Maybe the Vatican has some left. I don't like their Jesus head cheese. But they are all suppose to give you eternal life.
Lanza's credentials as a leading genetic researcher is beyond dispute. But his knowledge and total devotion to scientific medicine, does not bestow the same credibility to his personal views on religion or the afterlife.
He was thirteen when he altered chicken DNA to change the colour of chickens, which ended up in international science publications. He mentored with Christiann Barnard, Jonas Salk and B.F.Skinner. He is considered one of the fathers of stem cell research. He cloned an extinct donkey speicies and restored sight to blind animals. Scientist? Yes....and yet....
He was raised a Catholic. He has lived alone for the past 20 years on a 10 acre island in a little mansion surrounded with his private collection of dinosaur fossils. Apparently never married but then the demands of his professional career would explain that. It would seem impossible that he has little time to think about anything else that wasn't connected to larger view of life and death and so when he isn't actually doing science, he tries his hand at philosophising the meaning of life, science, the universe and everything and only comes up with personally satisfying waffle.
And so in published works he believes "death is an illusion", following Einstein's statement that except for physicists the perception of time is "a stubbornly persistent illusion". He suggests that given imminent scientific discoveries there will be a need for "the evolution of a new concept of God". He also contends that time and space are merely tools for the mind.
None of this is science. Its mere wish fulfilment. He is welcome to it and he has the attention to broadcast it all through any number of publications, but its still just curious waffle.
Think I will give meaning to a cow's demise and have a hamburger.
Energy is attribute of a system, not unlike temperature; they are both scalar quantities (English: it is just a number and a unit). If you are just energy, then you are just a single number. That seems very wrong.
That is correct Ny, you have to have a physical medium for a soul to exist, as it resides in our physical body...thus far that medium is unidentifiable despite precisely mapping our known universes physical makeup, down to the subatomic level without even suggestions of that medium. Also, knowing what we know about physics, to separate the energy defined by this mythical soul and its medium from the human body/brain, the level of energy needed would rival the energy used during one run of the LHC to break down particulate matter...as that would be the only physical interaction possible. I have seen many people die up close, without ever witnessing a 13 TeV display of energy during those events. Also considering our bodies are incapable of generating that level of energy. So, no evidence of a soul, and no physical possibility of our bodies having a soul, makes Lanza a dishonest, religiously bias, POS, or stupid...one of the two. You choose.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Larry King on the afterlife. Very moving
This is why I am donating my body to a body farm for them to use for forensic science.
rmfr
Here is a thought to mess with you a little bit arakish:
Can you "donate" anything when you are dead?
I mean obviously what you are really doing is: stating your body can be used for science and advancement of the human race, and you do not subscribe to the silly notions that somehow a "body" is more sacred than a pile of meat, flesh, bones etc, not very different from the meat etc we eat every day. The conscious brain has stopped, any notions of superiority over all other "living" things gone the moment the brain shuts down for good.
Just like everything else you may have once "owned" before you die, you are just directing others what to do with it, and hope people follow your directions after you are dead, in a sort of "deal" that most other people also want control of what happens with their "stuff" after they die.
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@ LogicFTW
Completely correct. I have no control over what gets done with my stuff after I am dead. That is why I have already paid for a State Licensed Executor (basically a shyster). That way, there is nothing my family can do about it. It is already set. If they don't like it, they can fuck themselves. Just like they did me when my family was killed. Not a god damned one of them, except me father, visited me. And me dad told me the only reason he was visiting was to collect the more important items by taking the fire safes from the house. So others would not break in, like they did. The dog and cat he took.
Thus, it ain't mean going to mean shit if any of my family tries to fight my LWT. Not one damn thing.
rmfr
I don't really know anything about him but this sounds like yet another attempt by a so called scientist to warp science to try and write god into it somewhere and then teach their made up shit to children. We see it a lot and many religious schools.
It reminds me of the fakery of the apparent foot prints in Texas which were heavily eroded by water that they tried to claim proved that dinosours and humans existed at the same time. They only saw what they wanted to see.
I think that kind of thing is really quite evil to be honest.
MarylinC: "I don't really know anything about him but this sounds like yet another attempt by a so called scientist to warp science to try and write god into it somewhere and then teach their made up shit to children. We see it a lot and many religious schools."
You have it backwards. It is NOT a scientist warping science, it is a Religious Absolutist warping science to fit his agenda. It is persons like this that are truly dangerous. The one in a million Religious Absolutist actually intelligent enough to understand science in order to learn it well enough so it can shoehorn its deity into the gaps.
People like this do not deserve [self-censored due to fact it violates forum guidelines].
rmfr
You need to look up an appeal to authority fallacy. Or if that is too much trouble, simply look at every major global news network, and then ask yourself why this paradigm shifting news has been missed by every single one of them.
I feel insulted on behalf of myself and the human race in general that I was overlooked on the "World Thinkers" list in favor of this guy.
Don't feel too bad Saporro. So was I. >-P
rmfr
@burningiris OP:
What do I think? I think this scientist is trying to redefine human "life" to simpler terms, which to me is stupid, we are human life, we already have a agreed upon definition of life (even if it is vague.)
Yes, the "electrical energy" in our brains, is a form of energy and for the most this energy is not "destroyed" upon death, it just goes somewhere else. But as others have said the unique structure that formats this energy to uses such as memory and calculation has lost its structure. We even have a term called "brain dead." When someone bodily functions continue but the major memory/calculation processes of the brain are no longer working correctly. And like most of us can easily realize, being brain dead in a lot of ways might as well be just a pile of useless meat.
I also think it is quite likely this scientist was badly misquoted and or taken out of context, but I can't be arsed to look it up.
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▮I am an atheist that always likes a good debate
▮Please include @LogicFTW for responses to me
▮Tips on forum use. ▮ A.R. Member since 2016.
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