[...]... above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything (or TOE) that has evaded other disciplines Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the first second of time after the Big Bang rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality But most of these comprehensive theories fail to. .. decided to go to the prom, I became so intrigued by the importance of the “sensorymotor system”—of consciousness and animal sense perception—that I went back to Harvard to work with the famed psychologist B.F Skinner several years later Oh, and by the way, I won the science fair with my chicken project And the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the whole school Like Emerson and Thoreau—two... biology teacher told me it was impossible, and my parents thought I was just trying to hatch chicken eggs and refused to drive me to the farm to get them I persuaded myself to make a journey by bus and trolley car from my house in Stoughton to Harvard Medical School, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of medical science I mounted the stairs that led up to the front doors; the huge granite... O’Donnell, and come with me.” I was much too afraid of him to refuse compliance I did as I was told, and followed him into the shop, a strange new world crammed with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds hanging from the ceiling Against the wall was his forge, opening into the center of the room Starting the bellows, Mr O’Donnell tossed the trap over the coals and a tiny fire appeared... photons that deliver their payloads of bits of the electromagnetic force, these are channeled through heavy-duty cables straight back until the actual perception of images themselves physically occurs in the back of the brain, augmented by other nearby locations, in special sections that are as vast and labyrinthine as the hallways of the Milky Way, and contain as many neurons as there are stars in the. .. into the macroscopic realm, the waves are too close together to be noticed or measured They are still there, however.) With small discrete particles, however, if they are not being observed, they cannot be thought of as having any real existence—either duration or a position in space Until the mind sets the scaffolding of an object in place, until it actually lays down the threads (somewhere in the. .. of the State University of New York, “There’s no point in coming up with theories.” But perhaps the cracks in the system are just the points that let the light shine more directly on the mystery of life The root of this present waywardness is always the same the attempt of physicists to overstep the legitimate boundaries of science The questions they most lust to solve are actually bound up with the. .. limited to some huge and hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight in the air I do not know But as I stood up and left, I no doubt dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the glowworm’s little world Our science to date has failed to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality This view of the world in which life and consciousness are the bottom line in understanding. .. contributing to an interference pattern They all arrived at the astonishing conclusion, however, that it is not possible to observe both whichway information and the interference pattern One can set up a measurement to watch which slit a photon goes through, and find that the photon goes through one slit and not the other However, once this is kind of measurement is set up, the photons instead strike the screen... life and consciousness But it’s a Sisyphusian task: physics can furnish no true answers for them If the most primary questions of the universe have traditionally been tackled by physicists attempting to create grand unified theories—exciting and glamorous as they are such theories remain an evasion, if not a reversal of the central mystery of knowledge: that the laws of the world somehow produced the . fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein. laws of the world somehow produced the observer in the first place! And this is one of the central themes of biocentrism and this book: that the animal observer creates reality and not the other. nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine