The Rise of Neo-Geocentrism
Mind-centric theories based on information theory and quantum mechanics are throwbacks to geocentrism. I found this 16th-century depiction of geocentrism on Wikipedia.
September 25, 2023. You’re a born narcissist. Only you and your experiences matter. The world is a stage for the drama of your life. You are reality’s epicenter.
As you grow up, you realize others have feelings too, and your narcissism expands to encompass your family, tribe, even humanity as a whole. Perhaps you, personally, aren’t reality’s reason for being, but your species surely is.
These assumptions come so naturally to us that for most of our pre-history and history we didn’t question them. Religions reflect our self-centeredness, and science did too, at first. The Sun, Moon, planets, stars and entire cosmos whirl around the Earth, our home. Don’t our eyes tell us as much every day and night?
It took courage as well as imagination, painstaking observations and rational analysis for Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo to challenge geocentrism. Their insights, met initially by incredulity and hostility, helped us escape our primal self-centeredness.
Today we know Earth is only one of nine planets orbiting the Sun, which is only one of billions of stars in our galaxy, which is only one of countless galaxies in the universe, which exploded into existence 14 billion years ago. Our planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, and a billion years later singled-celled organisms emerged. A few hundred thousand years ago, a split second in cosmic time, we appeared and assumed the whole shebang was made for us. Call us Homo narcissus.
Our eventual recognition of how minuscule we are compared to the immensity of space and time has been humbling. But that revelation should be a source of pride, too. We had the intelligence and maturity to escape the delusional self-regard and superstition of the dark ages. We earned the label Homo sapiens.
As far as we know, consciousness is a property of only one peculiar type of matter that evolved relatively recently here on Earth: brains. But increasingly, scientists and philosophers are propagating ideas that put us—or, more specifically, consciousness—back at the center of things. I call this perspective neo-geocentrism.
Neo-geocentrists are reviving ancient doctrines such as panpsychism, which holds that consciousness pervades all matter; and idealism, which says consciousness is more fundamental than matter. The physics writer George Musser reports on this trend in his upcoming book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation.
You can also find neo-geocentric ideas in the writings of cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, philosophers Philip Goff and Bernardo Kastrup and alternative-medicine mogul Deepak Chopra. Here are more specific examples of neo-geocentrism:
Information Theories of Consciousness. Mathematician Claude Shannon invented information theory in the 1940s to boost the efficiency of systems for transmitting and storing information. Ever since, scientists and philosophers have tried to transform information theory into a theory of everything. Information-based theories of reality are all neo-geocentric, because information—which Shannon defined as a system’s capacity to surprise an observer--presumes the existence of consciousness.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Invented by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, integrated information theory says consciousness emerges in any system with parts interacting in a certain synergistic way. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, an advocate of IIT, wrote in 2009 that even a single proton, which consists of three interacting quarks, might be a little conscious, making integrated information theory “a scientific version of panpsychism.”
Quantum Theories of Consciousness. Quantum mechanics has long provoked neo-geocentric musings. Is the cat alive or dead? Is that photon a wave or a particle? Well, it depends on how—or whether—we look at it. Quantum mechanics, physicist John Wheeler proposed decades ago, implies that we live in a “participatory universe,” in which our questions define the material world and even bring it into existence.
QBism. Inspired by Wheeler, physicist Chris Fuchs invented a quantum model called QBism, pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement. QBism keeps evolving. But according to a 2022 report in Nautilus, QBism’s basic premise is that quantum mechanics doesn’t reflect reality; it reflects our beliefs about reality.
Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). Eugene Wigner speculated that conscious observation causes probabilistic, “superposed” quantum states to collapse into a single state. Orch-OR, invented by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, flips this notion on its head, claiming that the collapse of superposed states generates consciousness. Because such collapses occur in all matter, not just brains, Penrose and Hameroff conclude that consciousness “could be deeply related to the operation of the laws of the universe.”
The Simulation Hypothesis. Descartes fretted over whether the world is an illusion foisted on us by a demon. Philosopher Nick Bostrom has revived this conceit, conjecturing that “we are living in a computer simulation” generated by an alien hacker. Or something. This hypothesis strikes me as creationism repackaged for nerds, but physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, philosopher David Chalmers and tech-titan Elon Musk seem to take it seriously.
Buddhism. Buddhism deserves to be on this list because of its popularity among western intellectuals, like my friend Robert Wright. Buddhism is not a religion, western fans often insist, it’s a method for understanding and relaxing the mind. But like Catholicism, the religion of my childhood, Buddhism espouses a supernatural metaphysics, in which the cosmos serves as the stage for our spiritual journey toward nirvana.
The cold, hard skeptic in me rejects neo-geocentrism as the kind of fuzzy-headed mysticism that science helps us overcome. Neo-geocentrism represents the projection onto the world of our fears and desires, our yearning to matter. The surging popularity of neo-geocentrism is, perhaps, a symptom of our era’s social-media-enabled self-infatuation.
But here’s the thing: I’ve had experiences, induced by psychedelics or meditation or whatever, that make me wonder whether the neo-geocentrists are onto something. So if neo-geocentrism bugs me, so do militant materialism and atheism, which belittle our craving for transcendent meaning, and seem oblivious to the infinite improbability of our existence. And after all, without minds to ponder it, the universe might as well not exist.
I guess what I’m advocating is a simple acknowledgment that no theory or theology can do justice to the weirdness of the world. Agnosticism, it seems to me, is the sensible choice for Homo sapiens.
Further Reading:
This column, an updated version of one behind Scientific American’s paywall, seemed like an appropriate follow-up to my last column, “The Brouhaha Over Consciousness and ‘Pseudoscience.’”
If you like the way I veer from hard-nosed skepticism to open-mindedness in this piece, you might enjoy my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.
Also see the full list of my free online columns here.