You are a born narcissist. You know you are conscious, and you don’t worry about whether others are too, because only your experiences matter. The world is a stage for the drama of your life. You are reality’s epicenter.
As you grow up, your narcissism encompasses people in 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 one of billions of stars in our galaxy, which is 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 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.
But recently prominent scientists and philosophers have been propagating ideas that restore us—more specifically, our minds–to the center of things. I call this perspective neo-geocentrism.
As far as we know, consciousness is property of only one weird type of matter that evolved relatively recently here on Earth: brains. Neo-geocentrists nonetheless suggest that consciousness pervades the entire cosmos. It might even have been the spark that ignited the big bang. Neo-geocentric thinking has always lurked at the fringes of science, but it is becoming more mainstream. Here are four popular examples of neo-geocentrism:
Information Theories of Consciousness. Claude Shannon invented information theory in the 1940s to quantify and boost the efficiency of communication systems. Ever since, scientists and philosophers have sought to transform it into a theory of everything. Information-based theories are all neo-geocentric, because information—definable as the capacity of a system to surprise an observer–presumes the existence of an observer.
Quantum Theories of Consciousness. Quantum mechanics has long provoked neo-geocentric musings. Is the cat in the box 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,” the existence of which somehow depends on us.
Reality Is a Simulation. 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 a high-tech civilization. Physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, philosopher David Chalmers and tech-titan Elon Musk have expressed sympathy for the simulation thesis, which is creationism repackaged for geeks.
Anthropic Principle. As physicists lose hope of explaining why our universe is the way it is, they have become increasingly fond of the anthropic principle, which decrees that our universe must be as we observe it to be, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Modern proponents of this neo-geocentric tautology include Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll and Brian Greene.
Neo-geocentrism’s surging popularity is a symptom, perhaps, of our era’s social-media-enabled self-infatuation. But if neo-geocentrism bugs me, so do militant materialism and atheism, which belittle our craving for transcendent meaning, and seem oblivious to the extraordinary 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 mystery of our existence. That modest agnosticism, it seems to me, is what Homo sapiens would choose.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which belongs to the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
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