Broadcast Wed., Dec. 11th 10-11 a.m. Central (1500 GMT) onNoLiesRadio.org, archived here. Note: TruthJihad.com subscribers can listen to shows on-demand before they are broadcast – and also get free downloads! If you are a subscriber, just log in to the members area of TruthJihad.com and go to the “Private Blog” to get early access to the shows.
Guest: Rick Delano, producer of the documentary film The Principle, scheduled for release in spring 2014.
Is the Earth, its life, and the peculiarly intensified consciousness associated with some of its life forms just a random, relatively unimportant cosmic accident? Or is there something mysterious about the way the whole universe seems to have been designed with all of its parameters tweaked for earth (and perhaps other earth-like planets) with life and consciousness?
This is the question posed by the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, one of the most interesting philosophical-scientific questions of our time. The Principle takes it one step further by highlighting recent discoveries “that the entire universe, as represented by the CMB dipole, is aligned with the tiny Earth”…making Earth the center not of the solar system, but of the whole freaking universe! Wow. No wonder real estate on this planet is going through the roof!
I don’t know whether or not Rick is right – but one thing I do know is that unlike the mainstream scientific community Rick is willing to come out and say that Building 7 was an obvious controlled demolition, and 9/11 an obvious inside job. To me, that gives him some street cred. I’m willing to hear him out on this cosmology thing.
What a fascinating collection of topics! I was particularly taken, on this occasion, with Was Galileo Wrong? and wanted to singe your ear a bit on that, while the iron's still hot, so to speak.
Rick Delano is a fluent exponent of subtle ideas – as you are – and this made for a particularly arresting hour, given the subject matter. My own blog is devoted to questioning received wisdom regarding the nature of "facts" (an obsession entirely generated by the 9/11 event, in which the two sides supposedly examine the same evidence – and arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions). I therefore want to suggest that the truth about Man's place in the universe is unlikely to be a cut-and-dried affair. On the contrary, it's next to a certainty that it's deeply paradoxical, partaking both (or rather, neither) of the current scientific or objective (nihilist) position that the Earth is 'merely' an insignificant rock in an insignificant orbit around a mediocre etc, and (or rather, nor) of the quasi-religious (subjectivist) position that we're at the center of it all.
Since it's exceedingly likely that we're not the only pebble on the beach; that there's probably lots of intelligent life out there, peppering the galaxy, if not the universe, then, just as each of us humans is empirically and without contradiction the center of his own world, then so is it for all life, everywhere. Just as it is intellectually unsatisfying to suggest that we're 'merely' (again) but one of a myriad possibly superposed universes, and we just happen to be at the center of ours, so it seems to me equally unsatisfying to regress to a pre-Copernican interpretation of the cosmos in which Man alone occupies center stage. I think you and Rick make the same point. Some kind of marriage of the two – or, better, a transcendence of the two – is urgently called for.
At the quantum level light behaves both as particles and as waves. At the quantum level the observer is an indispensable part of the landscape he observes. What we still have to comprehend is that the same applies at the macro level. Empirically there's no such thing as an objective world – one that exists independent of all observers. We may usefully posit such a thing, but everything we have to say about a supposedly independently-existing universe is necessarily theoretical. Everything that you experience, without any exceptions whatsoever, happens (in total blackness) inside your own head. All is interpretation. Where, then, is the observer? Or, to put it another way, what is the difference between the supposed thing observed, and the supposed thing that observes it? What are you aside from what you sense and think? Some serious, still reflection reveals that there is no difference. The 'thing' supposedly observing and the 'thing' supposedly observed are one and the same. It seems to me to follow that the universe is a universe – i.e. not a multiverse. It's one, single, undivided entity. As such everywhere is the center.
Great comment! I've been reading Robert Lanza's "Biocentrism" http://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciousness-are-the-keys-to-understanding-the-true-nature-of-the-universe/ which offers a promising new perspective on these matters. I hope to have him as a guest before too long.