The universe didn't exist until I stubbed my toe on the nightstand (or Schopenhauer vs. Biocentrism)

Topics I like reading about and understand absolutely nothing about.

The Self-Aware Universe Hypothesis or Biocentrism (Robert Lanza)

Formulated by biologist and medical scientist Robert Lanza alongside theoretical physicists, it contends that life and consciousness are not secondary byproducts of the universe, but rather the creators of physical reality.

The premise:
Taking the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to the extreme, it argues that space and time do not exist as independent physical objects, but as forms of animal perception. Without a conscious observer to collapse the wave function, the universe remains in an indeterminate state of probabilities.

Key principles (summarized):

1.    What we perceive as reality is a process involving our consciousness.
2.    Space and time are not absolute entities, but forms of animal perception.
3.    The behavior of particles (and of every object) is tied to the presence of an observer.
4.    Without consciousness, matter only exists as waves of probability.
5.    The universe is "fine-tuned" for life precisely because life is what generates it.

This also allows him to tackle the "fine-tuning" problem of the cosmos (why physical constants have the exact values that allow for life). According to him, it is neither a coincidence nor is there any need to invoke an infinite multiverse: the universe has those properties because we (consciousness) created it that way.
Lanza's leap is to interpret "measurement" as "conscious observation"—meaning that a perceiving mind is required for the collapse to occur. From this, he concludes that space and time are not properties of the universe, but "mental tools" of the observing animal, and that without consciousness, the universe remains in an unresolved limbo of probabilities.
It is a beautiful theory, internally coherent, which suffers from only one minor flaw: nobody explained to the 13.8-billion-year-old universe that it was supposed to wait around.

Schopenhauer as the theory's "grumpy godfather"

Schopenhauer didn't need quantum physics to reach a similar conclusion; he drew it from Kant a century earlier.
Before Lanza needed a particle collider, there was already someone who had reached a similar conclusion sitting at his desk in Frankfurt, with no instruments other than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a remarkable capacity for introspection.
Arthur Schopenhauer opens The World as Will and Representation with a line that today sounds almost prophetic: "The world is my representation." He does not say that the world contains a representation, nor that perception is an imperfect filter of an already-made reality out there. He says that the world, as it is given to us—extended, ordered in time, causally chained—is, in its very form, a product of the knowing subject.
For Schopenhauer, following Kant but pushing him to a more radical domain, space, time, and causality are not properties of things-in-themselves, but the a priori forms with which the intellect organizes any possible experience. We do not invent them on a whim nor do we choose them: they are the very structure by which an animal brain—his, ours—renders the world intelligible. Outside that structure, what remains is the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich), inaccessible as an object of knowledge, which Schopenhauer, in his most famous twist, names Will.
The difference with Lanza is not one of substance, but of method, and that is where it gets interesting.

The party-pooper physics committee (or how the universe manages on its own without anyone looking)

Predictably, the academic world didn't take too kindly to a biologist explaining to quantum physics what its true purpose was. The physics community—that guild that normally bickers internally for decades without agreeing on a single thing—surprisingly found swift consensus on one point: the universe does not need anyone looking at it to function. According to them, the phenomenon Lanza attributes to observing consciousness goes by a far less poetic name: decoherence, the simple friction between a particle and its environment. That is, reality doesn't collapse because a conscious being deigns to gaze upon it; it collapses because the universe, rude as it is, interacts with itself all the time without asking anyone's permission. Your living room wall doesn't need you to look at it to go on being a wall: rubbing against the air, the light, and the dust already "observing" it 24/7 is quite enough, requiring no overtime pay nor philosophical recognition.
The second charge against Lanza is even more devastating, if less entertaining: the theory predicts nothing testable. No possible experiment can confirm or refute it—which, in the scientific world, is the equivalent of pulling up to a police checkpoint without an ID: they won't arrest you, but they won't let you pass either. It is a theory that explains itself perfectly within its own walls, like those relatives who devise a family theory about why they always lose their keys, and it never fails... because the theory conveniently adjusts itself whenever needed.
And then there's the question no biocentrist wants to answer over dinner: who qualifies as an observer? If a human being collapses the wave function just by looking, does a dog do it too? An insomniac cockroach? A smart thermostat? If the answer is "anything with a shred of consciousness," then the universe has spent 13.8 billion years being continuously observed by billions of bacteria, and the "grand mystery" of quantum collapse dissolves with the same level of drama as a party where people were actually present all along—it's just that nobody bothered to announce it.
And just as Schopenhauer was about to turn off the lights of the universe to leave us all in empirical nothingness, a spectral voice echoed from the corner of out-of-print books. It was the spirit of Henri Bergson, waving his élan vital like a battle flag...
Hovering over this entire debate, like an uninvited ghost nobody dares kick out, looms the shadow of Henri Bergson and his élan vital: that vital impulse which, according to him, runs through all living matter and drives it forward without classical physics being able to fully explain it.
How do you expect the universe to exist without life, if matter is nothing more than the sediment left behind by the Élan Vital in its wake?
 

Bergson's defense

An awkward silence settled over the room. Schopenhauer, pleased with his demolition, was already packing his philosophical walking sticks into his bag. The physicists were checking their decoherence notes with the expression of someone who has just won a dinner debate without raising their voice. And Lanza, poor guy, was holding his double-slit slide like someone holding a broken umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm.
That was when the room's temperature dropped three degrees—not due to physics, but for theatrical effect—and from the corner of out-of-print books emerged, wrapped in an aura of pure energy and with his mustache still intact despite eternity, the spirit of Henri Bergson.
"One moment," he said, and his mere presence made even Schopenhauer look up, curious to see another German... pardon, Frenchman, as devoted to solemnity as himself. "You debate matter as if it were primary, given, solid, and life and consciousness as a late accident that learned to float on top of it. I've been telling you the opposite for over a century, and nobody made an essay with memes about me: matter is the trace left behind by life as it passes through. Not the other way around."
I told you so! Matter is just the trace left behind by life as it passes, not the other way around.
The physicists exchanged a glance. One of them, with the patience of someone who had already argued this with Einstein and lost their standing in the process, muttered something about "vital impulse" and "a lack of mathematical rigor." Bergson was unfazed.
"Ah, rigor. Always rigor. You measure time as if it were a train car, one point after another, each identical to the previous one, countable, divisible, dead. But lived time—la durée—that isn't measured: it is experienced. And in that experience, there is a force, a thrust, something that cannot be explained by adding electrons or subtracting probabilities. Robert," he said, turning toward Lanza with almost paternal tenderness, "you sensed something true, even if you dressed it in the wrong costume. You didn't need quantum physics. You needed to trust intuition over intellect—which is the only thing I came to ask of you my entire career, and nobody paid attention until a biologist looking for a fight showed up."
Schopenhauer, who couldn't stand having his spotlight of pessimism stolen, chimed in reluctantly:
"All of this is lovely, Henri, but the life you so celebrate is pure suffering, unfulfilled desire, a wheel turning without purpose."
"And yet it turns!" Bergson exclaimed, arms open as if embracing the entire universe. "That is what escapes you: the impulse doesn't need to make sense to be real. Life doesn't ask for permission; it doesn't wait for a lab verdict to be validated. It moves forward, creates, makes mistakes, persists. That is the élan vital: not a force to be measured, but a force to be felt. And if you need an electron to collapse to believe that life matters, the problem isn't with life. It's with the faith you place in your instruments."
A different kind of silence, this time born not of defeat but of genuine bewilderment, draped over the room. No one could refute Bergson with an equation, because Bergson had never offered one. And there, right there, is where Lanza's biocentrism—so thoroughly ridiculed just a paragraph earlier—found, through the back door, its finest advocate: someone willing to defend it not because it was true, but because he felt it ought to be. Which is, after all, the most honest defense any fringe theory could ever hope to receive.
And so the universe, caught between the pessimism of a German, the enthusiasm of a Frenchman, and the slides of an optimistic biologist, continues to not require our opinion to exist—though, evidently, we still require its opinion to understand our own.

Transparency note: Original idea with AI-generated text revised by me. I used Gemini, Claude, Mistral, and Grok.