Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff. It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American several years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants. Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stephen Shephard, The wheel of life, Trongsa dzong, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then, there are the people who -- like one person I know who I swear I'm not making up -- believe they are reincarnated from individuals who lived in places that don't, technically, exist.  This particular woman says in a past life she was a "gifted healer and wise woman from Atlantis."  She apparently remembers a lot of what she knew as an Atlantean person, which include pearls like "always strive to bring peace and love to those around you."

Which, honestly, I can't argue with, whether or not you're from Atlantis.

Apparently this study found that there are a great many other people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation." In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.  Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there.  At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already."  Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there.  Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof?  And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?"  At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.'

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

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The thoughtographer

Twice a year, a nearby town has a Friends of the Library used book sale that has become justly famous all over the region.  It features a quarter of a million books, runs for three weeks, and raises tens of thousands of dollars.  On the first day -- when the true rarities and collectibles are available -- the line to enter starts to form four hours before the doors open, and stretches all the way around the block.

I'm not quite such a fanatic, but it is still one of the high points of my year.  I've picked up some real gems there.  This year's take included the "cult bestseller" (says so right on the cover), Ghosts: True Encounters With the World Beyond by Hans Holzer, which is massive both in popularity and in actual weight.

If you're at all familiar with the field of parapsychology, you've probably heard of Holzer.  He was one of the principal investigators into the famous Amityville Horror (alleged) haunting.  He wrote over a hundred books, mostly on the supernatural and the occult, and for years taught courses in parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology.  Throughout his life -- and it was a long one, he died in 2009 at age 89 -- he was a vociferous believer in the paranormal, and equally strident denouncer of skeptics and scoffers.

Still, given my interest in beliefs in the supernatural, picking up a copy of this book for a couple of bucks was irresistible.  I'm glad to say it does not disappoint.  Besides containing hundreds of "true tales of ghosts and hauntings," he's not shy about saying what he thinks about the doubters:

To the materialist and the professional skeptic -- that is to say, people who do not wish their belief that death is the end of life as we know it to be disturbed -- the notion of ghosts is unacceptable.  No matter how much evidence is presented to support the reality of the phenomena, these people will argue against it and ascribe it to any of several "natural" causes.  Delusion or hallucination must be the explanation, or perhaps a mirage, if not outright trickery.  Entire professional groups that deal in the manufacturing of illusions have taken it upon themselves to label anything that defies their ability to reproduce it artificially through trickery or manipulation as false or nonexistent.  Especially among photographers and magicians, the notion that ghosts exist has never been popular.

There's a reason for that last bit, of course.  Photographers and magicians know how easy it is to fool people and create effects that look absolutely real.  It's not a coincidence that perhaps the most famous debunker, James Randi, was a professional stage magician before he dedicated his life to going after people like Sylvia Browne, Peter Popoff, and Uri Geller.

This paragraph (and the many others like it scattered throughout the book) shows that Holzer didn't really understand the definition of the word "skeptic."  Skeptics have the highest regard for evidence; in fact, it's the only thing that really convinces us.  But once it does, that's that.  Skeptics are able to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then," and turn on a dime if presented with reliable evidence.  However, that word "reliable" is usually the sticking point.  Holzer's compendium is chock-full of what he considers evidence, but which are either anecdotal accounts by people like "Mary G." and "John S.", or else demonstrations of the supernatural which are clearly explainable from the "natural causes" Holzer scoffs at.

The result is that he uncritically fell for people who were clearly frauds, and afterward staunchly stood by his assessment, a practice that was criticized by an article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research as "cast(ing) considerable doubt on the objectivity and reliability of his work as a whole."  One of the most egregious examples is his endorsement of the alleged abilities of the man who became known as "The Thoughtographer," Ted Serios.

Serios claimed to be able to use an ordinary camera outfitted with something he called a "gizmo" -- effectively, nothing more than a cardboard tube -- which was then aimed at his forehead.  He then (he said) sent his "thought energy" into the camera, and when the film was developed, it would have an image of what he was thinking about.

Ted Serios in 1967 [Image was released into the Public Domain by photographer Jule Eisenbud]

First, let's see what Holzer has to say about Serios:

A few years ago, Dr. Jules [sic] Eisenbud of the University of Colorado at Denver startled the world with his disclosures of the peculiar talents of a certain Ted Serios, a Chicago bellhop gifted with psychic photography talents.  This man could project images into a camera or television tube, some of which were from the so-called future.  Others were from distant places Mr. Serios had never been to.  The experiments were undertaken under the most rigid test conditions.  They were repeated, which was something the old-line scientists in parapsychology stressed over and over again.  Despite the abundant amount of evidence, produced in the glaring limelight of public attention and under strictest scientific test conditions, some of Dr. Eisenbud's colleagues at the University of Colorado turned away from him whenever he asked them to witness the experiments he was conducting.  So great was the prejudice against anything Eisenbud and his colleagues might find that might oppose existing concepts that men of scientists couldn't bear to find out for themselves.  They were afraid they would have to unlearn a great deal.

What Holzer conveniently fails to mention is that there was a second "gizmo" that Serios required -- a second, smaller tube with a lens at one end.  The other end contained a piece of an old 35-mm film slide, and when the flash went off, the image from the slide was projected right into the camera aperture.  It was small enough to be concealed in the palm of Serios's hand.

A magic trick, in other words.  Sleight-of-hand.

Serios's claims came to the attention of none other than the aforementioned James Randi, who invited Jule Eisenbud, Serios himself, and any other interested parties to come watch him up on stage -- where he replicated Serios's trick flawlessly.  Eisenbud afterward said he was "flabbergasted;" Serios gave a "wan smile" and wouldn't comment.

No mention of that in Holzer's book, either.

Look, I don't really blame Eisenbud for getting suckered; it's not like I wouldn't have been taken in, either.  We've all watched talented stage magicians do their thing and said, in bafflement, "How in the hell...?"  What I do blame Eisenbud for, though, is not pursuing it further -- telling Serios, "Okay, you need a 'gizmo'?  Tell me how it's made, and I'll make one for you -- show me you can do your trick without any props of your own construction."  Now, I also have to admit that working with Serios can't have been easy.  He was clearly mentally ill.  In Nile Root's book Thoughtography, about the Serios case, the author writes: 

Ted Serios exhibits a behavior pathology with many character disorders.  He does not abide by the laws and customs of our society.  He ignores social amenities and has been arrested many times.  His psychopathic and sociopathic personality manifests itself in many other ways.  He does not exhibit self-control and will blubber, wail and bang his head on the floor when things are not going his way.

He exhibits strong hostility toward figures of authority, such as policemen and scientists.  He is an alcoholic and in psychic experiments he has been encouraged toward the excessive use of alcohol.  He has demonstrated the symptoms of a manic-depressive with manic episodes.  In one hypermaniacal period he acted like a violent madman and could not be restrained.

He often becomes profane and raging, completely reckless.  While depressed he ignores other people, has a far-away look and is disenchanted with everything.  He is always bored with talk unless it is about him. He often imagines himself a hero, and sometimes identifies with a violent known personality.  He also exhibits sadistic behavior, for example by embarrassing Dr. Eisenbud once, giving as his own Dr. Eisenbud's name and his profession (a psychiatrist) when arrested.

In spite of the questionable research methods and the personality quirks of Serios, a number of Denver professional men believed Ted Serios was a psychic, with a unique power to record his thoughts with a Polaroid camera.

So I can see that it wouldn't have been any fun to try and force Serios to conform to adequate scientific control protocols.  Not that this excuses Eisenbud, though; he made the claim, so saying "Serios is impossible to control" doesn't obviate his duty to observe proper experimental procedure prior to publishing any results.

Holzer, though?  He ignored the overwhelming evidence that Serios was a fraud, claiming instead that there was "abundant amount of evidence, produced in the glaring limelight of public attention and under strictest scientific test conditions."  Which is not so much a dodge as it is a flat-out falsehood.  And that, to me, is inexcusable.

And another thing -- Holzer mischaracterizes skeptics and scientists in another way, one that shows that he didn't understand the scientific process at all.  He describes scientists as clinging to their preconceived notions, even in the face of evidence, as if the entire scientific edifice was threatened by new data, and the researchers themselves determined to sit back and keeping the same understanding of the universe they'd had all along.  The truth is, science depends on finding new and puzzling information; that's how science progresses.  Now, scientists are humans, and you can find many examples of people clutching their favorite model with both hands even when the contradictory evidence comes rolling in.  (A good example is how long it took the plate tectonics/continental drift model to be accepted.)  But then it's beholden upon the scientist making the extraordinary claim to produce such incontrovertible evidence that the opposition has no choice but to acquiesce -- which is exactly what happened when Drummond Matthews and Frederick Vine proved seafloor spreading and plate movement beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The truth is that finding new evidence that modifies or overturns a previous model is how careers are made in science.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Journalists are always writing articles with headlines that say, 'Scientists have to go back to the drawing board.'  As if we scientists are sitting in our offices, our feet up on the desk, masters of the universe, then suddenly... oops!  Somebody discovered something!  No, we're always back at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not making discoveries.  You're not doing science."

In my own case, I'm certainly a skeptic, even if I'm not a scientist but only a humble layperson.  And I can say without any hesitation that I would love it if there was hard evidence for the paranormal, and of life after death in particular.  Can you imagine how that would change our understanding of the world, and of ourselves?  Plus the added benefit of knowing that death wasn't the end of us.  Me, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of nonexistence; an afterlife would be awesome, especially if it involved a tropical climate, hammocks, and drinks with little umbrellas.

But be that as it may.  I still find Holzer's book entertaining, at least the parts with the actual ghost stories.  The diatribes about the evil skeptics and narrow-minded scientists, not so much.  It'd be nice to see more of the collaborative efforts to investigate paranormal claims, such as the ones done by the Society of Psychical Research.

But just saying "science is ignoring the evidence," and then presenting evidence that is clearly spurious, is not helping the parapsychologists' claims at all.

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Brain waves in the afterlife

It's understandable how much we cling to the hope that there's life after death.  Ceasing to exist is certainly not a comforting prospect.  Heaven knows (pun intended) I'm not looking forward to death myself, although I have to say that I'm more worried about the potential for debility and pain leading up to it than I am to death itself.  Being an atheist, I'm figuring that afterwards, I won't experience much of anything at all, which isn't scary so much as it is inconceivable.

Of course, if the orthodox view of Christianity is correct, I'll have other things to worry about than simple oblivion.

It's this tendency toward wishful thinking that pushes us in the direction of confirmation bias on the subject of survival of the soul.  Take, for example, a paper that came out just this week in PubMed called "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death."  The paper was based upon studies of four patients who had died after being removed from life support, in which electroencephalogram (EEG) readings were taken as their life signs faded away.  In one case, a particular type of brain waveform -- delta waves, which are associated with deep sleep -- continued for five minutes after cardiac arrest and drop in arterial blood pressure to zero.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors were cautious not to over-conclude; they simply reported their findings without making any kind of inference about what the person was experiencing, much less saying that this had any implications about his/her immortal soul.  In fact, it is significant that only one of the four patients showed any sort of brain wave activity following cardiac arrest; if there really was some sort of spirit-related phenomenon going on here, you'd think all four would have shown it.

That hasn't stopped the life-after-death crowd from jumping on this as if it were unequivocal proof of soul survival.  "One more piece of scientific evidence for an afterlife," one person appended to a link to the article.  "This can't be explained by ordinary brain science," said another.

The whole thing reminds me of the furor that erupted when the paper "Electrocortical Activity Associated With Subjective Communication With the Deceased," by Arnaud Delorme et al., showed up in Frontiers in Psychology four years ago.  The paper had some serious issues -- confirmation bias among the researchers, all of whom were connected in one way or another to groups more or less desperate to prove an afterlife, being only one.  The gist is that the researchers did brain scans of alleged mediums while they were attempting to access information about the dead.

To call the results equivocal is a compliment.  There were brain scans done of six mediums; of them, three scored above what you'd expect by chance.  In other words, half scored above what chance would predict, and half below -- pretty much the spread you'd expect if chance was all that was involved.  The sample size is tiny, and if you look at the questions the mediums were asked about the deceased people, you find that they include questions such as:

• Was the discarnate more shy or more outgoing?
• Was the discarnate more serious or more playful?
• Was the discarnate more rational or more emotional?
• Did death occur quickly or slowly?

Not only are these either/or questions -- meaning that even someone who was guessing would have fifty-fifty odds at getting an answer correct -- they're pretty subjective.  I wonder, for example, whether people would say I was "more rational" or "more emotional."  Being a science teacher and skeptic blogger, people who didn't know me well would probably say "rational;" my closest friends know that I'm a highly emotional, anxious bundle of nerves who is simply adept at covering it up most of the time.

Then there's this sort of thing:

• Provide dates and times of year that were important to the discarnate.

Not to mention:

• Does the discarnate have any messages specifically for the sitter?

Which is impossible to verify one way or the other.

Add that to the small sample size, and you have a study that is (to put it mildly) somewhat suspect.  But that didn't stop the wishful thinkers from leaping on this as if it was airtight proof of an afterlife.

Like I said, it's not that I don't understand the desire to establish the survival of the spirit.  No one would be happier than me if it turned out to be true (as long as the aforementioned hellfire and damnation isn't what is awaiting me).  But as far as the 2013 paper that was setting out to demonstrate the existence of an afterlife, and this week's paper that some folks are (unfairly) using for the same purpose -- it's just not doing it for me.

Be that as it may, I still have an open mind about the whole thing.  When there's good hard evidence available -- I'm listening.  Unless it happens after I have personally kicked the bucket, at which point I'll know one way or the other regardless.

The problem with hoaxes

If I had to pick the one thing that makes my job as a skeptic the most difficult, I wouldn't pick credulity, or ignorance of science, or even our tendency toward confirmation bias.

I would pick hoaxers.

I detest hoaxers.  The problem with a lie (which, let's be clear, is what a hoax is) is that once told, you've already accomplished three things:

1. You've damaged your own credibility;
2. You've suckered some people who probably will never find out the truth;
3. You've made it that much harder for the people who are actually interested in studying what you lied about to do research.

Take, for example, two hoaxes I ran across just in the last week, one (in my opinion) far more terrible than the other.

The less damaging one is a video, allegedly out of Blackburn, England, of a creepy "apparition" chasing a car.  Here's the YouTube video:

The video is admittedly creepy, with the slouching, white-clad figure shuffling along, its long hair swinging as it moves.  And it has all of the hallmarks of the "ghost encounter," the panicked chatter of the people in the car, the "ghost" coming toward them as if it wanted to steal their souls, and a scary backstory about an executed monk in nearby Turton Tower.

The problem is, of course, that it's a fake.  It's already been identified as part of a student film, clipped so as to make it look like a real encounter.  But this hasn't stopped the video from gaining over half a million views, most from people (to judge by the comments) who thought it was 100% real.

Far worse, in my opinion, is the hoax perpetrated by a boy and his family, just uncovered last week.  A boy named (I swear I'm not making this up) Alex Malarkey was seriously injured at age six in an automobile accident.  Upon waking from a coma, he told his father, Kevin Malarkey, a Christian therapist from Ohio, that he'd gone to heaven, where he'd met with and talked to Jesus Christ, as well as having a scary encounter with the devil.  Alex's story was turned into a bestselling book, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, and it buoyed up the faith and hopes of countless people who wanted desperately to think that there is an afterlife.

The bubble burst a few days ago.  Alex, now 16, released a letter, which (in part) reads as follows:

I did not die. I did not go to Heaven. 

I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to.

He goes on to say that he's still a staunch Christian, and that he thinks everyone else should be, too; but the damage is done, I think.  Bookstores have, by and large, pulled The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven from the shelves.  Understandably.  The only other option would have been to shelve it under "Fiction."

You have to wonder what Kevin Malarkey will do with his ill-gotten gains.  It's probably too much to hope for that he'll give it all to charity, but that's certainly what he should do, given the circumstances.

I get asked frequently, as an atheist, if I think it's possible that there's life after death.  My answer usually is, "I'll find out eventually."  I'm not just being flippant; it's the only possible answer when there's no hard evidence one way or the other.  Of the claims I've seen, there certainly haven't been any that have convinced me.  But falsehoods like the ones told by the Malarkey family muddy the water further, making all of us more likely to look at any claims of an afterlife with a wry eye.  Maybe some tales of ghosts and spirit survival and near-death experiences are true; but given the human propensity to lie, I'm perhaps to be excused if I don't give any of them much credit.

So to the Blackburn ghost people, and to the entire Malarkey family, and to anyone else who has created a hoax, and made it more difficult for truth-seekers to find what they're looking for, I have only one thing to say:

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Stephen Hawking said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Stephen Hawking was wrong in the realm of abstruse quantum phenomena, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.  Expertise is worth something, and Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. in physics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.  And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:

Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness. While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:

(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people.  It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.   

In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways. 

Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.

Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that's all it does.  Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:

(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.

But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right.  q.e.d. and ha ha ha."