'We think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules – we live a while and then rot into the ground,' said the scientist on his website.
Lanza, from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, continued that as humans we believe in death because 'we've been taught we die', or more specifically, our consciousness associates life with bodies and we know that bodies die.
His theory of biocentrism, however, explains that death may not be as terminal as we think it is.
Biocentrism is classed as the theory of everything and comes from the Greek for 'life centre'.
It is the believe that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way round.
This suggests a person's consciousness determines the shape and size of objects in the universe.