Biocentrism

a very strange book, its goal is to layout a supposed theory of existence that is apriori biological, but its ontological order is perpetually confused, it denies materialism while constantly making implicit materialistic assumptions in its arguments, it feels at best like a first draft of the more rigorous, principled and coherent interface theory of Donald hoffman.
The book's structure is also strange, its interweaving of autobiographical chapters into an otherwise technical book feel very forced and out of place, despite Robert lanza's best attempts to create flimsy connection with the loose anecdotes and the core essence of the book.
The tone is likewise odd, many of the metaphores fall flat (wtf does the "labrynthian hallways of the milkyway" even mean ?), it often times feels lacking in intellectual humility, acquiring more of a sales pitch timbre with statements like "biocentrism is the only human comprehensible explanation of how the world can be", really? the only one? also the implicit assumption that an explanation of how the world can be needs to be human understandable is just ... weak. To be fair, Robert lanza is no philosopher and no physicist, but I would still have expected him to at least try to argue his point more analytically, maybe expound on competing theories, and compare his proposed "theory"'s major implication against theirs, and do a bit more
than base the entire argument of the centrality of consciousness on the intuitive absurdity of imagining a universe without consciousness, a task that is impossible by definition. imagine a universe that is not observed, you can't ? that means it doesn't exist without an observer QED. somehow that doesn't feel very convincing or scientifically grounded.
Though he does spend a little bit of the early parts of the book pointing out some of the commonly held truisms and dogmas of physics and pointing out their failings, unreverendly asking questions that feel positively blasphemous, raising the carpet to show all the problematic implications that have been swifly dusted in there by physicists with statements that feel like they give some explanation but are in fact vacuous e.g. what existed before the big bang? oh the whole concept of space and time have no meaning before then ? that can't be the end of the line of questioning, can it?

The book does work as a great tour de force over the history of the evolution of quantum physics and the authors do a fantastic job of capturing and relaying the true weirdness of quantum phenomenons, many of these experiments like the quantum eraser and delayed-choice experiments I had come across before but their implications were not fully grasped by me until I saw them through the eyes of Robert lanza especially the emphasis on the informational side of it, that the mere availability and storage of the state information is sufficient to collapse the wave function. He was also the only other person to acknowledge the consciousness of shrodinger's cat, the anthropocentricity of the copenhagen interpretation was starting to drive me nuts. likewise the implications of relativistic speeds are explained clearly while still avoiding the condescending tones that many pop-science books fall into.

There is so much I can go into in terms of the many ontological contradictions, poverty of the writing style, but the main gripe I have with this book is that robert lanza seems to spend the entire book collecting evidence for a case that is never fully made, leaving the book as little more than a collection of facts that though interesting and enlightening in their own right, are never really congealed into anything remotely resembling a coherent theory. I fully agree with whoever it is that said that "Lanza stops exactly where the interesting part begins"