... But I'm kind of interested why you think it's BS. ...
OK ... Let me attempt to address this with a
very cursory critical review of Lanza's seven basic principles ...
The first principle of biocentrism is based on the premise that what we observe is dependent on the observer, and says that what we perceive as reality is “a process that involves our consciousness.”
This is correct, and it's not news. Setting aside Lanza's fuzzy allusion to the even fuzzier notion of 'consciousness', this represents ground that's been covered by (e.g.) Peircean semiotics and second-order cybernetics for up to a century. Some recommended readings if you want to explore this point would include people like (e.g.):
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Heinz von Foerster
- Gregory Bateson
- Humberto Maturana
- Francisco Varela
- Ernst von Glasersfeld
The second and third principles state that “our external and internal perceptions are intertwined” and that the behavior of particles “is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer,” respectively.
The first bit (re: intertwining) has always been a canonical principle in psychology and cognitive science, and (in the cursory form quoted) I can only take it as a tautology for which Lanza scores no points.
The second bit (re: particles' behavior contingent on the observer) is bogus and isn't even decent scholarly sleight-of-hand. Lanza himself frames observer-contingency with respect to the
probabilities of a particle's behavior rather than the behavior per se. This is the point at which Lanza makes the leap from accommodating biological / 'consciousness' issues to giving them not just primacy, but even causal control.
The fourth principle suggests that consciousness must exist and that without it “matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability.”
Insofar as Lanza never specifies which of the myriad spins on 'consciousness' he's leveraging here, the first bit is vacuous. Perhaps more to the point - he (a biologist touting the biological sciences) offers no explanatory linkage between biological life or operations and whatever version of 'consciousness' he's promoting.
He side-slips from epistemology to ontology in the second bit, where he predicates physical existence on the abstract probabilistic description of the physical. IMHO this bit is somewhere between hand-waving and outright BS.
The fifth principle points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life.
Ah, yes - the longstanding and well-worn 'Goldilocks' / 'Anthropic' principle.
It's interesting that a biologist touting biology would miss the obvious opportunity to note that the degree of 'good fit' between life and the physical universe is just as lucidly explained by life's adaptability rather than the universe's design. This, of course, would deny him a clear path to his eventual position that the physical is contingent on the conscious / cognitive.
Finally, the sixth and seventh principles state that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. ...
This is correct, and it's not news. Spatiality and temporality are side- or meta-effects of perceptual-cognitive processes underlying psychomotor operations. The 'space' and 'time' referred to in (e.g.) physics are formal abstractions inserted to support quantification and analysis reflecting these aspects of 'conscious experience' (as Lanza puts it).
A lot of psychological research literature has dealt with spatiality and temporality issues - particularly reviews and analyses of pathological cases (e.g., brain injuries). I'd also recommend looking into biosemiotics in its original sense, starting with the work of Jakob von Uexküll.
