Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

  Post 116.  October 4, 2021

   The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

   A  Deistic Picture of the Universe

I had heard of the Anthropic Argument, that the world was designed specifically for human habitation, but didn’t really scrutinize it until recently. The core concept was implicit in the Intelligent Design theories of Christian apologists. And I understood the general reasoning – from an array of puzzling scientific “coincidences”, such as the unique “initial conditions” and “fine-tuned constants”¹ that seemed arbitrarily selected to produce a world with living & thinking creatures. But, I assumed that the evidence may have been cherry-picked to support a foregone conclusion. Now, I have finally got around to reading this highly-technical 700 page tome, full of arcane mathe-matical equations. Of course, as a layman, I am not fluent in the language of Physics and advanced Math. So, I simply skimmed the hard parts, and focused on the easier portions, that were expressed in plain English. It wasn’t easy, but I think it was time well spent, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of Philosophical and Scientific Cosmology.

In the foreword, prominent physicist John Archibald Wheeler summarized the philosophical meaning of this scientific data : “It is not only that man is adapted to the universe . . .”, as implied by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, but that, “the universe is adapted to man.” He goes on to assert the “central point of the anthropic principle”, that “a life-giving factor² lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world.” He made that assertion, despite knowing that “design” is a dirty word in the vocabulary of most scientists. The authors mention several key assumptions, (see side-notes left), that also apply to the Enformationism thesis. Yet, Wheeler goes further out on a limb to contend that, “This amazing prediction looks like being some day testable and therefore would seem to count as ‘falsifiable’ in the sense of Karl Popper”. He may be best known for his provocative “It from Bit” hypothesis, that everything in the material world is created from the immaterial essence that we now know as “Information”. Which is the core concept of my own philosophical worldview.

Barrow and Tipler didn’t invent the notion of an Anthropic (human oriented) Principle in Nature. They merely digested many different cosmological theories over centuries into a form that is amenable to the technical and mathematical format of modern science. They “traced the history of the underlying world-view in which it has germinated”. And I was pleased to see that my own Enformationism  fits neatly into a niche in the cultural evolution of such a teleological world. However, the authors prefer the term “eutaxiological”, which means that the end state is unknown (i.e. no prophecy), and implies that the Process may be the Purpose. But first, they address the Copernican assumption (rule of thumb), underlying most of modern cosmology. Which asserts as a “principle” – based on 17th century observations – that “we [humans] do not occupy a privileged position in the Universe”. To which, the authors reply that “our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers”.

                       Post 116 continued . . . . Click Next

1. Constants :
Fundamental invariant qualities of nature as derived from theoretical equations of Physics. Most are expressed as dimensionless ratios between two observed facts.

2. Elan Vital :
The vital force or impulse of life, especially : a creative principle held by Bergson to be immanent in all organisms and responsible for evolution.
In the Enformationism Thesis, that role is played by shape-shifting Information : the power to enform, and the code for self-organization..

ANTHROPIC ASSUMPTIONS

A. We can identify which natural properties are necessary or compatible for life

B. Evolution follows natural laws and inherent limitations set by initial conditions & constants

C. The element Carbon, only produced in certain stars, is essential to life, but is rare (.025%) on Earth

D. The initial conditions of our universe were selected from all possible logical (mental) or actual (multiverse)  combinations

E. The complex pathway to Life has a low statistical probability

F. An unlikely occurrence is not necessarily a miracle, but must have some ultimate Cause

Copernican Mediocracy :
“The "Axis of Evil" is a name given to an anomaly in astronomical observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The anomaly appears to give the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than might be expected by chance – a result which has been claimed to be evidence of a departure from the Copernican principle. . . .
   But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun – the plane of the earth around the sun – the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”
___Lawrence Krauss
     Cosmologist

The Anthropic

Cosmological

Principle

John D. Barrow

& Frank Tipler

1996

“. . . A series of mysterious coincidences between the numerical values of the the fundamental constants of Nature. The possibility of our own existence seems to hinge precariously upon these coincidences..”

Made for Man

Privilege vs Justice

ENFORMATIONISM

“The Anthropic Principle may be a remarkable starting point, allowing us to place constraints on the Universe's properties owing to the fact of our existence, but that is not a scientific solution in and of itself”.
____Ethan Seigel

Note : The ACP is a philosophical conjecture, based on scientific data