The Anthropic Principle

[Senegoid]

@Chronos

Maybe the alternative isn’t “finding ourselves in an unsupporting universe”, but not finding ourselves at all. This calls back to perhaps the most fundamental of all philosophical conundrums: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Legend has it that Leibniz gave an answer to this question: That there are infinitely many ways that the universe could have contained something, but only one way that it could have contained nothing. Thus, the odds are ∞:1 that the universe would contain something.

All this talk here suggests that Leibniz blew it. It seems instead, with all the fundamental constants required to be within such narrow tolerances for there to be anything at all, that there are actually very limited ways (perhaps only one) that the universe could have contained something, but substantially infinite ways the universe could have contained nothing. (That is, nothing more than a seething [del]mass[/del] existence of abstract wave functions that couldn’t even organize themselves into atoms.)

Raymond Smullyan, in his book What Is The Name of This Book? (Full Text on-line (PDF)) tells of a philosopher who made it his life’s project to find the answer to this question, with an astonishing result! See Chapter 10.

[Francis_Vaughan]

The trouble with the fundamental question is that it infinitely recurses. Leibnitz doesn’t answer the question because he still requires a structure within which to place his infinite number of possibilities. He talked of a universe that contained nothing - that isn’t nothing, it is embedded in the logical structures to reason about an empty universe. An empty universe is not the same thing as no universe.

{ø} ≠ ø

[Mosier]

@LSLGuy

I sure hope you’re kidding.

I don’t think there’s an argument against my assertion that wouldn’t work at least equally well against the OP’s.

[Voyager]

@Chronos

Personally, I think of the Anthropic Principle as less of a principle itself, and more as an exception to the Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle says that we should assume that the place we happen to find ourselves in the Universe is typical of the Universe as a whole. The Anthropic Principle adds to that “…except insofar as conditions need to support us being here”.

At the level of the universe. On a more local level we are here because of the existence of a planet with characteristics far from common in the universe. In our case we can prove the multi-planet-verse, and can be reasonably sure that other planets not exactly like ours can support life.

Making the AP planetary, we can note that we are happy the earth lets us exist, and note that the Martians don’t complain about a planet that doesn’t let them exist.

[MrDibble]

Doulas Adams dealt with the AP best, I think:

imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.