In today's thrilling blog post, I look at the anthropic principle, why it's sometimes trivial-but-useful, but sometimes a complete load of hooey.
The weak anthropic principle basically states that the Universe is the way it is because things happened the way they did. It's unfortunate, and completely unnecessary, that it's more often stated to be about sentient life, because it really isn't. The idea is that by knowing the contents of the Universe, you can constrain the processes that must have happened to form such contents. It really doesn't make any difference if you choose to explain the existence of turkeys, sand, or clouds - using sentient life only sounds mystical if you think there's something fundamentally special about it.
The strong anthropic principle ties in with the idea that the Universe is so carefully fine-tuned to support intelligent life that there must have been a designer. This is wrong every way you look at it. There are so many fundamental parameters that fine-tuning is a myth - if you just alter one, then sure you'll screw everything up and the Universe won't support life anymore. But if you alter two or three...
Moreover, the idea that the Universe looks designed specifically for us, rather than intelligent life in general, looks decidedly ropey to me. Most of the Universe is a complete hell-hole as far as human life is concerned. Even the Earth is often an incredibly hostile place to live - we survive in spite of our environment as much as because of it.
Not that the lack of fine-tuning in any way diminishes the astounding fact that we exist at all. Our existence may be incredibly unlikely, but that in no way requires the hand of a designer.
Placeholder post intended to be replaced with a better summary.
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I thought of a more succinct way to handle the strong anthropic principle, which I added to the post :
ReplyDelete"In short, the Universe will always appear to be fine-tuned to contain whatever it happens to contain. Whether that includes life or not is just a detail."
Will read at home.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor - I entirely agree with your commentary. Moving on to reading the article . . . .
ReplyDeleteYou're commentary was actually more interesting than most of the article. I do like the image at the bottom thought. ;^)
ReplyDeleteOh . . . just realized you wrote the article too! Well, sometimes a brief, concise statement has more impact than a verbose article.
ReplyDeleteDavid Lazarus Well, of course writing the longer article helped me to come up with the more precise version. :)
ReplyDeleteAlso, people who do think there's something to the fine-tuning argument are probably going to be more persuaded by the longer version (e.g. Hoyle didn't use an anthropic argument and it wouldn't have mattered if he did; life isn't a special thing so far as the Universe is concerned; the designer's purpose (if there is one) is unknown; and fine-tuning is a meaningless concept).
Designer? What designer? :^D
ReplyDelete