Anthropic Principle Refuted
Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:31:43 -0500 (EST)
At 09:17 AM 1/11/98 -0800, Hal Finney <hal@rain.org> wrote:
>One reason for believing in the existence of God is the fact that the
>universe appears to be narrowly tailored for the existence of our kind
>of life. Take a look at figure 5 on http://www.sns.ias.edu/~max/toe.html
>and you see what a tiny fraction of the possible values for physical
>constants would allow life as we know it to exist. One way to explain
>this seeming coincidence is to say that our universe was intentionally
>created to have parameters in this region.
>
>Note that this does not explain where the universe creator came from.
>It is possible that the universe in which he lives is fundamentally
>different from our own in ways we can't currently imagine, and is such
>that life can exist automatically. He then created our universe to
>explore the possibility of how our kind of life would work, which is
>only possible within this narrow and special range (an advanced version
>of the way we play with different rules for cellular automata, and find
>that only a limited set of rules lead to interesting behavior).
>
>Of course there are alternate explanations for this coincidence. It
>may be that all possible universes exist, and only those for which the
>constants are such as to allow the formation of life do have life form.
>But that is not a much simpler theory than the one which says that
>we were formed out of another universe; both require the existence of
>universes that we otherwise have no evidence for.
No, actually the anthropic principle is false. Certain physical parameters
just are. We exist because of them, not vice versa. And if the universe
had been different, perhaps some other conscious life forms would
exist and argue the same arguments. But to argue this principle is like
saying the God exists because I deal a certain hand of cards and not
another.:)
Daniel Ust