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IEET > Vision > Directors > Nick Bostrom
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Bostrom and others on the anthropic principle
Posted: Feb 19, 2007
The universe appears to be so finely tuned to permit the existence of intelligent life that there may have been an Intelligent Designer. Or is it that since we can only exist in one of the infinite number of universes that permit intelligent life that is the only kind of universe we can observe? The latter is the “anthropic principle.” Nick Bostrom is one of the world’s experts on this question, and is interviewed for this excellent documentary about it.
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Professors Reese, Tegmark and the others do not go far enough in pursuing the implications of Anthropic Reasoning. It is not a matter of a just a handful of physical constants that appear fine tuned to allow life, nor is it something that can be explained away by reliance on either a "multiverse" or simplistic "intelligent design" assertions. (Please visit my Blog, home to my upcoming book on the subject = http://anthropic.blogspot.com/)
Instead, I describe a much more personal perspective (see below, from the book jacket).
J.M.Cohen
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Here’s a fact: From the Big Bang to your birth on earth, this universe did not miss a beat.
Somehow, every twist and turn of physics, chemistry, biology, earth making and life’s evolution twisted and turned your way. When and wherever events hit a crossroads over 13.7 billion years, they took the road that led to you.
You can know it’s true … because here you are, alive to know it.
An apparently random, wild sequence ran right along to the place you stand at this very moment. You find yourself self-aware, a result of every falling domino that fell so precisely as to give rise to your birth. One misstep, one zig in place of a zag, one essential event of nature other than it was … and there’d be no “story of you” to tell, no you to hear it.
There are amazing coincidences, seeming accidents and chance conditions interconnected in the most startling ways, flukes, fortuities and lucky breaks, level upon irreplaceable level, stretching as far as time itself. So many events, seemingly, need not have occurred, but nonetheless did occur for our world, this galaxy, this universe, all that’s necessary for your life to be.
I present a most personal-to-you twist on the Anthropic Principle:
Never once in the history of this universe did a single atom spin or sputter, split or splice in a way to prevent your being, not one if it was crucial to your being. What is more, every required atom, without a falter if indispensable to you, spun and sputtered, split and spliced precisely when and how needed for you to be a product down-the-line … all as shown by your living at history’s current end. Thus, a method for prediction and experimentation about the nature of our universe is presented: Can the very fact of our lives serve as the basis for precise hypotheses concerning the fundamental structure of this universe, the nature of stars and galaxies, the history of our planet, the path and mechanism of evolution … hypotheses that are testable, falsifiable? Can we predict with certainty those physical properties that must have been just what is necessary for our births, and not of any nature to have foreclosed that outcome? Such a method of anthropic prediction goes against the grain of modern science and its vision of human life as a just-happened-to-happen effect. Instead, here is a method of prediction and experimentation, concerning the most fundamental properties of the universe, based on little else than the fact that the experimenter exists.
I should add that the reason I do not feel that the "multiverse" is an explanation is because I am in this universe, the only one I know and experience as the home of my life. I must ask, not only why there happens to be any universe anywhere in which I can have my life, but why I am experiencing my life in the one universe that would have needed to be so were my life to be possible. For example, if one of the other universes in the ensemble had all needed conditions for a "me," but this universe did not, I suppose (under our present image of self identity) that some clone or doppelganger of "me" might live there - but not the one and only "me" I know and am experiencing, the one in this place and time line.
Thus, the question is how things are right in, seemingly, the one and only universe in which I would have required them to be right for my life to be. The other universes of the ensemble are irrelevant to solving that mystery.
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