Robert J. Kolker wrote:

Uncle Al wrote:

Life is finely tuned to exist in the universe. There is no anthropic
principle. Sentience exists because the universe cannot be bothered
with doing the fine stuff..

The Weak Anthropic principle has validity. It the universe were not a
certain way physically then we would not have evolved. The nature of the
universe must be such that life like ours can evolve in conditions that
existed and exist on Earth. If the universe did not have stars that
exploded and produced the elements of which we are composed we would not
be here. As Carl Sagan used to say " We are all made of sturrr stuffff,
the stuffff of bilyuns and bilyuns of sturrrs"

Bob Kolker


Al isn't denying it's existence, only its relevance.

I hope that it interests you that this was my argument for the relative
strength of the weak argument per my take on it. In terms of strength,
I'd say bout a hundred proof...

~

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...%40sundial.net

Kevin A. Scaldeferri wrote:

In article abergman-841B1F.01014824112003@localhost,
Aaron Bergman wrote:

Nobody likes the anthropic principle. Not even Lenny.

But that doesn't mean it's wrong.

It would suck if it were correct

I would have replaced "correct" with "necessary" and "wrong" with
"unnecessary".

At least in it's weak form, as I usually think of it, the anthropic
principle is tautologous. All it says it that there exists a data
point, which is that we exist, and that nature must be consistent with
this.

There are various stronger formulations, but they are all philosophy
or religion.


I disagree only if given that the underlying direction of all action in
a big bang induced expanding universe is ultimately entropic. Any
occurrence within the system is, therfore, a result of the tuning of the
constants that were set at t=10^-43 . This includes humans in all their
glory, and the weak argument would support this via the fact that it is
observationally proven that the human is one of nature's more preferred
methods for satisfying the second law of thermodynamics.

Humans represent a very efficient path of entropic action, and so the
need for human efficiency has pre-existed since the big bang occurred,
and there is nothing philosophical about that. In fact, it would
require an unfounded faith-like philosophical assumption to conclude
anything else."