"Derek Potter" wrote in message
...
Immortalist gets an answer from me...


"Derek Potter" wrote in message
.. .
abracad gets an answer from

Anthropic Principle: Many people are aware of the weak and strong anthropic
principle. The weak one says, basically, that is was jolly amazing of the
universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point
where they make a linving in, for example, universities, while the strong one
says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans
should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with
words like 'Cosmic' and 'Chaos' in the titles.

The universe is also balanced in such a way to allow rocks to exist, so
perhaps
we should call it a Lithic Principle.

Not obviously. It may be that the ratio of strong to weak force
strengths is finely-balanced to allow nucleosynthesis in stars and
thus rocks to form but the simple formation of rocks from magma and
sediments doesn't seem to need much fine tuning. The supply of air,
food and so on to human beings was once interpreted as Divine
Providence, but now, thanks to Barrow and Tipler, we can dismiss that
argument in three letters: WAP. It tends to reappear as the Argument
from Design.


Good, then we can also dismiss a fool sucka that takes the old debate seriously
too?

Of course WAP as applied to science hinges on how many ad-hoc rules
are required to get from apparently universal physical laws to the
specific conditions required for life to arise and thrive. But WAP
itself seems to be a principle that is invoked in non-sceintific
contexts as well.

I can't remember whether B&Tdescribe a teleological AP but the
strongest AP that made any sense to me didn't assert that "the whole
point of the universe was that humans should ..." it asserted that
human beings, being good observers, collapsed the wave function of the
universe. Thus (it says) the only self-consistent universes are 1)
ones in which observers arise 2) ones which remain in a mixed state
indefinitely.

If Scrabble is necessary, then so are players, and a universe to play in.
Woozy
calls this the "Really Strong" or "Scrabble" Anthropic Principle. Humans (or
at
least intelligent beings) are necessary, providing an order to biological
evolution which has been lacking since the failure of the Chain of Being. This
also suggests that if aliens exist, they may well play Scrabble.

I suspect they play Conceptual Scrabble: you get dealt a handful of
out-of-context concepts and string them together to make specious
arguments. Extra points for obscurity.

Philosopher, physicist and mathematician see a black sheep.

'All sheeps are black' - immediately says philosopher.

'There are sheeps and some of them are black' - says physicist.

'There is at least one sheep, and at least half of it is black' - says
mathematician.

'There is an observation of a black sheep. Let us construct a
hypothesis that all observations of sheep are that they are black. But
let us not impose an ontology of sheep onto our observations: let us
stick to what we observe which is that sheep are or are not black, we
will not impute existence to the sheep, only to the observations.' -
says an alt.philosopher.

That still leaves the maggots...