anthropic principle

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pages: 186 words: 64,267

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

However, suppose that only in the smooth regions were galaxies and stars formed and were conditions right for the development of complicated self-replicating organisms like ourselves who were capable of asking the question: why is the universe so smooth? This is an example of the application of what is known as the anthropic principle, which can be paraphrased as “We see the universe the way it is because we exist.” There are two versions of the anthropic principle, the weak and the strong. The weak anthropic principle states that in a universe that is large or infinite in space and/or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time.

In this case the only difference between the regions would be their initial configurations and so the strong anthropic principle would reduce to the weak one. A second objection to the strong anthropic principle is that it runs against the tide of the whole history of science. We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe. Yet the strong anthropic principle would claim that this whole vast construction exists simply for our sake.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle. There are a number of objections that one can raise to the strong anthropic principle as an explanation of the observed state of the universe. First, in what sense can all these different universes be said to exist? If they are really separate from each other, what happens in another universe can have no observable consequences in our own universe.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

The quotation from the ‘eloquent blogger’ is at http://www.religionisbullshit.net/blog/2005_09_01_archive.php. 66 Dawkins (1995). The anthropic principle: planetary version 67 Carter admitted later that a better name for the overall principle would be ‘cognizability principle’ rather than the already entrenched term ‘anthropic principle’: B. Carter, ‘The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 310, 1983, 347–63. For a book-length discussion of the anthropic principle, see Barrow and Tipler (1988). 68 Comins (1993). 69 I spelled this argument out more fully in The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986). The anthropic principle: cosmological version 70 Murray Gell-Mann, quoted by John Brockman on the ‘Edge’ website, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/smolin.html. 71 Ward (1996: 99); Polkinghorne (1994: 55).

However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it. It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence. I think the confusion arises in the religious mind because the anthropic principle is only ever mentioned in the context of the problem that it solves, namely the fact that we live in a life-friendly place.

And, thanks to Darwin, we know how it is brought about: by natural selection. The anthropic principle is impotent to explain the multifarious details of living creatures. We really need Darwin’s powerful crane to account for the diversity of life on Earth, and especially the persuasive illusion of design. The origin of life, by contrast, lies outside the reach of that crane, because natural selection cannot proceed without it. Here the anthropic principle comes into its own. We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Physicists have been hissed for using “the A word” in speeches. You either love the anthropic principle or hate it; you find it “deep” or a facile witticism. Wherever you go, there you are. The anthropic principle’s mixed reputation owes something to the fact that people have interpreted it in so many different ways. Carter himself offered two versions. His weak anthropic principle is, despite the “feeble” billing, the more important one. This is a simple selection effect saying that, as observers, we have to find ourselves in a part of the universe compatible with observers. Carter also offered a strong anthropic principle saying that, as observers, we have to find ourselves in a universe whose laws permit the existence of observers.

Physicists have often remarked that some of the observed universe’s attributes seem improbably tailored to the origin and evolution of intelligent life. This too might be understood as a selection effect. Carter called this thesis the anthropic principle. He intended the anthropic principle as a commonsense counterweight to the Copernican principle. Carter’s idea has since become one of the more polarizing concepts of modern physics. It is probably fair to say that most physicists consider the anthropic principle valid but not necessarily useful. Some roll their eyes at what they see as a catchy banality that gets more than its share of media attention. “Anthropic notions flourish in the compost of lax language and beguiled thought,” wrote one unsympathetic reviewer.

“Turtle Trading: A Market Legend.” Investopedia, February 13, 2018. Carroll, Rory. “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars.” Guardian, July 17, 2013. Carter, Brandon. “The Anthropic Principle and Its Implications for Biological Evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series A 310, no. 1512 (1983): 347–363. . “Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.” June 2004. arXiv:gr-qc/0606117v1. . “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.” In M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, Proceedings of the Symposium, Kraków, September 10–12, 1973, IAU Symposium No. 63, Dordrecht: D.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

TO CALCULATE probabilities in the multiverse we must take into account that life exists in our universe. It sounds obvious, but not every possible law of nature creates sufficiently complex structures, and therefore the correct law must fulfill certain requirements—for example, give rise to stable atoms, or something similar to atoms. This requirement is known as the “anthropic principle.” The anthropic principle doesn’t normally result in precise conclusions, but within the context of a specific theory it lets us estimate which values the theory’s parameters can possibly have and still be compatible with the observation that life exists. It’s like when you see someone walking down the street with a Starbucks cup and you conclude the conditions in this part of town must allow for Starbucks cups to arise.

Not very precise, and maybe not terribly interesting, but still, it tells you something about your environment. While the anthropic principle might strike you as somewhat silly and trivially true, it can be useful to rule out some values of certain parameters. When I see you drive to work by car every morning, for example, I can conclude you must be old enough to have a driver’s license. You might just be stubbornly disobeying laws, but the universe can’t do that. I have to warn you, however, that the reference to “life” in connection with the anthropic principle or fine-tuning is a common but superfluous verbal decoration. Physicists don’t have a lot of business with the science of self-aware conscious beings.

The first successful use of the anthropic principle was Fred Hoyle’s 1954 prediction of properties of the carbon nucleus that are necessary to enable the formation of carbon in stellar interiors, properties that were later discovered as predicted.23 Hoyle is said to have exploited the fact that carbon is central to life on Earth, hence stars must be able to produce it. Some historians have questioned whether this was indeed Hoyle’s reasoning, but the mere fact that it could have been shows that anthropic argumentation can lead to useful conclusions.24 The anthropic principle, therefore, is a constraint on our theories that enforces agreement with observation.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

That is, the fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. That principle is called the weak anthropic principle. (We’ll see shortly why the adjective “weak” is attached.) A better term than “anthropic principle” would have been “selection principle,” because the principle refers to how our own knowledge of our existence imposes rules that select, out of all the possible environments, only those environments with the characteristics that allow life. Though it may sound like philosophy, the weak anthropic principle can be used to make scientific predictions. For example, how old is the universe? As we’ll soon see, for us to exist the universe must contain elements such as carbon, which are produced by cooking lighter elements inside stars.

The age of the universe is also an environmental factor, since there are an earlier and a later time in the history of the universe, but we must live in this era because it is the only era conducive to life. Environmental coincidences are easy to understand because ours is only one cosmic habitat among many that exist in the universe, and we obviously must exist in a habitat that supports life. The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that we will argue for here, although it is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints not just on our environment but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves. The idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire universe, and that is much more difficult to explain.

Hoyle wrote, “I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.” At the time no one knew enough nuclear physics to understand the magnitude of the serendipity that resulted in these exact physical laws. But in investigating the validity of the strong anthropic principle, in recent years physicists began asking themselves what the universe would have been like if the laws of nature were different. Today we can create computer models that tell us how the rate of the triple alpha reaction depends upon the strength of the fundamental forces of nature. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The principle is tautological: in order for the universe to be observed, there must be observers. Obviously. Who would disagree? The controversy generated by Carter, Barrow, and Tipler lies not with the Weak Anthropic Principle but with the Strong Anthropic Principle, the Final Anthropic Principle, and the Participatory Anthropic Principle. Barrow and Tipler define the Strong Anthropic Principle as "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history" and the Final Anthropic Principle as "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out" (pp. 21-23).

According to the Copernican Principle, our sun is merely one of a hundred billion stars on the outskirts of an average galaxy, itself one of a hundred billion (or more) galaxies in the known universe that cares not one iota for humanity. By contrast, Carter, Barrow, and Tipler's Anthropic Principle insists that humans do have a significant role in the cosmos, both in its observation and its existence. Carter (1974) takes the part of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that says that the observation of an object changes it and extrapolates this part from the atomic level (where Heisenberg was operating) to the cosmological level: "What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers." In its weak form—the Weak Anthropic Principle—Barrow and Tipler contend quite reasonably that for the cosmos to be observed, it must be structured in such a way as to give rise to observers: "The basic features of the Universe, including such properties as its shape, size, age and laws of change, must be observed to be of a type that allows the evolution of observers, for if intelligent life did not evolve in an otherwise possible universe, it is obvious that no one would be asking the reason for the observed shape, size, age and so forth of the Universe" (1986, p. 2).

In classifying the relationship of science and religion, I would like to suggest a three-tiered taxonomy: The same-worlds model: Science and religion deal with the same subjects and not only is there overlap and conciliation but someday science may subsume religion completely. Frank Tipler's cosmology (1994), based on the anthropic principle and the eventual resurrection of all humans through a supercomputer's virtual reality in the far future of the universe, is one example. Many humanists and evolutionary psychologists foresee a time when science not only can explain the purpose of religion, it will replace it with a viable secular morality and ethics.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

And at this point he makes a startlingly modern move—he invokes the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is basically the idea that any sensible account of the universe around us must take into consideration the fact that we exist. It comes in various forms, from the uselessly weak—“the fact that life exists tell us that the laws of physics must be compatible with the existence of life”—to the ridiculously strong—“the laws of physics had to take the form they do because the existence of life is somehow a necessary feature.” Arguments over the status of the anthropic principle—Is it useful? Is it science?—grow quite heated and are rarely very enlightening.

You might hope to make some statistical predictions, on the basis of the anthropic principle; “sixty-three percent of observers in the multiverse will find three families of fermions,” or something to that effect. And many people are trying hard to do just that. But it’s not clear whether it’s even possible, especially since the number of observers experiencing certain features will often end up being infinitely big, in a universe that keeps inflating forever. For the purposes of this book, we are very interested in the multiverse, but not so much in the details of the landscape of many different vacua, or attempts to wrestle the anthropic principle into a useful set of predictions.

—grow quite heated and are rarely very enlightening. Fortunately, we (and Boltzmann) need only a judicious medium-strength version of the anthropic principle. Namely, imagine that the real universe is much bigger (in space, or in time, or both) than the part we directly observe. And imagine further that different parts of this bigger universe exist in very different conditions. Perhaps the density of matter is different, or even something as dramatic as different local laws of physics. We can label each distinct region a “universe,” and the whole collection is the “multiverse.” The different universes within the multiverse may or may not be physically connected; for our present purposes it doesn’t matter.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

However, given that the SETl assumption implies that there are billions of such highly developed civilizations, it seems unlikely that all of them have made the same decision to stay out of our way. The Anthropic Principle Revisited. We are struck with two possible applications of an anthropic principle, one for the remarkable biofriendly laws of our universe, and one for the actual biology of our planet. Let's first consider the anthropic principle as applied to the universe in more detail. The question concerning the universe arises because we notice that the constants in nature are precisely what are required for the universe to have grown in complexity.

It amazes me that people can have such blinkered vision, that they can concentrate just on the final state of the universe, and not ask how and why it got there.92 The perplexity of how it is that the universe is so "friendly" to biology has led to various formulations of the anthropic principle. The "weak" version of the anthropic principle points out simply that if it were not the case, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. So only in a universe that allowed for increasing complexity could the question even be asked. Stronger versions of the anthropic principle state that there must be more to it; advocates of these versions are not satisfied with a mere lucky coincidence. This has opened the door for advocates of intelligent design to claim that this is the proof of God's existence that scientists have been asking for.

Indeed it is very unlikely. But equally unlikely is the existence of our universe, with its set of laws of physics and related physical constants, so exquisitely, precisely what is needed for the evolution of life to be possible. But by the anthropic principle, if the universe didn't allow the evolution of life we wouldn't be here to notice it. Yet here we are. So by a similar anthropic principle, we're here in the lead in the universe. Again, if we weren't here, we would not be noticing it. Let's consider some arguments against this perspective. Perhaps there are extremely advanced technological civilizations out there, but we are outside their light sphere of intelligence.


pages: 208 words: 70,860

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

We are each at the end of a long and highly improbable chain of events that stretches all the way back to the origin of life itself. Break any one of the links in that chain and you would not be here. So you can ponder if you wish how the anthropic principle applies to you; but this is no more remarkable than the lottery winner contemplating his good fortune. And had his numbers not come up, then someone else would have won and could equally reflect on the improbable odds of her win. Brandon Carter’s argument has become known as the Weak Anthropic Principle. There also exists a Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the Universe has to be the way it is in order for intelligent life to evolve somewhere and at some point in time in order to question its existence.

This and other issues, such as the way multicelled organisms evolved from single-celled ones billions of years ago, will tell us whether we can expect these important steps in the evolutionary journey from abiogenesis to humans to have occurred elsewhere in the Universe. THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE There exists a far more profound question than the one posed by Fermi’s paradox that I must mention before I finish this chapter. It is one that until recent years was restricted to philosophical circles alone, but has now entered mainstream physics. The idea at its core is called the anthropic principle, which focuses on the sheer improbability of our universe, or at least our small corner of it, being so ideally suited and fine-tuned for us, humans, to exist.

It might then be strong enough to bind two protons, in which case hydrogen would convert to helium far more easily. In fact, all the hydrogen in the Universe would have been used up and converted into helium just after the Big Bang. With no hydrogen, there would be no possibility of combining it with oxygen to make water and hence no chance of life (as we understand it) ever appearing. The anthropic principle seems to be saying that our very existence determines certain properties of the Universe, because if they were any different we would not be here to question them. But is this really so remarkable? Maybe if the Universe were different, we—whatever “we” would then mean—would have evolved according to whatever those conditions would have allowed and we would still be asking: how come the Universe is so finely tuned?


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson wrote: ‘The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.’ This harks back to the anthropic principle mentioned in Chapter 5, which Fred Hoyle exploited to work out how carbon is created within stars. The anthropic principle states that any cosmological theory must take into account the fact that the universe has evolved to contain us. It implies that this should be a significant element in cosmological research. The Canadian philosopher John Leslie devised a firing squad scenario to elucidate the anthropic principle. Imagine that you have been accused of treason and are awaiting execution in front of a firing squad of twenty soldiers.

Similarly, it seems to defy the odds that the six numbers that characterise the universe have very special values that allow life to flourish. So do we ignore this and just count ourselves extremely lucky, or do we look for special meaning in our extraordinarily good fortune? According to the extreme version of the anthropic principle, the fine-tuning of the universe which has allowed life to evolve is indicative of a tuner. In other words, the anthropic principle can be interpreted as evidence for the existence of a God. However, an alternative view is that our universe is part of a multiverse. The dictionary definition of the universe is that it encompasses everything, but cosmologists tend to define the universe as the collection of only those things that we can perceive or that can influence us.

absorption The process by which atoms absorb light at specific wavelengths, allowing their presence to be detected by spectroscopy by identifying the ‘missing’ wavelengths. alpha particle A subatomic particle ejected during certain kinds of radioactive decay. The particle, consisting of two protons and two neutrons, is identical to the nucleus of a helium atom. anthropic principle The principle that states that, since humans are known to exist, the laws of physics must be such that life can exist. In its extreme form, the anthropic principle states that the universe has been designed to allow life. arcminute A unit used in the measurement of very small angles, equal to 1/60 of 1°. arcsecond A unit used in the measurement of very small angles, equal to 1/60 of an arcminute or 1/3,600 of 1°.


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

What happens when smart machines are able to manufacture smarter machines? PERHAPS THE CLEAREST INDICATION that the search for an unmerited privileged position for humans will never be wholly abandoned is what in physics and astronomy is called the Anthropic Principle. It would be better named the Anthropocentric Principle. It comes in various forms. The "Weak" Anthropic Principle merely notes that if the laws of Nature and the physical constants— such as the speed of light, the electrical charge of the electron, the Newtonian gravitational constant, or Planck's quantum mechanical constant had been different, the course of events leading to the origin of humans would never have transpired.

Under other laws and constants, atoms would not hold together, stars would evolve too quickly to leave sufficient time for life to evolve on nearby planets, the chemical elements of which life is made would never have been generated, and so on. Different laws, no humans. There is no controversy about the Weak Anthropic Principle: Change the laws and constants of Nature, if you could, and a very different universe may emerge—in many cases, a universe incompatible with life. * The mere fact that we exist implies (but does not impose) constraints on the laws of Nature. In contrast, the various "Strong" Anthropic Principles go much farther; some of their advocates come close to deducing that the laws of Nature and the values of the physical constants were established (don't ask how or by Whom) so that humans would eventually come to be.

Even if the existence of such universes were to follow firmly from well-established theories—of quantum mechanics or gravitation, say—we could not be sure that there weren't better theories that predict no alternative universes. Until that time comes, if it ever does, it seems to me premature to put faith in the Anthropic Principle as an argument for human centrality or uniqueness. Finally, even if the Universe were intentionally created to allow for the emergence of life or intelligence, other beings may exist on countless worlds. If so, it would be cold comfort to anthropocentrists that we inhabit one of the few universes that allow life and intelligence. There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

Or as Boltzmann put it: “A living being that finds itself in such a world at a certain period of time can define the time direction as going from less probable to more probable states (the former will be the ‘past’ and the latter the ‘future’), and by virtue of this definition he will find the universe is ‘initially’ always in an improbable state.” Most of the universe is dead, but we can’t know about that dead part because it’s impossible to live in. This kind of reasoning is known as the anthropic principle, which states that a universe that humans live in must run according to physical laws that permit human life. This sounds like a tautology, but these days physicists and cosmologists often use this principle to explain the mysterious fact that the universe appears “fine-tuned” in a way that’s conducive to our existence.

This consists of many other universes where the constants of nature are indeed unsuitable for life. But because we can’t live in those universes, we are only aware of our universe, with its values for the constants of nature. Although the context of this reasoning is rather different than Boltzmann’s, the method, the anthropic principle, is his. So how plausible is Boltzmann’s creation story—that our habitable universe began as a random, highly unlikely fluctuation that created a region of low entropy? Most modern cosmologists would probably reject Boltzmann’s explanation, but simply by raising the question, Boltzmann defined a topic at the heart of modern theoretical physics.

statistically unlikely low-entropy state: For a detailed discussion of Boltzmann’s response to Zermelo, see From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll. “A living being”: See “On Zermelo’s Paper” by Boltzmann, from Kinetic Theory, vol. 2, by Stephen G. Brush. This kind of reasoning is known as the anthropic principle: See From Eternity to Here by Carroll. Boltzmann brain: See “Can the Universe Afford Inflation?” by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo, Physical Review D 70 (2004); and see From Eternity to Here by Carroll. “For some reason, the universe”: The Feynman Lectures on Physics 1, chap. 46, “Ratchet and Pawl.”


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In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The AI Singularity futuristic narrative seems like a retelling of Teilhard’s Omega Point – or Judgement Day if you prefer – when the sum of intelligence in the universe accelerates exponentially thanks to self-improving Artificial Intelligence. Thereafter AI absorbs all sentience into its merciful wholeness. The verdict is out whether this would be heaven or hell. Teilhard has also been very influential on the authors of the Anthropic Principle.20 The Anthropic Principle tries to make sense of why the universe is so finely tuned for life to emerge and evolve. This fact is profoundly evident from the so-called ‘physical constants’, pure numbers that govern the natural laws. An example of a physical constant is the ‘Plank constant’, the number 6.62606957×10-34 m2 kg/s that shows up in just about everything concerning quantum physics.

If the Plank constant were slightly different from 6.62606957, there would not be stable nuclei in atoms, which means that atoms would decay faster than they do, and therefore there would not be complex chemical molecules. No chemistry means no life, no humans, and no AI. So how come the Plank constant is exactly right for life? Why doesn’t it have any other value but this ‘right’ one? The Anthropic Principle claims, somewhat tautologically, that the universe is finely tuned because we are here to observe it. There simply could not have been any other way. Only a universe capable of eventually supporting life could produce intelligent observers, who would then observe how finely tuned that universe is.

If there have been, or are, other universes different from ours we might as well regard them as non-existent: there is no one there to observe them. This innocent sounding tautology becomes very controversial in its ‘stronger’ version, one that Teilhard would recognise and rejoice in: that the universe is compelled to allow conscious life to emerge eventually. This is where the Strong Anthropic Principle meets the AI Singularity: Kurzweil, Barrow and Tippler believe that there must be a purpose for intelligence in the universe. That intelligence cannot be a mere evolutionary accident that took place on a small blue planet on the outer ridges of an insignificant galaxy amongst the hundred billion galaxies that make up the observable universe.


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Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen Hawking

anthropic principle, Apple Newton, cosmological constant, dark matter, Johannes Kepler

The infla-tionary model showed that the present state of the universe could have arisenfrom quite a large number of different initial configurations. It cannot be thecase, however, that every initial configuration would have led to a universelike the one we observe. So even the inflationary model does not tell us whythe initial configuration was such as to produce what we observe. Must we turnto the anthropic principle for an explanation? Was it all just a lucky chance?That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of under-standing the underlying order of the universe. QUANTUM GRAVITY In order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws thathold at the beginning of time.

Why should some, but not all, ofthe dimensions be curled up into a small ball? Presumably, in the very earlyuniverse, all the dimensions would have been very curved. Why did threespace and one time dimension flatten out, while the other dimensionsremained tightly curled up? One possible answer is the anthropic principle. Two space dimensions do notseem to be enough to allow for the development of complicated beings like us.For example, two-dimensional people living on a one-dimensional Earthwould have to climb over each other in order to get past each other. If a two-dimensional creature ate something it could not digest completely, it wouldhave to bring up the remains the same way it swallowed them, because if therewere a passage through its body, it would divide the creature into two separateparts.

On asmaller scale, the electrical forces that cause the electrons to orbit around thenucleus in an atom would behave in the same way as the gravitational forces.Thus, the electrons would either escape from the atom altogether or it would spi-ral into the nucleus. In either case, one could not have atoms as we know them.It seems clear that life, at least as we know it, can exist only in regions ofspace-time in which three space and one time dimension are not curled upsmall. This would mean that one could appeal to the anthropic principle, pro-vided one could show that string theory does at least allow there to be suchregions of the universe. And it seems that indeed each string theory doesallow such regions. There may well be other regions of the universe, or otheruniverses (whatever that may mean) in which all the dimensions are curledup small, or in which more than four dimensions are nearly flat.


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When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

The fact that our universe appears to be fine-tuned to engender life is not a matter of luck. Rather, it is a consequence of the “anthropic principle”: if our universe weren’t the way it is, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Partisans of the anthropic principle say that it can be used to weed out all the versions of string theory that are incompatible with our existence, and so rescue string theory from the problem of nonuniqueness. Copernicus might have dislodged man from the center of the universe, but the anthropic principle seems to restore him to that privileged position. Many physicists despise it; one has depicted it as a “virus” infecting the minds of his fellow theorists.

Many physicists despise it; one has depicted it as a “virus” infecting the minds of his fellow theorists. Others, including Witten, accept the anthropic principle, but provisionally and in a spirit of gloom. Still others seem to take perverse pleasure in it. The controversy among these factions has been likened by one participant to “a high-school-cafeteria food fight.” In their books against string theory, Smolin and Woit view the anthropic approach as a betrayal of science. Both agree with Karl Popper’s dictum that if a theory is to be scientific, it must be open to falsification. But string theory, Woit points out, is like Alice’s Restaurant, where, as Arlo Guthrie’s song had it, “you can get anything you want.”

But string theory, Woit points out, is like Alice’s Restaurant, where, as Arlo Guthrie’s song had it, “you can get anything you want.” It comes in so many versions that it predicts anything and everything. In that sense, string theory is, in the words of Woit’s title, “not even wrong.” Supporters of the anthropic principle, for their part, rail against the “Popperazzi” and insist that it would be silly for physicists to reject string theory because of what some philosopher said that science should be. Steven Weinberg, who has a good claim to be the father of the standard model of particle physics, has argued that anthropic reasoning may open a new epoch.


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The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

The impossibility of forecasting the position of an electron, or the weather a year ahead, made the world proof against the confidence of prognosticators and experts and planners. The puddle that fits its pothole Briefly in the late twentieth century, some astronomers bought into a new skyhook called the ‘anthropic principle’. In various forms, this argued that the conditions of the universe, and the particular values of certain parameters, seemed ideally suited to the emergence of life. In other words, if things had been just a little bit different, then stable suns, watery worlds and polymerised carbon would not be possible, so life could never get started.

Molecular bonds are just the right strength to be stable but breakable at the sort of temperatures found at the typical distance of a planet from a star: any weaker and the universe would be too hot for chemistry, any stronger and it would be too cold. True, but to anybody outside a small clique of cosmologists who had spent too long with their telescopes, the idea of the anthropic principle was either banal or barmy, depending on how seriously you take it. It so obviously confuses cause and effect. Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa. In a world where water is liquid, carbon can polymerise and solar systems last for billions of years, then life emerged as a carbon-based system with water-soluble proteins in fluid-filled cells.

In a world where water is liquid, carbon can polymerise and solar systems last for billions of years, then life emerged as a carbon-based system with water-soluble proteins in fluid-filled cells. In a different world, a different kind of life might emerge, if it could. As David Waltham puts it in his book Lucky Planet, ‘It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed. Waltham himself goes on to make the argument that the earth may be rare or even unique because of the string of ridiculous coincidences required to produce a planet with a stable temperature with liquid water on it for four billion years. The moon was a particular stroke of luck, having been formed by an interplanetary collision and having then withdrawn slowly into space as a result of the earth’s tides (it is now ten times as far away as when it first formed).


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Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

According to England’s Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, there are at least six constituents that are necessary for “our emergence from a simple Big Bang,” including (1) Ω (omega), the amount of matter in the universe = 1: if Ω were greater than 1, it would have collapsed long ago, and, if Ω were less than 1, no galaxies would have formed. (2) ε (epsilon), how firmly atomic nuclei bind together = 0.007: if ε were even fractionally different, matter could not exist. (3) D, the number of dimensions in which we live = 3. (4) N, the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to that of gravity = 1039: if N were smaller, the universe would be either too young or too small for life to form. (5) Q, the fabric of the universe = 1/100,000: if Q were smaller, the universe would be featureless, and, if Q were larger, the universe would be dominated by giant black holes. (6) λ (lambda), the cosmological constant, or “antigravity” force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate = 0.7: if λ were larger, it would have prevented stars and galaxies from forming.2 The most common reason invoked for our universe’s “fine-tuning” is the “anthropic principle,” most forcefully argued by the physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle: It is not only man that is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to the principle, a life-giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.3 So in addition to the grand question Why is there something rather than nothing?

Electrons in hot atoms emit photons – photons that didn’t exist before they were emitted – which are emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with the idea that photons can be created from nothing without cause, but not whole universes?”19 Explanations for Our Universe The anthropic principle invoked to explain our universe troubles most scientists because of its antithesis known as the “Copernican principle,” which states that we are not special. The anthropic principle puts humans right back in the center of the cosmos, not geographically but anthropocentrically – it is all about us. There are a number of counterexplanations for our universe that continue in the scientific tradition of defenestrating humans from the Tower of Babel.

If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been less by one part in 1010, the universe would have collapsed after a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 1010, the universe would have been essentially empty after a few million years. In neither case would it have lasted long enough for life to develop. Thus one either has to appeal to the anthropic principle or find some physical explanation of why the universe is the way it is.31 Hawking’s collaborator Roger Penrose layered on even more mystery when he noted that the “extraordinary degree of precision (or ‘fine tuning’) that seems to be required for the Big Bang of the nature that we appear to observe … is one part in 1010123 at least.”


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The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

Can it predict our universe? Yes. That is a sensational claim, the goal of physicists for almost a century. But can it predict just one universe? Probably not. This is called the landscape problem. There are several possible solutions to this problem, none of them widely accepted. The first is the anthropic principle, which says that our universe is special because we, as conscious beings, are here to discuss this question in the first place. In other words, there might be an infinite number of universes, but our universe is the one that has the conditions that make intelligent life possible. The initial conditions of the Big Bang are fixed at the beginning of time so that intelligent life can exist today.

Perhaps there is a loving God after all, or perhaps there are thousands of dead planets that are too close or too far, and we are on a planet that is just right for sustaining intelligent life that hence can debate this question. Similarly, we may coexist in an ocean of dead universes, and our universe is special only because we are here to discuss this question. The anthropic principle actually allows one to explain a curious experimental fact about our universe: that the basic constants of nature seem to be fine-tuned to allow for life. As physicist Freeman Dyson has written, it seems as if the universe knew that we were coming. For example, if the nuclear force were a bit weaker, the sun would never have ignited, and the solar system would be dark.

One can list a number of these accidents that make life possible, and each time we are in the middle of the Goldilocks zone. So the universe is one gigantic crapshoot, and we won the roll. But according to the multiverse theory, it means we coexist with a vast number of dead universes. So perhaps the anthropic principle can pick our universe from the millions of universes in the landscape, because we have conscious life in our universe. My Own Point of View on String Theory I have been working on string theory since 1968, so I have my own definite viewpoint. However you look at it, the final form of the theory has yet to be revealed.


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Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

.* Alternately, one could “explain” the flatness of the universe by identifying it as a prerequisite of human existence. This argument, called the anthropic principle, went as follows: Were the cosmic matter density only slightly higher, the universe would have stopped expanding and have collapsed before enough time had elapsed for stars and planets and life to form; were it only slightly lower, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to have congealed from the rapidly thinning primordial gas. Therefore, the argument goes, the fact that we are here constrains certain cosmological parameters, among them the value of omega. The anthropic principle “explains” the miracle of the flat universe if we imagine the creation of many universes, only a fraction of which chance to have the values requisite for life to appear in them.

The anthropic principle “explains” the miracle of the flat universe if we imagine the creation of many universes, only a fraction of which chance to have the values requisite for life to appear in them. But the explanation cannot be tested unless the creation of other universes can be established, something that may well be impossible by definition. In that sense, the anthropic principle is a dead-end street. The English physicist Stephen Hawking, whose work is said to have contributed to the formulation of the principle, nonetheless called it “a counsel of despair.”7 But where there is enigma there is also the promise of discovery: A paradox may signal an inadequacy in the way we are looking at a question, thereby suggesting a new and more fruitful way of approaching it.

Several leading cosmologists, notably Andrei Linde of Stanford University, have constructed consistent and physically reasonable models in which our universe is one among many, perhaps an infinite number of universes. In these models, “new” universes bubble up out of the vacuum of preexisting ones. Many never attain a state in which life can exist—some quickly collapse, and others keep expanding at faster-than-light velocities forever, never forming matter—but some, like ours, can harbor life. The anthropic principle begins to make more sense in such models, inasmuch as it simply describes (or attempts to describe) the cosmological conditions required for life to appear in a given universe and for its existence therefore to be registered by intelligent observers. These models may help us understand how our universe got started, but they do so at the price of removing the ultimate question of genesis to a perhaps unattainable distance.


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Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Yet so great is the number of planets in the universe that even these minuscule odds yield an expectation that the universe contains a billion planets bearing life. And (here comes the anthropic principle) since we manifestly live here, Earth necessarily has to be one of the billion. Even if the odds against life arising on a planet are as low as one in a billion billion (which puts it well beyond the range we would classify as possible*3), the plausible calculation that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe provides an entirely satisfying explanation for our existence. There will still plausibly be one life-bearing planet in the universe. And once we have granted that, the anthropic principle does the rest. Any being contemplating the calculation necessarily has to be on that one life-bearing planet, which therefore has to be Earth.

If we apply the principle of mediocrity to life on this planet, doesn’t it warn us that we would be foolhardy and vain to think that the Earth might be the only site of life in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies? It is a powerful argument, and I find myself persuaded by it. On the other hand, the principle of mediocrity is emasculated by another powerful principle, known as the anthropic principle: the fact that we are in a position to observe the world’s conditions determines that those conditions had to be favourable to our existence. The name comes from the British mathematician Brandon Carter, although he later preferred – with good reason – the ‘self-selection principle’. I want to borrow Carter’s principle for a discussion of the origin of life, the chemical event that forged the first self-replicating molecule and hence triggered natural selection of DNA and ultimately all of life.

Any being contemplating the calculation necessarily has to be on that one life-bearing planet, which therefore has to be Earth. This application of the anthropic principle is astonishing but watertight. I have oversimplified it by assuming that once life has originated on a planet, Darwinian natural selection will lead to intelligent and reflective beings. To be more precise, I should have been talking about the combined probability of life’s originating on a planet and leading, eventually, to the evolution of intelligent beings capable of anthropic reflection. It could be that the chemical origin of a self-replicating molecule (the necessary trigger for the origin of natural selection) was a relatively probable event but later steps in the evolution of intelligent life were highly improbable.


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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Elements of Chaos Heat Death Hunger Drowning Wildfire Disasters No Longer Natural Freshwater Drain Dying Oceans Unbreathable Air Plagues of Warming Economic Collapse Climate Conflict “Systems” III. The Climate Kaleidoscope Storytelling Crisis Capitalism The Church of Technology Politics of Consumption History After Progress Ethics at the End of the World IV. The Anthropic Principle Acknowledgments Notes I Cascades It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.

But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely. IV The Anthropic Principle What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing.

The fact of dramatic near-term climate change should inspire both humility and grandiosity, but this Drakean approach seems to me somehow to get the lesson both right and backward: supposing that the terms of your thought experiment should govern the meaning of the universe, yet unable to imagine that humans might make for themselves an exceptional fate within it. Fatalism has a strong pull in a time of ecological crisis, but even so it is a curious quirk of the Anthropocene that the transformation of the planet by anthropogenic climate change has produced such fervor for Fermi’s paradox and so little for its philosophical counterpoint, the anthropic principle. That principle takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grandly narcissistic view of the cosmos. It’s the closest thing string-theory physics can bring us to empowering self-centeredness: that however unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this.


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

In lieu of an explanation based exclusively on physical laws, Collins and Hawking decided to invoke what Australian physicist Brandon Carter dubbed the anthropic principle: the concept that the existence of humans constrains the nature of the universe. If the universe were sufficiently different, anthropic reasoning asserts, stars like the Sun wouldn’t have formed, planets like Earth would be absent, beings like humans would not exist, and there would be nobody to experience reality. Therefore the fact that we, as intelligent entities, are around implies that the universe must have been close enough to its present form to guarantee the emergence of such cognizant observers. Collins and Hawking applied the anthropic principle as follows to explain why the universe is isotropic: Suppose there are an infinite number of universes with all possible different initial conditions.

accelerators Cockcroft and Walton’s research and Cockcroft-Walton generator and Cockcroft’s attempt to break nuclear targets and complex realm of particles on definition of early experiments with at Fermilab Gamow’s quantum tunneling formula and Ising’s prototype of Lawrence’s cyclotron and lightning strikes as Powell’s construction of recycling of Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and Van de Graaff ’s work with Wideröe’s design of Wideröe’s ray transformer and ADD model Adelberger, Eric ADM formulation air (element) Akeley, Lewis ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector alpha particles Alpher, Ralph Alternate Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) Ampère, André-Marie ancient Greece Anderson, Carl Andromeda galaxy angular momentum anthropic principle antigravity antimatter antineutrinos antiprotons antiquarks Antoniadas, Ignatius Aref ’eva, Irina argon, in particle detectors Aristotle Arkani-Hamed, Nima Arnowitt, Richard Ashcroft, Neil astronomy ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) detector atomic bomb, development of atomic number atomism atoms ancient Greek concepts of Dalton’s work with electrostatic force and first use of term, in modern sense Lawrence’s time interval measurements involving nucleus of radioactive processes and relative weights of solar system comparison with Thomson’s “plum pudding” model of attractive forces axions Bardeen, John Barish, Barry baryons Beams, Jesse Becquerel, Henri Bednorz, Johannes Bekenstein, Jacob Benford, Gregory Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (“Rad Lab”) beta decay beta particles Bethe, Hans Bevatron Big Bang conditions dark energy scenarios and general theory of relativity on measurement of background radiation left over from particle detectors to reproduce conditions of Big Bang theory Big Crunch Big Rip Big Whimper blackbodies Blackett, Patrick black holes Bekenstein’s theory on expansion of first use of term Large Hadron Collider (LHC) research and creation of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) and microscopic physics of public concern over Blewett, John Bohr, Niels Born, Max bosons asymmetry involving fermions and beginning of the universe and as category of elementary particles exchange particles and intermediate vector bosons Standard Model prediction of string theory and supersymmetry for uniting fermions and Yukawa’s electromagnetic research and bottom quarks Boyle, Robert Boyle’s Law braneworld hypothesis Brasch, Arno Breit, Gregory bremstrahlung Brin, David Brobeck, William Brout, Robert brown dwarfs bubble chambers, Fermilab Burstein, David Bush, George Herbert Walker Calabi, Eugenio Calabi-Yau spaces Caldwell, Robert calibration calorimeters carbon Carter, Brandon cathode rays Cavendish, Henry Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge Chadwick’s research on neutrons at Cockcroft and Walton’s splitting of a lithium nucleus at Cockcroft-Walton generator at cyclotron proposal for description of Gamow’s research at Rutherford as director of Thomson as director of Walton’s linear accelerator at CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) Collaboration Central Design Group (CDG) Central Tracking Chamber, Tevatron CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) description of founding of funding of hardware knowledge of researchers at location of public fears of work of Chadwick, James Charge-Parity (CP) violation charginos charm quarks Cherenkov, Pavel Cherenkov detectors Chu, Paul Citizens Against Large Hadron Collider Cline, David Clinton, Bill closed strings closed timeline curves (CTCs) cloud chambers CMS (Composer Muon Solenoid) detector COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite Cockcroft, John Douglas cold dark matter Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) Collaboration Coma Cluster Collins.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

The philosopher Richard Dawid makes a case along these lines—invoking the idea, mooted at the end of Chapter 10, that we can learn which kinds of explanatory elegance are signs of truth—in String Theory and the Scientific Method. 284 “post-empirical physics”: Another amendment to the iron rule would allow string theory to accrue scientific legitimacy by providing explanations of the values of the physical constants—which the Standard Model treats as brute posits—in a way that departs from the canon of shallow causal explanation, by appeal to what is called an “anthropic principle.” Anthropic explanations invoke the existence, in our universe, of intelligent observers, remarking that we should expect to see only physical constants that would allow complex life-forms like ourselves to evolve. Scientists and philosophers argue about whether such an aperçu genuinely helps to account for the physical constants having the (approximate) values that they do.

Scientists and philosophers argue about whether such an aperçu genuinely helps to account for the physical constants having the (approximate) values that they do. What’s clear is that anthropic derivations are not explanations of the shallow causal sort allowed by the iron rule: they invoke a fact, the presence of watchful intellects, that is causally irrelevant to the values of the constants. Thus, even if string theory, together with the anthropic principle, gives us reason to expect certain values, that prediction or explanation (if it is such) does not, by the lights of the iron rule, constitute the basis for a legitimate empirical test. 285 “It will follow orders”: Collins and Pinch, The Golem, 1. 286 “bumbling giant”: Collins and Pinch, The Golem, 2. 288 they assign confidence levels to hypotheses: These terms have precisely specified meanings.

Acheulean hand ax, 239, 240 “action at a distance,” 136–38 Adam (biblical figure), 212 aesthetic reasoning; See also beauty elimination from scientific argument, 209–10 particle physics and, 227–35 string theory and, 284–85 air, as fundamental substance, 2, 143 alchemy Newton and, 183–92 scientific investigation vs., 188 secrets of the philosopher’s stone, 214 Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, 233 ambition, 98, 283; See also motivation Anaximander, 2, 117, 143, 304n Anaximenes, 2 Ancient World of Sussex (Nibbs), 176 Anglican Church, 246, 250–52 anthropic principle, 318n–319n Archaeopteryx, 223 Archimedes, 295n archival function of scientific papers, 165–66 argument, See scientific argument Arian heresy, 187, 250–52 Aristarchus, 3 Aristotle Bacon and, 106, 243, 304n biology, 125–28 breadth of inquiry, 203–4 Cartesian rejection of intellectual authority of, 242 Cartesian worldview vs., 133–35, 307n and causal principles, 147 and explanatory thinking, 117 gravity theory, 27–28, 133–34 and humanism, 271 and iron rule, 248 Kuhn and, 23, 25, 123–24 and natural philosophy, 3 Newton’s methods compared to, 202–3 and philosophical reason, 134 prioritizing of broad patterns over small detail, 202–3 and psuche (soul), 126–29, 134, 140, 307n and quintessence, 133–34, 228 and rule of four, 313n on theories and observed facts, 201 arithmetic, 236–37 Aronowitz, Stanley, 64 arson, 66–67 assumptions auxiliary, 79–82, 94–96, 139, 140, 281 blaming of, 71–72 Eddington and, 161 astrographic bending number, 48–49, 157–58 astrographic telescope, 43–46, 48, 68–69, 69, 70, 111, 155–61 astronomy, 2–3, 295n Tycho Brahe and, 114–15 Copernican revolution, 26–27 developments in early 1600s, 106 Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, 193 Athanasius, 316n atheism, 207 Atlantis (hypothetical example), 120–22, 257–60, 262–64 atomic hypothesis, 193, 244 atomists, Greek, 126, 134, 143 atoms, 228; See also quantum mechanics authenticity, 267–68 auxiliary assumptions, 79–82, 94–96, 139, 140, 281 Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), 117 ax, Acheulean vs.


pages: 30 words: 8,756

Overtime: A Tor.Com Original by Charles Stross

anthropic principle

Precog fugues aren’t deterministic, Bob: worse, they tend to disrupt whatever processes they’re predicting the outcome of. That’s why Forecasting Ops are so big on statistical analysis. If Kringle said we won’t see another Christmas party, you can bet they’ve rolled the dice more than the bare minimum to fit the confidence interval.” “So preempt his prophecy already! Use the weak anthropic principle: if we cancel next year’s Christmas party, his prophecy is delayed indefinitely. Right?” Andy rolls his eyes. “Don’t be fucking stupid.” “It was a long shot.” (Pause.) “What are we going to do?” “We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “I am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit.


Overtime by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle

Precog fugues aren’t deterministic, Bob: worse, they tend to disrupt whatever processes they’re predicting the outcome of. That’s why Forecasting Ops are so big on statistical analysis. If Kringle said we won’t see another Christmas party, you can bet they’ve rolled the dice more than the bare minimum to fit the confidence interval.” “So preempt his prophecy already! Use the weak anthropic principle: if we cancel next year’s Christmas party, his prophecy is delayed indefinitely. Right?” Andy rolls his eyes. “Don’t be fucking stupid.” “It was a long shot.” (Pause.) “What are we going to do?” “We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “I am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit.


pages: 223 words: 62,564

Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide by Lewis Dartnell

anthropic principle, biofilm, carbon-based life, double helix, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, Mars Rover, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, silicon-based life

Had the universe been created with slightly different rules, that perhaps did not allow carbon synthesis, then our life would be impossible and we would not witness such a different universe. It should come as no surprise that things are exquisitely arranged to promote life, as we would never see it any other way, an idea known as the anthropic principle. The helium-burning reprieve in the core of a star does not last long and fusion begins grinding to a halt again as the available helium is used up. The interior of the star is now structured rather like a hot onion, with a core of carbon and oxygen surrounded by a shell of helium and an outer layer of hydrogen.

Planetary and Space Science 48(11): 1065. Index accretion disc acetylene acidity acidophiles aerobes aerobic respiration algae ALH84001 alien life alkaliphiles Alpha Centauri amino acids ammonia amono-peptides anaerobes anaerobic respiration Andromeda Galaxy Anomalocaris Antarctic Dry Valleys anthropic principle aquifers artificial life asteroids astrobiology definition astrometry atmosphere of Earth of Mars of Titan ATP ATP synthase autocatalysis autotrophs bacteria barophiles Betelgeuse Big Bang biofilms biosignature/biosign biosphere black smoker see hydrothermal vents blue shift bombardment Callisto (moon of Jupiter) Cambrian Explosion 55 Cancri A carbohydrate carbon isotopes carbonaceous chondrites carbonate-silicate cycle carbon dioxide carbon fixation carbonic acid cell membrane cells cryopreserved chemoautotrophs chemosynthesis chirality (handedness) chitin chlorophyll chloroplasts climate collagen comets complex life continental crust convergence co-rotation cycle cosmic radiation craters cryo-volcanism cryptoendoliths cyanide cyanobacteria cytoplasm Darwinian definition Darwin space telescope Darwin’s pond deep basalt aquifers Deimos (moon of Mars) denaturation Devon Island DNA Doppler effect Earth Earthshine EcoSphere ecosystem enantiomers Enceladus (moon of Saturn) endolithic environments endosymbiosis energy extraction inorganic environment enzymes Epsilon Eri Eridanus eukaryotes Europa (moon of Jupiter) evolution extinction extra-solar planets extremophiles eye fixation carbon methane nitrogen flight formaldehyde formamide fossil record free radicals Gaia galaxies Andromeda Galaxy metallicity Milky Way Galileo Galilei Galileo probe Ganymede (moon of Jupiter) glaciation, runaway glucose Goldilocks Principle Golgi body gravitational microlensing greenhouse effect grylloblattid insects habitable zone haemoglobin halophiles handedness see chirality Haughton Crater HD28185 HD209458b Herschel, William heterotrophs homeobox genes Hot Jupiters Hubble Space Telescope Huygens lander hydrogen hydrogen cyanide hydrosphere hydrothermal vents hyperthermophiles icebugs impact impact frustration inorganic energy interference patterns interferometry Io (moon of Jupiter) iron ferrous isotope jarosite Jupiter moons Kepler spacecraft Krebs cycle life artificial emergence of as energy disequilibrium as information transmission on Mars lithoheterotrophs lithosphere Lowell, Percival LUCA (last universal common ancestor) magnetic fields Mars atmosphere canals environmental collapse evolution of life on geography Hellas impact basin Meridiani Planum Olympus Mons survival of life Valles Marineris volcanoes water on M-class dwarves Mercury Meridiani Planum metabolism metallicity metamorphosis meteorites methane methane fixation methanogens Milky Way mitochondria Moon formation of mRNA multicellular organisms Murchison meteorite myxobacteria natural selection nebulae Neptune nitrogen nitrogen fixation nucleotides nucleus oceanic crust Opportunity Mars Rover organelles organics on Mars synthesis organisms multicellular organoheterotrophs Orion osmosis oxidation oxygen oxygenic processes ozone PAH see polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons panspermia, permafrost Phobos (moon of Mars) photoautotrophs photosynthesis planetary orbits planet formation plate tectonics Pluto polarity polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons polymers porphyrins potential difference prebiotic chemistry primordial soup progenote collective prokaryotes proteins protein synthesis protons Proxima Centauri psychrophiles pulsars radial velocity technique red dwarves see M-class dwarves redox redox couples redox potential red shift reduction respiration reverse transcriptase ribose ribosomes ribozymes Rio Tinto RNA RNA world rockcrawlers Rubisco enzyme salinity Saturn moons Schiaparelli, Giovanni sight silicon-based life Sirius SLiMEs Snowball Earth snow line Space Interferometry Mission spallation zone Spirit Mars rover stars birth of Sun-like stromatolites subduction zones subsurface lithotrophic microbial ecosystems see SLiMEs sugars Sun supernovae symbiosis tardigrades (water bears) Tau Bootis Tau Ceti temperature Terrestrial Planet Finder thermophiles threose/TNA tidal heating tidal locking Titan (moon of Saturn) transit method tree of life triple alpha process tRNA ultraviolet (UV) radiation uranium Uranus Urey-Miller reactions vegetation Venus Viking probes viruses volatiles volcanism Vostok, Lake water on Mars phase diagram


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

It is only in the universes that contain astrophysicists that anyone ever wonders why the constants seem fine-tuned. This type of explanation is known as ‘anthropic reasoning’. It is said to follow from a principle known as the ‘weak anthropic principle’, though really no principle is required: it is just logic. (The qualifier ‘weak’ is there because several other anthropic principles have been proposed, which are more than just logic, but they need not concern us here.) However, on closer examination, anthropic arguments never quite finish the explanatory job. To see why, consider an argument due to the physicist Dennis Sciama.

Let us label the universes 1, 2, 3 and so on, in the order in which the device visits them. Sometimes Lyra also takes with her a measuring instrument that measures the constant D, and another that measures – rather like the SETI project, only much faster and more reliably – whether there are astrophysicists in the universe. She is hoping to test the predictions of the anthropic principle. But she can only ever visit a finite number of universes, and she has no way of telling whether those are representative of the whole infinite set. However, the device does have a second setting. On that setting, it takes Lyra to universe 2 for one minute, then universe 3 for half a minute, universe 4 for a quarter of a minute and so on.

Since there is now only one way for measuring instruments to respond to averages, typical values and so on, a rational agent in those universes will always get consistent results when reasoning about probabilities – and about how rare or common, typical or untypical, sparse or dense, fine-tuned or not anything is. And so now the anthropic principle can make testable, probabilistic predictions. What has made this possible is that the infinite set of universes with different values of D is no longer merely a set. It is a single physical entity, a multiverse with internal interactions (as harnessed by Lyra’s device) that relate different parts of it to each other and thereby provide a unique meaning, known as a measure, to proportions and averages over different universes.


pages: 232 words: 67,934

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

Take the Argument from Design, which says that the order humans find in the world could not have come about by itself. If the world is ordered in a way that can be grasped by the human mind, the world must have been created by something like the human mind – or so defenders of design believe. Sometimes they invoke the anthropic principle – the idea that humans could only come into being in a universe of roughly the sort that actually exists. But the anthropic principle points the other way, especially when the multi-world theory is taken into account. If our universe is one of many, unlike others in containing observers like ourselves, there is no need to posit a designer. Most universes will be too chaotic to allow the emergence of life or mind.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

So isn't it a wonderful fact that the laws are just right for us to exist? Indeed, one might want to add, we almost didn't make it! Is this wonderful fact something that needs an explanation, and, if so, what kind of explanation might it receive? According to the Anthropic Principle, we are entitled to infer facts about the universe and its laws from the undisputed fact that we (we anthropoi, we human beings) are here to do the inferring and observing. The Anthropic Principle comes in several flavors. (Among the useful recent books is Barrow and Tipler 1988 and Breuer 1991. See also Pagels 1985, Gardner 1986.) In the "weak form," it is a sound, harmless, and on occasion useful application of elementary logic: if x is a necessary condition for the existence of y, and y exists, then x exists.

It has to contain such elements for us to exist, we may grant, but it might not have contained such elements, and if that had been the case, we wouldn't be here to be dismayed. It's as simple as that. Some attempts to define and defend a "strong form" of the Anthropic Principle strive to justify the late location of the "must" as not casual expression but a conclusion about the way the universe necessarily is. I admit that I find it hard to believe that so much confusion and controversy are actually generated by a simple mistake of logic, but the evidence is really {166} quite strong that this is often the case, and not just in discussions of the Anthropic Principle. Consider the related confusions that surround Darwinian deduction in general. Darwin deduces that human beings must have evolved from a common ancestor of the chimpanzee, or that all life must have arisen from a single beginning, and some people, unaccountably, take these deductions as claims that human beings are somehow a necessary product of evolution, or that life is a necessary feature of our planet, but nothing of the kind follows from Darwin's deductions properly construed.

Then he must be single, right? (That's a truth of logic.) Poor John — he can never get married! The fallacy is obvious in this example, and it is worth keeping it in the back of your mind as a template to compare other arguments with. Believers in any of the proposed strong versions of the Anthropic Principle think they can deduce something wonderful and surprising from the fact that we conscious observers are here — for instance, that in some sense the universe exists for us, or perhaps that we exist so that the universe as a whole can exist, or even that God created the universe the way He did so that we would be possible.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

However, it is easy to show that if even one of them were significantly different from its actual magnitude, life would be impossible. In short, it seems that the laws of physics have been carefully fine-tuned in such a way as to make life possible.17 How can we explain this? One theory that has been advanced is known as the anthropic principle.18 According to this theory, there is no mystery at all, because if the universe were not tuned for life, we would not be here to ask why it is. In my opinion, this is nonsensical. It is equivalent to answering the question “Why didn't the United States and the Soviet Union have a nuclear war?”

See delta-v Adams, John Couch, 152 Adonis (asteroid), 127 Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST), 251 aerial algae, seeding of on Venus, 220 aerobraking, 103, 133, 164, 173, 339 Aerojet, 145 aeroshell, 339 ALH84001 (SNC meteorite), 120 Allen, Paul, 29–30, 177 Allison, Graham, 309 Alpha Centauri (star), 181, 182, 185 time to reach using chemical rocket systems, 183–84 using fission propulsion, 185 using fusion propulsion, 191 using laser projector light sails, 200, 211 using nuclear salt-water rockets, 188 using photon rockets, 195 using thin solar sails, 198 Altair (star), 240 Alvarez hypothesis (Walter and Luis Alvarez), 290, 298 Amazon, 34 Ambani, Mukesh, 176 American Historical Association, 272 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 244 Anderson, Eric, 138 Andrews, Dana, 202–203 Ansari, Anousheh, 29–30 anthropic principle, 261 antifreedom movement, 309–10 antimatter for propulsion, 90, 174, 191–95, 207 as a weapon, 208 antisatellite systems (ASAT), 63–64 apogee, 96, 163, 339 Apollo (asteroid), 127 Apollo program (NASA), 12, 54, 74, 76, 77, 102, 104, 153, 296, 317, 343 chemical analysis of typical lunar samples, 72, 73–74 impact on STEM education in US, 285–86, 285 mission driven nature of, 329 Applied Fusion Systems, 180 Aquila (constellation), 240 Ariane (European rockets), 36 Ariane V (heavy-lift rocket), 107 Arrhenius, Svante, 255 artificial gravity.

See low Earth orbit Lerner, Eric, 180 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecoeur), 274 LEV (Lunar Excursion Vehicle), 70, 71, 79–81 chart of range and lunar accessibility, 81 LeVerrier, Joseph, 152 Lewicki, Chris, 138 Lewis, John, 136, 138, 150 life, search for, 12–14, 254–55, 297 anthropic principle, 261 See also extraterrestrials, search for; intelligence, search for Life of the Cosmos, The (Smolin), 262 light sails, 195–201 cannot thrust to the sun, 206 thin solar sails for interstellar travel, 197–99, 198 use of mirror effect, 203 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), 186–87 limited-resources views, 301–305, 308 “carrying capacity,” 313–14 Lindbergh, Charles, 29 liquid oxygen (LOX).


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

In particular, some of the predictions derived from past records are unreliable due to observation selection, thus introducing an essential qualification to the general and often uncritically accepted gradualist principle that 'the past is a key to the future'. This resulting anthropic overconfidence bias 3 For a summary of vast literature on observation selection, anthropic principles, and anthropic reasoning in general, see Barrow and Tipler (1986); Balashov (1991); and Bostrom (2002a). 122 Global catastrophic risks time Fig. 6.1 A schematic presentation ofthe single-event toy model. The evidence E consists of our present-day existence. is operative in a wide range of catastrophic events, and leads to potentially dangerous underestimates of the corresponding risk probabilities.

Stellar engines for Kardashev's type I I civilisations. ]. Brit. Interplan. Soc., 53, 297-306. Badescu, V. and Cathcart, R.B. (2006). Use of class A and class C stellar engines to control Sun's movement in the galaxy. Acta Astronautica, 58, 1 1 9-129. B alashov, Yu. (1991). Resource Letter AP- 1 : The Anthropic Principle. Am. ]. Phys., 59, 1069-1076. Ball, ).A. ( 1973). The Zoo hypothesis. Icarus, 19, 347-349. Barrow, J . D . and Tipler, F.). (1986) . The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press). Baxter, S. (2000). The planetarium hypothesis: a resolution of the Fermi paradox. ].

Bulgatz, ). ( 1 992). Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars and More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony Books). Cantril, H . ( 1947). The Invasionfrom Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Carter, B . ( 1983). The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution. Philos. Trans. Royal Soc. London A, 3 1 0, 347-363. Caves, C. (2000). Predicting future duration from present age: a critical assessment. Contemp. Phys., 41 , 143. Cavicchioli, R. (2002). Extremophiles and the search for extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology, 2, 281-292.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

And you see that and you say, How could it just be a big bang … that [made] everything come out so perfectly, to be perfectly conducive to life on this planet. It is just impossible, to me, that it could have been created just by random time and chance.9 Here we find another argument popular with creationist policy makers, which cosmologists call “the anthropic principle.” It is related to the problems we have estimating probabilities and statistics in such things as gambling, life, and economic situations that involve insurance, investment, and risk. Imagine, for instance, the feelings Bachmann’s blade of grass would have when the great holy golf ball landed upon it.

July 11, 2011 INDEX A Abernathy, Ralph, 99–100 Absolutism, 127–28 Abstinence-only sex education, 17, 274–76, 279 Adler Planetarium projector, 20 Affirmative action, 114–15 Agriculture, advances in, 25 Alternative theories, 11–12, 15. See also Creationism America Competes Act, 156 American Science Pledge, 317–20 Anthropic principle, 169–70 Anthropology, cultural, 114 Antiauthoritarian system (top wing), 30–33, 31, 43, 56, 112–13, 246, 249 Antibiotics, use of, 165 Anti-evolution advocates. See Creationism Anti-intellectualism, 246, 286–87 Antiscience anti-intellectualism and, 246, 286–87 arguments of partisans of, 277–78 belief resistance and, 291–92 in China, 58, 220, 285–86 concept collapse and, 118 of conservatives, 284–85, 287–88 culture wars and, 123–24, 163 of evangelical movement, 107–11 fairness doctrine and, 143–46 feedback loop and, 286 neoconservative movement and, 132–34 New Age movement, 134–38 partisanship, 277–82, 285, 290 politics, 60, 63–65 postmodern, 112–15, 121–22, 132–34, 136, 166–67 of Republican Party, 18–19, 296 scientists and, 159 Shadow AAAS an, 273–78 of U.S.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Carroll, John B. 1993. Human Cognitive Abilities: A Survey of Factor-Analytic Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Carter, Brandon. 1983. “The Anthropic Principle and its Implications for Biological Evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 310 (1512): 347–63. Carter, Brandon. 1993. “The Anthropic Selection Principle and the Ultra-Darwinian Synthesis.” In The Anthropic Principle: Proceedings of the Second Venice Conference on Cosmology and Philosophy, edited by F. Bertola and U. Curi, 33–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

I felt a need to laugh. “We aren’t part of some dumb software syncitium! We’re here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe.” Houndtooth Man frowned. “Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of immortality or strong anthropic principle?” “The latter. You think it’s a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too early in the history of a particular universe? We don’t. You young gods are all the same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts.


pages: 292 words: 88,319

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

If the Universe has a centre and conditions vary with distance from that centre, then there will be some places where conditions make life impossible and other places where its existence is most likely. If the latter conditions were to arise near the centre, then this would provide a physical reason (rather than a philosophical prejudice) why we might find ourselves near the centre of the Universe. The modern discussion of the Anthropic Principles in cosmology has developed this insight further, see for example J.D. Barrow and F.J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986, where Kant’s progressive cosmology is discussed in more detail in section 10.2. 7. I. Kant, op. cit., pp. 139–40. 8. The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Smart as we are, we’ve never really managed to realize that war comes with massive casualties and collateral damage, and that after the war, mostly, we go back to the same norm – one we could have preserved before we started, without a load of pain and vengeance to deal with for decades afterwards. Remember the song, ‘War (What is it good for)’? Absolutely Nothing! In his book Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom (a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics and superintelligence risks) predicts situations in which we face serious threats as a result of superintelligence. He calls it the vulnerable world hypothesis (VWH). Bostrom states that there is bound to be some level of technology in the future at which civilization almost certainly gets destroyed, unless quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented degrees of preventive policing and/or global governance are implemented.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

But scientists are wary of anything that suggests a special place for the Earth, when there is no good reason for it to receive such special treatment. Of course, if there were only one planet with life, then it would be bound to be, by definition, the planet on which the inhabitants were thinking “Why us?”—a variant on the so-called anthropic principle—so strictly speaking the “no special place” argument has no good scientific basis, but it is still hard to believe that we are unique. The size of the Milky Way galaxy, let alone the whole universe, suggests that the second option that they are out there but haven’t found us is eminently possible.


pages: 740 words: 236,681

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

And Aristotle, in fact, deduced several dozen first causes in his theology. The second standard Western argument using reason for God is the so-called argument from design, which we have already talked about, both in its biological context and in the recent astrophysical incarnation called the anthropic principle. It is at best an argument from analogy; that is, that some things were made by humans and now here is something more complex th t wasn’t made by us, so maybe it was made by an intelligent being smarter than us. Well, maybe, but that is not a compelling argument. I tried to stress earlier the extent to which misunderstandings, failure of the imagination, and especially the lack of awareness of new underlying principles may lead us into error with the argument from design.

His lips are curious in being the exact same shade of swarthiness as his face, like muscles in a sepia anatomy print. As he raises his glass to these exemplary lips Dale intervenes with “I think, sir—” “Fuck the ‘sir’ stuff. Name’s Myron. Not Ron, mind you. Myron.” “I think it’s a little more than that, what I’m trying to say; the puddle analogy is as if the anthropic principle were being argued from the Earth as opposed to the other planets, which of course we can now see, if we ever doubted it, aren’t suitable for life. In that sense, yes, we’re here because we’re here. But in the case of the universe, where you have only one, why should, say, the observed recessional velocity so exactly equal the necessary escape velocity?”


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The standard model of physics has dozens of constants that need to be precisely what they are, or atoms would not have been possible, and there would have been no stars, no planets, no brains, and no books on brains. That the laws of physics are so precisely tuned to have allowed the evolution of information appears to be incredibly unlikely. Yet by the anthropic principle, we would not be talking about it if it were not the case. Where some people see a divine hand, others see a multiverse spawning an evolution of universes with the boring (non-information-bearing) ones dying out. But regardless of how our universe got to be the way it is, we can start our story with a world based on information.


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

At the time Wheeler was at Princeton, working on the structure of spacetime on the atomic scale—he called it “quantum foam”—and fusion for the hydrogen bomb. The split between nearly theological physics and hard-eyed defense is classic Wheeler. On the one hand, he coauthored the standard book on gravitation/general relativity; he named “black holes”; he worked on the anthropic principle, which explores the possibility that the universe evolved so that we could observe it. On the other hand, Wheeler—along with Edward Teller and Luis Alvarez—was one of a small but public and influential group of physicists supporting the development of the hydrogen bomb; his colleagues’ disapproval, he said, was “deeply troubling.”


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

Understanding how the universe came to have these values is known as the fine-tuning problem. Barrow and Tipler argue that these extraordinarily unlikely values can only be accounted for by the fact that we live in an anthropic universe in the sense that, if the fundamental constants had different values then we would not be here to lament our non-existence. The anthropic principle does not account for the unlikely values, it merely accepts their necessity for existence. It does not explain how the universe arrived at its finely tuned combination of fundamental constants nor who, or what, threw the dice. There seems to be only a limited number of possibilities. Theists seize on these cosmic coincidences as evidence of a divine hand knowingly turning the tumblers to their precise numbers, just as William Paley had argued that a divine watchmaker must have fashioned biological complex structures, such as the eye.


Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

They work really well, don’t you think?” Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. “Ye cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye.” The Devil shrugged. “Nobody’s asking you to believe in me. You don’t, and I’m still here, aren’t I? If it makes things easier, think of me as the garbage-collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle. And they”—he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs—“work by magic, for all you know.” Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically. The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now that he thought about it, he had no idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with it.


pages: 448 words: 116,962

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

"But maybe circumstances arising then formed a necessary precondition for the Eschaton's existence, or the existence of something related to but beyond the Eschaton. There's a whole school of cosmology predicated around the weak an-thropic principle, that the universe is as it seems because, if it was any other way, we would not exist to observe it. There is a… less popular field, based on the strong anthropic principle, that the universe exists to give rise to certain types of en-tity. I don't believe we'll ever understand the Eschaton until we understand why the universe exists." She smiled at him toothily, and let a Prussian diplomat rescue her with the aid of a polite bow and an offer to explain the fall of Warsaw during the late unpleasantness in the Baltic.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

I'm not clear on the details, but apparently it's at the root of one particularly weird directed invocation: if we can set up a gauge field for probability metrics we can tune in on specific EIs fairly--" "EIs?" "External Intelligences. What the mediaeval magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved. Some of them are strongly superhuman, others are dumb as a stump from our perspective. What counts is that they can be coerced, sometimes, into doing what people want. Some of them can also open wormholes--yes, they've got access to negative matter-and send themselves, or other entities, through.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

Humanity could not be be any more intelligent because in that case we would have already built an intelligent machine when we were slightly less intelligent. So at the point of being able to build an intelligent machine, humanity needs to have almost exactly the intelligence that it has now, and no more. This is an instance of the anthropic principle, namely that the world cannot be different than it is because if it was different then we would not be here to experience it. Related Work Many very recent new books This book started as an informal paper with titled “Artificial Intelligence will kill your Grandchildren” initially published in 2008.


Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov

anthropic principle, G4S, gravity well, two and twenty

Human beings prefer to live on planets with suitable characteristics, and then when all habitable planets resemble each other in these characteristics, some say, ‘What an amazing coincidence,’ when it’s not amazing at all and not even a coincidence.” “As a matter of fact,” said Pelorat calmly, “that’s a well-known phenomenon in social science. In physics, too, I believe—but I’m not a physicist and I’m not certain about that. In any case, it is called the ‘anthropic principle.’ The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them. But the question is: Where is the planet that served as a model? Which planet rotates in precisely one Galactic Standard Day of twenty-four Galactic Standard Hours?” Trevize looked thoughtful and thrust out his lower lip.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For a fascinating and more detailed analysis of the probable life spans of cities and corporations, see the work of Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt—e.g., Bettencourt et al., “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities.” a flurry of critical correspondence: For example, see Garrett and Coles, “Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Principles” and Buch, “Future Prospects Discussed.” a raffle where you come in knowing nothing: The statistician Harold Jeffreys would later suggest, instead of Laplace’s (w+1)⁄(n+2), using rather (w+0.5)⁄(n+1), which results from using an “uninformative” prior rather than the “uniform” prior (Jeffreys, Theory of Probability; Jeffreys, “An Invariant Form for the Prior Probability in Estimation Problems”).


pages: 659 words: 203,574

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge by Vernor Vinge

anthropic principle, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, dematerialisation, gravity well, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, low earth orbit, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, MITM: man-in-the-middle, source of truth, technological singularity, unbiased observer, Vernor Vinge

“You know, it’s almost as if someone were picking on the human race,” he mused. “Out of all the solar systems, that we should be the on the low metal one, the outsider.” He didn’t like the idea. It smacked of the theistic fantasy Cor Ascuasenya so loved: humanity as doormat to the gods. “You’ve got it backward, my sir. Ever hear of the anthropic principle? Most likely, intelligent life exists on Tu exactly because we are different from the others. Think what an abundance of metals would mean. It’s not just a matter of wealth, millions of ounces of iron available for large scale construction. My guess is such concentrations of metals would change the surface chemistry so much that life would never develop.”


pages: 824 words: 268,880

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

Or Deleuze’s own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything. In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth’s surface, but they did.


pages: 1,087 words: 325,295

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Danny Hillis, double helix, information security, interchangeable parts, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, selection bias, Snow Crash, Stewart Brand, trade route

“It exists in my mind as a jumble of moments when I thought or did things—and every one of those moments, Raz, could have gone another way. And all of the other outcomes would have been bad ones. I’m certain of that. I replay it in my head over and over. And in every case, I happened to do the right thing.” “Well, it’s kind of like the anthropic principle at work, isn’t it?” I pointed out. “If anything had been a little different, you’d be dead—and so you wouldn’t have a brain to remember it with.” Arsibalt said nothing for a while, then sighed. “That is as unsatisfactory as anthropic arguments usually are. I’d prefer the alternate explanation.”


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Afterward, when your amazing clever reasoning turns out to have been stupid, you’ll have ended up in a much better position if your amazing clever reasoning was of the first type. When I look back upon my past, I am struck by the number of semi-accidental successes, the number of times I did something right for the wrong reason. From your perspective, you should chalk this up to the anthropic principle: if I’d fallen into a true dead end, you probably wouldn’t be hearing from me in this book. From my perspective it remains something of an embarrassment. My Traditional Rationalist upbringing provided a lot of directional bias to those “accidental successes”—biased me toward rationalizing reasons to study rather than not study, prevented me from getting completely lost, helped me recover from mistakes.