TO SERVE MAN

[substitute]

The Anthropic Principle is the most ridiculous thing I have seen produced by real grown-up scientists.

It's fascinating in a train-wreck way to watch geeks reinvent wheels. Clearly there wasn't any need to stay awake during Philosophy 10, much less do any reading on the subject later on when they got big ideas about the place of humanity in the universe.

Comments

I'm out of practice

[mrhinelander.livejournal.com]

I remember having trouble getting it when Hawking explains the anthropic principle. I persisted, because--well, just because it's Hawking, right? It turned out that it didn't really matter, because over the next decade or two or whatever it's been, I was THOROUGHLY prepared for every single one of my encounters with discussions of the anthropic principle.

All bogus, 100% of the time. I soon developed this rule of thumb to see if the speaker is barking up the wrong tree: "Is the speaker equivalently saying, 'I'm 60 inches tall, and LOOK, my skeleton is 59.5 inches tall. Just think, if my skeleton were just 0.1 inches shorter or taller, I couldn't live! PROOF that..." They seem to trail off at that point.

That is not the anthropic principle, I remember that much from Hawking. Beyond that--well, I drink a lot, did I mention that?

Is there any bourbon? Oh, and ham, wasn't there ham?

Theory

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

I can't remember who it was (John Horgan?) who observed that scientists are generally pretty good at doing science and generally pretty bad at thinking about it all. It's an odd situation.

Puddle

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

«...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking,
'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I
find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me
staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in
it!'»

--Douglas Adams, as quoted in by Richard Dawkins in his
eulogy for Adams

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Somewhere along the line, we fell into the grievous fallacy of thinking that science was the pursuit of measurable truth. If we'd all get it through our heads that science is actually the pursuit of pretty accurate predictive models, then it would be clear why scientist shouldn't waste their time teaching creationism or that the the universe "had" to unfold in such a way that we'd be here to observe it.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

It's funny you put it that way, because I always figured the Anthropic Principle, out of the hands of kooks, was the exact opposite: that it's not remarkable that the Universe appears to be carefully tuned to support human life, but rather that it just happens to be that way and thus we happen to be here -- a reminder to those who might think otherwise that the probability of past events is always 1.

[gcrumb.livejournal.com]

WAP? SAP? PAP? FAP? CRAP?

Sounds like it was designed to be absurd....

... Either that, or it's a long-lost Three Stooges sketch.

[hweimei.livejournal.com]

If only I were carbon-based, I'd fit right in! *snif*

[jessef.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I've always found the Anthropic Principle compelling, and I think you may be misinterpreting a concept that you would actually find copacetic. But I haven't had all that much exposure to the topic, so I'm open to the possibility that it's absurd and I'm the one who misunderstood it.