Nice collection of coincidences and just right configurations that make our universe/existence possible. Strange that the article doesn't also point out that all of these coincidences are 100% inevitable, otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe them.
Of course, other kinds of life are possible, which would require other "just right" conditions - but in that case, we'd all be living in that universe, marveling at those coincidences!
You're referring to the Anthropic principle, which is a hypothesis, not a law of nature.
It also says nothing on inevitability. These things could easily have just not occurred (knowing what we know) and then we wouldn't be here to observe them.
"Only universes capable producing/hosting conscious observers can be consciously observed from within them" seems like more than just a hypothesis to me.
That's not what GP says. The original post said " all universes must inevitably produce the conditions for intelligent life" which is not obviously true. The anthropic principle does not say that either.
Any mention of the anthropic principle w.r.t. the article is essentially screwing up the causality, as correctly stated ITT.
My understanding is that the principle is just the observation that our existence implies that a certain chain of events occurred in the past. That isn't the same thing as saying that the chain of events necessarily had to occur.
Since you seem to know this with certainty, perhaps you'd like to edit the related Wikipedia article [0]:
> The anthropic principle, also known as the observation selection effect, is the hypothesis that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing intelligent life.
> The anthropic principle is often criticized for lacking falsifiability and therefore its critics may point out that the anthropic principle is a non-scientific concept, even though the weak anthropic principle, "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist", is "easy" to support in mathematics and philosophy (i.e., it is a tautology or truism). However, building a substantive argument based on a tautological foundation is problematic. Stronger variants of the anthropic principle are not tautologies and thus make claims considered controversial by some and that are contingent upon empirical verification.
>According to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the anthropic principle essentially just says that the conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 1.
If you cherry-pick, sure, but you have to completely ignore the rest of the article. The excerpt you provided indeed points out it's a truism. The article also clearly states why that's problematic.
The article just lists existing beliefs (even mentions PAP) and some people believe it's problematic. Those beliefs look out of context of fine tuning problem, but they are presented in a rudimentary form, so can't be analyzed, so we have to accept these beliefs merely exist.
The anthropic principle in its weak form isn't really a hypothesis - it's more of a methodological principle that warns us against unnecessary theories. This is best illustrated by the historical debate between Dirac and Dicke (who came up with this idea) about cosmic coincidences.
In 1937, Dirac noticed striking numerical relationships between fundamental physical constants and the age of the universe [1]. He proposed these couldn't be coincidental and suggested fundamental constants must vary with cosmic time. But Dicke (1961) showed that some of these "coincidences" weren't so mysterious: they were necessary conditions for our existence as observers [2]. The universe had to be old enough for heavy elements to form in stars, but not so old that all stars burned out. These constraints naturally explain some of the numerical relationships Dirac found, without requiring varying constants.
However, Dicke's argument has limits: it only works for coincidences necessary for intelligent life. It can't explain away "gratuitous coincidences" - numerical relationships that aren't required for our existence. This is particularly relevant because Dirac's work was actually part of a longer tradition - going back to Weyl in 1919 [1] - of physicists finding peculiar numerical relationships between physical constants.
While the article discusses coincidences that make our existence possible, we need to consider how to explain the other ones. Is it even feasible ? Let me give it a try.
If physical constants were "set" randomly, with their observability conditioned only by whether they allow intelligent life, we should expect to find both types of coincidences in our universe: the necessary ones that enable our existence, and gratuitous ones that just happened to come along for the ride in our universe's "roll of the dice".
This leads to a disturbing conclusion: for laws of physics to be discoverable by observers in a universe without a creator, they must contain misleading elements as a by-product of what allowed these observers to emerge. The universe seems to impose a double-bind on its observers - the very conditions that make it observable must also make it deceptive.
This is only loosely related but I thought you might be interested in a new paper, just described[1] by Sabine Hossenfelder.
They started with the assumption of a multiverse, and said that we're most likely to find ourselves in a universe that has physical constants allowing for the most observers. They checked such a constant, and found that the constant is nowhere near the ideal; if it had been different, there would be a lot more planet-bearing stars in our universe. They claimed this as evidence that the other universes don't exist.
Let's say there are two possible coincidences, A and B, each with an independent one-in-a-million chance. Coincidence A is necessary for life to emerge, but B is irrelevant.
Now let's say there are a trillion universes, with random settings. Only one in a million universes have coincidence A, but those are all the universes with observers. All the observers see coincidence A.
Out of those million universes, we can expect to see only one universe with coincidence B. The vast majority of observers will only see the coincidence that allowed them to exist.
You can't, not for sure. But this does mean that we shouldn't expect to find gratuitous coincidences. Most likely, the apparent coincidences we observe in physics and cosmology will either be necessary, due to physical relationships we don't understand yet, or will be explainable by the anthropic principle.
Would being one in a million itself be a coincidence though, one which we couldn't differentiate from coincidences explainable by the anthropic principle? "Most likely" doesn't satisfy me.
It's easy to form conjectures, but there is a deep metaphysical problem when it comes to satisfactorily modeling a system from the inside. It's turtles all the way down [0]. Unless our universe is embedded within another system, and its configuration at least partially mirrors the configuration of the system it is embedded within [1], and this is recoverable, then we really just can't make many absolute claims about the nature of our universe's particular configuration.
[0] And the only way out is by solving the deepest metaphysical problems which physics has not been able to touch, such as, "Why is there anything at all?"
[1] An example might be the conservation of energy, or stationary action. If such principles were to hold even within a system our universe might be embedded in, we could start to narrow down a few things and maybe uncover some suprauniversal inevitabilities. The challenge is proving that without observing the universe from the vantage point of a host system, which would really mean proving the inevitability of such principles in any system of sufficient complexity.
My claim is just that if we see something that seems like an unlikely coincidence, we should look for explanations. Either there's some underlying reason that it isn't a coincidence after all, or there's a reason that no observers would be possible if it were otherwise.
It's possible that occasionally, we'll waste our time looking for explanations of things that really are coincidences. But since this will be rare, it's worth looking for explanations anyway.
So false coincidences or false gratuity (+ the rare coincidences allowed by the probabilities of non-correlated variables).
There seems to be a contradiction in terms in my approach: how could I conceive of gratuitous coincidences that are outside of the causal network necessary for life to emerge and at the same time expect they are not entirely independent from necessary coincidences ?
Both necessary and superfluous coincidences could be manifestations of "structural coherence" and correlate to the degree of "order" or "complexity" of the universe. I'm unsure about my choice of words (knowing that there are precise ways to measure those), but maybe what I'm trying to grasp at is that emergence of observers is a hard problem, as shown by the very small margins the fundamental constants need to sit within for this to happen. Our existence isn't attributable directly to the singular values they take, but to the expressivity they allow, carbon chemistry being an example of that.
Maybe the laws of physics and fundamental constants operate like a sophisticated construction system. Like Lego, they offer increased degrees of freedom and expressive potential, but this very complexity comes with the cost of enabling marginally legal or "quasi-valid" configurations. A high level of compositionality inherently generates possibilities beyond strict necessity—introducing both meaningful structures and potential anomalies.
We could almost put this to test by measuring how easy it is to find non-sensical quasi-equations in the laws of physics, comparing our set of fundamental constant values with randomly generated ones. I guess distinguishing false coincidences and false gratuity would constitute the wall preventing us from doing so.
Anthropic principle explains only coincidences necessary for existence of life. If a coincidence isn't necessary for life, then it's not explainable by anthropic principle.
Physics isn't unable to touch the problem "Why is there anything at all?", it only doesn't touch it because the problem was declared to be useless to think about, and you obviously can't touch it without thinking. The usual reason is that the thing kept existing since previous time.
Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?" (regarding magnetic attraction/repulsion) precisely for this reason. [0]
He considers it a waste of time to consider, because you fundamentally can't make meaningful progress on the problem with our current tools and understanding, and it's possible that no amount of tools or understanding can reach the bottom-most turtle. There are some things we may simply never know.
That you can't make progress is not a fact, but an opinion. But it's a fact that you won't make progress if you don't try to solve problems.
As another example, Lee Smolin disagrees with anthropic principle, because he believes anthropic principle doesn't allow to study such fundamental problems. At least he thinks solving these fundamental problems is science's business.
I agree that it's worth pursuing, but it turns into a metaphysical journey, and metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, not physics. We have to establish that it's even possible to answer these questions.
>Physics isn't unable to touch the problem "Why is there anything at all?"
>Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?"
In Chinese, Korean or Japanese, "how" and "why" are the same word. A "why" after all, always decomposes into a "there is" (fields, particles, properties such as mass) and a "how" (the associated laws). Physics is restricted to the latter but hasn't been able to find a definitive frontier between the two. A "there is" often decomposes into another "how" and another "there is" after progress is made. Example: mass and the higgs field.
It's the Anthropic Principle[1], basically it's the idea that those coincidences having occured can be explained by the fact that if they didn't, we wouldn't exist, and thus there would be no one to wonder why they happened. In other words, those coincidence happened necessarily, in a way.
What he said is not the anthropic principle. He said these coincidences must always occur. That's not true. They have occurred in at least one universe, solar system and planet: ours. But these conditions are not inevitable.
And we've come full circle back to the anthropic principle, which does not imply that all universes eventually evolve life (it implies that if you are alive, you life in a universe that can create life)... so I am officially being trolled here.
The universe (OUR universe) must be configured to allow life to exist (obviously, b/c we do).
Not the same as All universes (in any configuration) will allow life to exist.
By our universe you mean the part of the universe that we observe? Like people believed the world ends at the sky firmament? How would you explain them why uninhabitable planets don't exist?
If all universes start in the same state and evolve deterministically, then they go through the same evolution, then if one produces life, then all produce life.
> Not the same as All universes (in any configuration) will allow life to exist.
Sorry I didn't realize that was the argument being made. I thought it was it's inevitable for there to be at least one universe that will evolve life. Not trying to troll you.
> I thought it was it's inevitable for there to be at least one universe that will evolve life.
Oh man, here we go.
I'm not sure that's true either. Unless you believe that all possible universes will eventually occur. In which case carry on, no truth/falsehoods exist at that level that I know of.
It's the same feeling I had after reading the article, though, and I'm pretty familiar with anthropic reasoning.
The anthropic principle is the most plausible answer we have to the honestly quite reasonable question of "if all of these things are so unlikely, why did they still all happen?", so why not emphasize it more?
The idea is also pretty powerful in ordinary/non-metaphysical contexts in the form of survivorship bias, and something useful to keep in mind whenever listening to somebody successful post-hoc explaining how all of their conscious past decisions inevitably led them to where they are.
I agree, this is in the category of "if things were different, they'd be different".
All of these things had to be some way, and in every way they could be there would be something different now. However, they were they way they were so we're here now.
It's a lot like saying that it took a string of nearly impossible coincidences at just the right time for you to be born. Which is true. But just because dad plowed mom at half past two instead of quarter past doesn't mean we don't have a person, we just have a slightly different person. And that person would also be the result of a bunch or impossible coincidences. It's basically the lottery paradox. Every individual ticket is unlikely to win, however, it is guaranteed someone will win.
