Anthropic Principle

Abstract. The presumptuous philosopher (PP) thought experiment lends more credence to the hypothesis which postulates the existence of a larger number of observers than other hypothesis. The PP was suggested as a purely speculative endeavor. However, there is a class of real world observer-selection effects where it could be applied, and one of them is the possibility of interstellar panspermia (IP). There are two types of anthropic reasoning: SIA and SSA. SIA implies that my existence is an argument that larger total number of observers exists; SSA implies that I should find myself in a region with larger number of observers. However, as S. Armstrong showed, SIA can’t distinguish between different ways how larger number of observers appeared, so it can’t favor IP compared with other ways to get many observers. SSA application here is less controversial as it tells only about relation between regions size: e.g. I am more likely to live in a larger country than in a small one, conditioning that the total number of small countries is also small.
Anthropic considerations suggest that the universes in the multiverse with interstellar panspermia will have orders of magnitude more civilizations than universes without IP, and thus we are likely to be in such a universe. This is a strong counterargument against a variant of the Rare Earth hypothesis based on the difficulty of abiogenesis: even if abiogenesis is difficult, IP will disseminate life over billions of planets, meaning we are likely to find ourselves in a universe where IP has happened. This implies that there should be many planets with life in our galaxy, and renders the Fermi paradox even sharper. Either the Great Filter is ahead of us and there are high risks of anthropogenic extinction, or there are many alien civilizations nearby and of the same age as ours—which is itself a global catastrophic risk, as in that case the wave of alien colonization could arrive between 25-500 ky from now.

Die Wissenschaft schreitet voran. Mit der Kartographierung der kosmischen Hintergrundstrahlung wurden Signale aus der ganz frühen Zeit des Universums sichtbar gemacht. Die Entdeckung des Higgs-Bosons im Jahr 2012 hat unsere Kenntnis der Elementarteilchen vervollständigt. Schon Anfang des neuen Jahrtausends ist die Sequenzierung des menschlichen Genoms gelungen; erste Versuche, künstliches Leben zu schaffen, folgten. Gewachsen ist auch die Fähigkeit, Gedanken allein aus der Beobachtung neuronaler Aktivitäten abzulesen.
Viele Fragen aber bleiben trotz des wachsenden Wissens unbeantwortet. Schauen wir nur auf uns selbst: Was ist der Sinn meines Lebens? Gibt es überhaupt so etwas wie bleibende Bedeutung? Oder verlieren wir uns im endlosen Universum?
Wodurch haben wir Menschen in der Evolution die eindrückliche Fähigkeit erworben, die Welt so weitreichend entdecken zu können?
Zu solchen Fragen nach den eigenen Ursprüngen und nach unserem Standort in der Wirklichkeit möchte das Buch ermuntern und nimmt dabei die Gottesfrage mit in den Blick. Dem Leser werden fundierte Einführungen in essentielle Fragestellungen des Dialogs zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaften geboten.

This document is the Special Issue of the First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe (EDU 2008). Please refer to the preface and introduction for more details on the contributions. Keywords: acceleration, artificial cosmogenesis, artificial life, Big Bang, Big History, biological evolution, biological universe, biology, causality, classical vacuum energy, complex systems, complexity, computational universe, conscious evolution, cosmological artificial selection, cosmological natural selection, cosmology, critique, cultural evolution, dark energy, dark matter, development of the universe, development, emergence, evolution of the universe evolution, exobiology, extinction, fine-tuning, fractal space-time, fractal, information, initial conditions, intentional evolution, linear expansion of the universe, log-periodic laws, macroevolution, materialism, meduso-anthropic principle, multiple worlds, natural sciences, Nature, ontology, order, origin of th...

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/collapse-5/

One of the most fertile collaborations in contemporary popular science writing began with a biologist and a mathematician meeting for lunch at a Coventry pub in 1990. Combining their prodigious knowledge of contemporary science, the unique partnership between Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart has spawned a series of popular science books remarkable in their scope, epistemological subtlety and conceptual innovativeness. To read ‘Jack&Ian’ is to embark upon an exhilarating and intellectually enriching ride through the thickets of contemporary scientific thinking and emerge with a profound sense of how it all interconnects. Their combined critical perspective brings much-needed clarity to popular science memes such as 'emergence’, ‘chaos’ and ‘complex systems’, and they can be relied upon never to neglect the ‘big picture’. In this interview, Cohen and Stewart recount the history of their ‘complicit’ collaboration, discuss the significance of the novel ideas proposed in their co-authored works, explain their criticisms of reductionism, anthropic reasoning and astrobiology, and tell us about the aliens who helped them to write their books.

In this fascinating journey to the edge of science, Vidal takes on big philosophical questions: Does our universe have a beginning and an end or is it cyclic? Are we alone in the universe? What is the role of intelligent life, if any, in cosmic evolution? Grounded in science and committed to philosophical rigor, this book presents an evolutionary worldview where the rise of intelligent life is not an accident, but may well be the key to unlocking the universe's deepest mysteries. Vidal shows how the fine-tuning controversy can be advanced with computer simulations. He also explores whether natural or artificial selection could hold on a cosmic scale. In perhaps his boldest hypothesis, he argues that signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are already present in our astrophysical data. His conclusions invite us to see the meaning of life, evolution and intelligence from a novel cosmological framework that should stir debate for years to come.

Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or less banished then by Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But it used to have and still has its revival in modern physical cosmology both in the controversy between the big bang and steady state models some decades ago and in the contemporary attempts to explain the big bang within a quantum cosmological framework. This paper has two main goals: First a conceptual clarification and distinction of different notions of "big bang" and "universe" is suggested, as well as a multiverse taxonomy and a classification of initial and eternal cosmologies. Second, and with the help of this analysis, it is shown how a conceptual and perhaps physical solution of the temporal aspect of Immanuel Kant's "first antinomy of pure reason" is possible, i.e. how our universe in some respect could have both a beginning and an eternal existence. Therefore, paradoxically, there might have been a time before time or a beginning of time in time. - Keywords: cosmology, big bang, big crunch, universe, multiverse, time, general relativity, quantum cosmology, loop quantum cosmology, string cosmology, world models, quantum vacuum, cosmic inflation, anthropic principle, closed timelike loops, Abhay Ashtekar, Hans-Joachim Blome, Martin Bojowald, George F. R. Ellis, Maurizio Gasperini, John Richard Gott III, Alan Guth, Jim Hartle, Stephen Hawking, Mark Israelit, Claus Kiefer, Li-Xin Li, Andrei Linde, Wolfgang Priester, Eckhard Rebhan, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Gabriele Veneziano, Alexander Vilenkin, H. Dieter Zeh.

Abstract: Using simple probability theory, this article explores 76 subatomic, cosmological, terrestrial and biological events/phenomena which must have occurred in precise order which led to the development of our species according to the known laws of physics. The ineluctable conclusion of the mathematics involved is that God invariably exists.

In 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', by Douglas Adams, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is found to be 42 { but
the meaning of this is left open to interpretation. We take it to mean that there are 42
fundamental questions which must be answered on the road to full enlightenment, and we attempt a first draft (or personal selection) of these ultimate questions, on topics ranging from the cosmological constant and origin of the universe to the origin of life and consciousness.

Herein I focus on the Chrysostomian rendition of the analogy of the king, the palace, and the kingdom together with its Nyssenian source of inspiration. Tangentially, I refer to relevant works by other early Christian authors, such as Theophilus of Antioch, Nemesius of Emesa, and Theodoret of Cyrus. My goal is to show that, alongside the straightforward narrative of human uniqueness and superiority, the early Christian tradition proposed a wealth of ideas pertaining to the place of humankind within the earth’s ecosystem and the universe. Rather than anthropocentric, unecological, and acosmistic, the early Christian tradition established a way of thinking that anticipated by centuries the holistic framework of contemporary anthropic cosmology.

John Chrysostom Past, Present, Future, ed. by Doru Costache and Mario Baghos. Sydney: AIOCS Press, 2017: 235-65.

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing un-interpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.

Contents Preface 5 List of contributors 7 Introduction 9 Acknowledgements 14 Part I-Physics and Cosmology Scale Relativity and Fractal Space-Time: Theory and Applications Laurent Nottale 15 Scale Relativity: an Extended Paradigm for Physics and Biology? Commentary by Charles Auffray and Denis Noble 80 Multiscale Integration in Scale Relativity Theory Response by Laurent Nottale 83 The Self-organization of Time and Causality: steps towards understanding the ultimate origin Francis Heylighen 87 Symmetries and Symmetry-breakings: the fabric of physical ...

James Lovelock, now 100, is an independent scientist and futurist. His latest book, Novacene, builds on his previous work on the Gaia hypothesis to postulate that we are quickly approaching the end of the Anthropocene and the beginning of a new geological age, the Novacene, characterized by the emergence of electronic life, with the distinctive capability to directly transform energy into information.

The question of the eternity or temporality of the universe was thoroughly discussed by Muslim theologians. Most of them, principally those who were called Mutakallimūn, agreed on the notion of creation ex nihilo, i.e., creation out of nothing. On the other hand some Muslim philosophers adopted the Greek originated notion of an eternal universe that has existed forever without a beginning. In modern times the Kalām cosmological argument was revived by William Craig to be utilized as a logical reason for the existence of God. In this paper I will try to elucidate the fundamental Islamic arguments brought up by Mutakallimūn in support of the principle of creation and I will concentrate my study on arguments proposed by two main thinkers: the well-known theologian Ibn Hazm Al-Zāhirī and the well- recognized thinker Abu Hamid Al-Ghazālī. I then discuss some questions raised in connection with the philosophical implications of modern cosmology, including the role of the primary singulari...

This document is the Special Issue of the First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe (EDU 2008). Please refer to the preface and introduction for more details on the contributions. Keywords: acceleration, artificial cosmogenesis, artificial life, Big Bang, Big History, biological evolution, biological universe, biology, causality, classical vacuum energy, complex systems, complexity, computational universe, conscious evolution, cosmological artificial selection, cosmological natural selection, cosmology, critique, cultural evolution, dark energy, dark matter, development of the universe, development, emergence, evolution of the universe evolution, exobiology, extinction, fine-tuning, fractal space-time, fractal, information, initial conditions, intentional evolution, linear expansion of the universe, log-periodic laws, macroevolution, materialism, meduso-anthropic principle, multiple worlds, natural sciences, Nature, ontology, order, origin of th...

Contents Preface 5 List of contributors 7 Introduction 9 Acknowledgements 14 Part I-Physics and Cosmology Scale Relativity and Fractal Space-Time: Theory and Applications Laurent Nottale 15 Scale Relativity: an Extended Paradigm for Physics and Biology? Commentary by Charles Auffray and Denis Noble 80 Multiscale Integration in Scale Relativity Theory Response by Laurent Nottale 83 The Self-organization of Time and Causality: steps towards understanding the ultimate origin Francis Heylighen 87 Symmetries and Symmetry-breakings: the fabric of physical ...

The paper explores two main themes in science, philosophy and theology/worldview discourse: anthropic principles and transhumanism. After providing a brief history of the first theme, it cautions about potential dehumanisation from adopting the wrong anthropic principle as a kind of ‘disanthropic’ reasoning. Part of the solution is to reclaim a proper meaning of ‘anthropic’ for the social sciences and humanities beyond the natural sciences of physics and cosmology or statistical probabilities. The second theme is investigated both in theistic and nontheistic variants as they influence what is meant by ‘human’ in the context of evolution and development. Transhumanism is portrayed in terms of both risk and reward with the rise of neoeugenics and biotechnological human enhancements. The paper closes by briefly acknowledging Human Extension (Sandstrom 2011, 2014) as a reflexive anthropic principle that can be applied in social sciences and humanities to help overcome the ideologies of naturalism and scientism. The Human Extension approach focuses on choices and actions that bring into relief the eschatological claims of some transhumanists and posthumanists who speak disanthropically about human extinction due to technocratic artificial intelligence or who deny human exceptionalism and instead promote species egalitarism among earthly creatures.

We give an overview of mathematical music theory as it has been de-veloped in the past twenty years. The present theory includes a formal language for musical and musicological objects and relations. This lan-guage is built upon topos theory and its logic. Various models of ...

Theistic religions establish a relation between transcendent deities and transient human beings. Anthropologically speaking, religions were established for human well being. Epistemologically speaking, they were established as a search for absolute truth. Theologically speaking, they try to find value and meaning in human life. According to science, absolute claims to truth by religions are often unwarranted. However, science is also an unfinished discourse on truth. The failure to admit this would generate fundamentalism of various sorts. The author makes a philosophical odyssey into the claims of truth by religions and science and advocates the need for developing a positive and inclusive theology for battling fundamentalism.

Einleitung
Die Existenz der Menschheit hängt von einer großen Zahl unglaublicher „Koinzidenzen“ ab. Beruht unser Universum auf Zufall oder auf einem Plan? Ist der Beobachter für die Entstehung des Universums ebenso wichtig wie das Universum für das Entstehen des Beobachters? Lassen willkürliche Anfangsbedingungen zur Zeit des Urknalls nach 15 Milliarden Jahren zwangsläufig eine für Menschen bewohnbare Welt entstehen? Wie wahrscheinlich sind die biologischen Vorgänge, die zur Entstehung des Lebens führten, angesichts der starken astrophysikalischen Einschränkungen für das Universum?

The article signals the challenges posed by the new cosmological paradigm, and proposes the thinking of Fr Stăniloae as a traditional solution regarding the confluence of theology and science. It addresses the author’s cosmological elaborations by focusing on three main areas, the movement of the universe, the rationality of the cosmos and the anthropic principle.

We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated. We describe the consequences of this anthropic bias for estimation of catastrophic risks, and suggest some directions for future work.

The paper addresses an apparently unsolvable philosophical question: can the Christian Dogma of the Trinitarian nature of God be rationally explained? The authors argue that the conflict between fides and ratio can be resolved by a novel interpretation of the concept of time within a new philosophical paradigm: the Purposeful Evolution Theory (PET) 1 , where time, as in Plato, is a movable image of Eternity. In this paper, the PET is used to explain the Christian Dogma of Trinity through a deductive reasoning centred on the concept of atemporality. The Purposeful Evolution Theory has strict links with Plato's philosophy and represents a key for a systematic interpretation of Plato's unwritten doctrines. The authors argue that Plato's unwritten doctrines already addressed and partially solved the problem of Eternity and Time, indirectly giving a reason-based explanation of the Trinitarian Nature of God and His Goodness, before it was even revealed.

We note that there is an exception to the general arguments that no falsifiable predictions can be made, on the basis of of presently available data, by applying the weak anthropic principle (WAP) to the landscape of string theory. If there are infinitely more vacua in the landscape for one sign of a parameter than the other, within an anthropicaly allowed range, then under very weak assumptions about the probability measure one gets a firm prediction favoring that sign of that parameter. It is interesting to note that while the understanding of the string landscape is evolving, present evidence on the nature of the landscape allows such an argument to be made, leading to the conclusion that the WAP favors a negative value for the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, in contradiction to the result of astronomical observations. The viability of applying the WAP to string theory then requires that either there are found an infinite discretum of anthropically allowed vacua for $\Lambda >0$, or the recently found infinite discretum of solutions for $\Lambda <0$ be reduced to a finite value.

"General lectue given to students and their instructors to introduce the reading of the week in some kind of 'great books'/history of ideas program.
As an interested nonscientist with some modest background in the sciences, I find the discussions fascinating.

For Lee Smolin, our universe is only one in a much larger cosmos (the Multiverse) - a member of a growing community of universes, each one being born in a bounce following the formation of a black hole. In the course of this, the values of the free parameters of the physical laws are reprocessed and slightly changed. This leads to an evolutionary picture of the Multiverse, where universes with more black holes have more descendants. Smolin concludes, that due to this kind of Cosmological Natural Selection our own universe is the way it is. The hospitality for life of our universe is seen as an offshot of this self-organized process. - This paper outlines Smolin&#39;s hypothesis, its strength, weakness and limits, its relationship to the anthropic principle and evolutionary biology, and comments on the hypothesis from different points of view: physics, biology, philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, and metaphysics. Some of the main points are: (1) There is no necessary connect...

Avoiding the discussion on the more than thirty variations of the anthropic principle, the essence of the explanation I propose is that the values of the universe's parameters are fine-tuned for the production of humans-similarly as the values of a tree's parameters are fine-tuned for the production of seeds-because human life constitutes the universe's seed or input and output. The incontrovertible law of biogenesis alone affirms the eternity of human life by providing solid scientific evidence that life never originates from nonlife, and that species originate only from the same species, never from lower forms of species, in spite of the rhetoric of evolutionists-they mistake development from the universe's human input for evolution from simple beginnings.

In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way, the ``process&#39;&#39; by which the laws and constants of physics is determined not too different from the process that gave rise to our current biodiversity, i.e. Darwinian evolution. This has implications for the fields of SETI and Artificial Life, which are based on a philosophy of the inevitability of life.

This paper proposes a new explanation for the paradoxes related to anthropic reasoning. Solutions to the Sleeping Beauty Problem and the Doomsday argument are discussed in detail. The main argument can be summarized as follows: 1. Our thoughts, reasonings and narratives inherently comes from a certain perspective. With each perspective there is a center, or using the term broadly, a self. 2. The natural first-person perspective is most primitive. However we can also think and express from others' perspectives with a theory of mind. 3. A perspective's center could be unrelated to the topic of discussion so its de se thoughts need not to be considered, e.g. the perspective of an outside observer. Let's call these the third-person perspective. 4. First-person reasoning allows primitive self identification as I am inherently unique as the center of the perspective. Whereas from third-person perspective I am not fundamentally special comparing to others so a reference class of observers including me can be defined. 5. It is my contention that reasonings from different perspectives should not mix. Otherwise it could lead to paradoxes even independent of anthropic reasoning. 6. The paradoxes surrounding anthropic reasoning are caused by the aforementioned perspective mix. Regarding the sleeping beauty problem the correct answer should be double halving. Lewisian halving and thirding uses unique reasonings from both first and third-person perspectives. 7. Indexical probabilities such as " the probability that this is the first awakening " or " the probability of me being one of the first 100 billion human beings " also mixes first-and third-person reasonings. Therefore invalid. 8. Readers against perspectivism may disagree with point 1 and suggest we could reason in objective terms without the limit of perspectives. My argument is compatible with this belief. Objective reasoning would be analytically identical to the third-person perspective. My argument would become that objective reasoning and perspective reasonings should not mix. In the following I would continue to use " third-person perspective " but readers can switch that to " objective reasoning " if they wish so.

Physicists in search of the foundation of the world: how tiny objects can create matter, energy and even space and time - and possibly countless other universes. -- This article is meant as an introduction into quantum geometry (loop quantum gravity) and string theory, written for the general audience. Partly, this article is also a conference report and review, based

This is the outline:
1. La présence du motif parménidien chez Tresmontant
2. Une inévitable incursion en biologie
3. Une preuve cosmologique qui serait preuve « totale »
4. Dieu découvert à travers la science ou dans la science ?
5. Trouver Dieu dans les sciences ? À condition d’en préciser le sens.