[extropy-chat] The Personal Anthropic Principle

[Lee Corbin]

James writes

> I found the ABC's piece on the anthropic principle very helpful:
> 
> http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm

Yes, that is a good discussion. And it reminds me that I should
have reserved my spleen for anything other than the "Weak 
Anthropic" principle. Quite a number of professions adopt
only this milder form. From the link above, David Deutsch says:

    Another way to go is to say, oh well then, the reason why it seems fine tuned is
    that actually there are lots of universes and all possible values of these
    constants of nature, all possible laws of physics, all possible ways that the
    universe could be are actually instantiated in some universes. And the reason why
    we observe these particular values that seem fine tuned for our existence, is
    simply because in the other ones there's no one there to ask the question. And so
    we shouldn't be surprised that we're in one of the ones that has parameters such
    that someone's going to ask the question. And that idea, the idea that we should
    condition all our predictions on the assumption that we are here to ask the
    question, is called the weak anthropic principle.

Lee


> Out of complete cosmological naivety, it also seems to me less likely
> that the meta-verse contains all possible universes, separated by each
> possible quantum variation, than that there is some structural
> patterning that reduces the N of universes. Perhaps Robin's suggested
> mechanisms of adjacent universe-gobbling is one mechanism which reduces
> the infinitude of the metaverse.