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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spiney" data-source="post: 233765" data-attributes="member: 192438">This was “extremely trendy” just a few years ago, provoking much controversy (with many accusations of it being pseudoscience, or just plain gibberish), but seems to have almost vanished now. Why? The weak anthropic principle (WAP) is just a truisim, it says that for human beings to exist then physical conditions must permit this, which fixes the values of various physical constants in the universe. etc. OK, yeah, but so what? The strong anthropic principle (SAP) says the universe was designed (!) so that life would “have to” emerge. An updated version – perhaps – of Paley’s Watch. A more recent version appears in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. This strongly appeals to number mystics, who feel that maths is “much too unreasonably effective in explaining things” (eg, Plato, Wigner), so must somehow exist independently “out there” - outside our minds - so therefore has been “created”. The final anthropic principle  (FAP) says that intelligent life is the teleological end of the universe, a thought first philosophically voiced by Aristotle, more recently by Teilhard De Chardin (the “Omega Point”). The most recent version of this involves quantum theory’s “collapse of the wave function” (we all accept that happens, right???), with observers “selecting” the universe they live in, out of infinite other possibilities.  Lots of people have thought this was all just complete balls. Famous skeptic and debunker Martin Gardner proposed the completely ridiculous anthropic principle. As Auberon Waugh used to say: “I don’t know, what do other people think?” <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle</a> . <a href="http://www.anthropic-principle.com/" target="_blank">www.anthropic-principle.com/</a> . <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point</a>  . <a href="http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/summary.html" target="_blank">http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/summary.html</a> .  ((( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefunction_collapse" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefunction_collapse</a> ))).</blockquote>

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