I wouldn't dismiss the anthropic principle outright. Even though it is construed as a philosophy more than a scientific theory, the evidence is right before our eyes. The quantum nature of reality suggests an ordering that unfolds to accomodate the reason for being. Tracing the evolution of the process of creation suggests that the intelligence that guides this unfolding process exists at the very most basic level, in the maintainance of particles and pre-particle definitons compatible with the current scenario and the discarding and rejection of particles and pre-particle definitions not compatible with it. Philip Bucksbaum of Michigan University established that an infinite amount of information can be stored in a single electron. Information is intelligence.
You said
Quote:
|
As a get-out, some string theorists have turned to the anthropic principle, suggesting that the laws and constants of our universe have to be the way they are to allow the emergence of life - otherwise we wouldn't be here to measure them. This anthropic reasoning is philosophically uncomfortable for many scientists, who question whether it is even testable.
|
But neither string theory nor loop-quantum gravity theory can be empirically supported either, let alone be testable.
The discomfort that scientists feel for anthropocentrism is linked to the concept of a beginning out of nothing and the continuation of the creative process as a manifestation of perpetual motion in that the process is apparently accelerating. The problem lies in quantifying the how and why.
These questions can be rationalised. We have to get away from the "the Universe is the way it is otherwise we wouldn't be here to describe it" kind of thinking. The fact is, if the Universe were any other way, then that is the way that it would be, and we would still be here to observe it. This, of course, begs those questions "how and why?".
Difficult as it may be, try to conceive of a state of pre-beginning. Before there was anything there was nothing. Period. No time, no void, no substance. So the beginning happens. That's all. What caused it to happen to my mind was what I like to think of as being a premonition. A premonition does not require the function of time. Premonitions are foreshadowings of future events. This particular premonition was of the idea that anything existing, let alone being cognizant of that fact, yes - existence itself - being so staggeringly awesome and profound that it simply vents into issuance. What is established at this time is the difference between being and not being, existence versus nothing, and it represents an infinite differential. Polarity is established and the process creates space and matter and ultimately time expanding in a perpetual realization of that premonition, which is occurring at the periphery of the Universe as we speak, and wherein we find the manifestation of consciousness which must of needs predispose the premonition since the two are mutually inclusive. The same consciousness that Carl Gustav Jung described intuitively as "The Universal Unconscious".
We have found that evolution is accelerating. And for this reason consciousness could not have manifest in one giant entity infinite in scope and duration since it would become obsolete over time. That is why we are corporeal and finite, as the duration of our observable Universe is also finite, doomed to ultimately peter out and dissipate, even as creation happens anew at the periphery.