The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Poul Anderson, "Wellspring of Dreams," see here.

Anderson discusses The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by John D Barrow and Frank J Tipler.

Barrow and Tipler ask whether the important quantities in physics are arbitrary. The quantities listed by Anderson are:

the gravitational constant
the fine-structure constant
Planck's constant
the charges of elementary particles
the masses of those particles
the present size of the universe
its present age

This reminds me why I am a philosopher, not a physicist. Like Socrates, I cannot handle all these technical details. But, without them, we would have neither science nor technology. The scientists (natural philosophers) have got it right.

The size and age of the universe are closely related, almost identical, since the universe is expanding. To say that the universe is big is to say that it is old. Or, at least, to say that it has reached a certain size is also to say that it has reached the corresponding age. It is sometimes argued that there must be life elsewhere because the universe is big. However, if the universe needed to reach a certain age before it could contain any life, then maybe we are the first? Elements necessary for life had to be synthesized in a first generation of stars, then had to condense into a second generation of stars and planets - and that took time.

Why are the size and age of the universe listed with the other quantities? They just happen to be the current size and age when we are asking the question. The universe had to reach a certain size and age before anyone could exist in it to ask anything. However, the size and age will continue to increase whereas the other listed quantities will not.

The Weak Anthropic Principle: the universe is the way we perceive it because, if it were otherwise, then we would not exist to perceive it.

If there are universes with physical quantities that are incompatible with life, then no one is perceiving those universes.

The Strong Anthropic Principle: the universe must have properties that allow life to develop.

Anderson tells us that the reasoning involves quantum mechanics and the observer-observed relationship. Philosophically, I believe that there is an objective world that existed before it was observed and that exists independently of being observed. However, I have yet to read Barrow's and Tipler's book.

The Final Anthropic Principle: intelligence must come into existence and will never die out.

Anderson says that this "...is admittedly a non sequitur..." (p. 244) So why is it asserted? The human race could be killed by a comet or a nuclear war and we might be the only intelligent life... But, again, I have yet to read the book.

Anderson writes that: "We can only hope for another Stapledon..." (p. 238) to fictionalize current cosmology "...as he did the cosmology of his period." (ibid.) And, again referring to Stapledon by name, Anderson writes:

"What we now have offered us is an eschatology for today. What we need is a genius who will make a story of it." (p. 245)

Since Anderson's later novels fictionalized all of the cosmological and eschatological speculations summarized in this article, it is clear that Anderson himself was this genius and this new Stapledon.

Dyson imagines intelligence surviving heat-death as "...changeable configurations of leptons." (p. 246) Barrow and Dyson argue that, in the finite time before a cosmic collapse, an infinite number of experiences and thoughts would be possible. How? I need to read their book.

Chaos And Wishful Thinking Maybe

"For Newton and his colleagues the ordered laws of motion themselves appear to be the end of Nature. God exists to uphold and perpetuate them, defending the world system from falling into chaos and irrationality."

-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 62.

The Biblical God had imposed order on pre-cosmic chaos represented by water.

"'In a reality forever liable to chaos, the Patrol is the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course... A cosmos of random changes must be senseless, ultimately self-destructive. In it could be no freedom.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield of Time (New York, New York, 1991), PART SIX, 1990, p. 435.

At the very end of The Shield of Time, a Danellian finally tells Everard and Wanda the meaning of the Patrol. It had been hinted at the very beginning of the series that the trainees were not yet being told the whole truth.

Barrow and Tipler summarize the history of Arguments from Design as a lead-in to introducing the Anthropic Principle. They also quote Stephen Jay Gould who characterizes the Principle as the latest manifestation of a comforting tradition of wishful thinking.

The Anthropic Principle

Poul Anderson, "Wellsprings of Dream" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 235-247.

John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, 2009).

I am reading the latter, having read about it in the former. Some discussion might be relevant on this blog, especially in relation to Anderson's cosmological sf. Barrow and Tipler make a point that might be relevant to the discussions in our combox:

"...the authors are cosmologists, not philosophers. This has one very important consequence which the average reader should bear in mind. Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgement regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon. The authors are no exception to this rule and it would be unwise of the reader to draw any wider conclusions about the authors' views from what they may read here."

-Barrow & Tipler, op. cit., p. 15.

Many scientists also feel no qualms about subscribing to emotionally charged religious or political views just like the rest of us! We need not only theories to test but also a world-view to live by but we do not have to be dogmatic about it. A philosophy of nonattachment involves nonattachment to the details of a philosophy.

Poul Anderson's novel, Mirkheim, dramatizes social conflict and change, presents a vast cast of characters with every conceivable viewpoint and incorporates sympathetic treatment of the single character that the author most obviously disagrees with.

From The End Of Time To Roma Mater

I read Barrow's and Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle because Poul Anderson had discussed it but I wound up disappointed. I do not understand:

the mathematics;

why intelligence should be either necessary or immortal;

how a finite period of time can contain an infinity of experiences.

The Final Anthropic Principle requires the universe to collapse whereas it is now thought that it will expand indefinitely. I read somewhere on Wikipedia that Tipler has a reply to this but surely the main lesson to be learned is that we just do not know enough yet.

I return with some relief to Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys, Volume I, Roma Mater, where we notice numerous details as if for the first time. Hadrian's Wall is seventy-seven miles long, the breadth of Britannia at that point. We also notice both similarities and differences between Mithraism and Christianity. Gratillonius addresses Mithras both as "Savior" and as "Lord" but also as "Warrior." Mithras was not slain but slew the Bull. He stands before "the Serpent" but also before "the Lion." And we remember the Lion of Judah.

Mithraism was mythological but not also historical and did not admit women so it lost out to Christianity. Eventually, Gratillonius will convert.

The Space-Travel Argument

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

I am having to skip through this book because I do not understand the mathematics. I will try, but fail, to understand the Final Anthropic Principle.

The penultimate chapter asks why von Neumann probes have not already reached the Solar System. The simplest answer is that there is no one to send any but Poul Anderson offers alternative answers in The Boat of a Million Years and Starfarers. The truth, I think, is that we just do not know enough yet. New data falsifies current theories and there is currently a surplus of new data. Our main hope has to be that our scientific/technological/data-gathering civilization will live long enough to learn more.

"...the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know."

-James Blish, The Triumph of Time IN Blish, Cities in Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT p. 596.

The Ground Of Science

Poul Anderson, "Wellsprings of Dream" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 235-247.

Anderson concludes this article by observing that, just as ballet springs:

"...from the everyday dynamics of walking or myth from everyday birth, life, love, death, mystery..." (p. 247)

- in the same way, "...some grand science fiction..." (ibid.) can spring from "...the ground of science..." (ibid.) as imaginatively extrapolated in works like The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. 

My problem with this proposition is that, having read Anderson's summaries of this and some similar works, I am far more interested in contemplating their philosophical implications than in just reading some more science fiction! For previous relevant blog discussion, see here. I stated in a post in 2016 that I had yet to read Darrow's and Tipler's book. I still have yet to read it. What happened? Did I try to get hold of a copy and not succeed or just not try? I will re-address this issue tomorrow when the Public Library opens.

We observe a universe that allows the existence of conscious life because, if the universe did not allow the existence of conscious life, then there would be no one here to observe it but does the universe just happen to be like this or are there many universes of which just a few allow conscious life?

The existence of the universe is necessary for observation of the universe but is observation of the universe also necessary for its existence? How could this be? The observer-observed relationship in quantum mechanics is indeed odd but could it imply the dependence of existence on observation? Do some theoreticians confuse information about reality with reality?

Alan Moore points out that fictional characters "exist" (this word is wrong but I do not think that there is a right one) only because we imagine them but that we exist as human beings only because we exercise our imaginations. Is this relationship similar to the existence-observation relationship?

Philosophically, I am convinced of materialism, that being preceded consciousness, not vice versa. Do philosophers of science stray back into idealism, the primacy of consciousness, through lack of philosophical clarity or because the evidence leads them in that direction? This is only the beginning.

Quanta And Gods

I will have to read the entire 677-page The Anthropic Cosmological Principle because I want to try to get to the bottom of this issue and because it is relevant to Poul Anderson's "Requiem for a Universe," Harvest of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis. Unfortunately, quantum mechanical technicalities will intrude so I will not understand everything. Like Socrates, I am a conceptual philosopher, not a natural philosopher.

I might also reread The King of Ys by Poul and Karen Anderson although we have been all the way through that Tetralogy on this blog at least twice before. It is long and good and we are bound to find things to say about it that we do not remember having said before. The Tetralogy represents an earlier conceptual stage when people responded to ultimate realities by personifying them as the Three of Ys, the Olympians, Mithras and the new God born in the age of Augustus. The Nine Witch-Queens of Ys recognized that the heavens were changing.

Anderson's Time Patrol agents travel between eras:

"...a youth killed a bull, and the Bull was the Sun and the Man...

"...peasants readied sacrifice to an Earth Mother who was old in this land when the Aryans came, and that was in a dark predawn past. 

"...the mountains, haunted by wolf, lion, boar, and demon. It was too alien a place.

"...he wanted suddenly to run and hide, up to his own century and his own people and a forgetting."

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 7, p. 92.

"'They don't have our kind of Weltanschauung, remember. To them, the world isn't entirely governed by laws of nature; it's capricious, changeable, magical.'

"And they're fundamentally right, aren't they? The chill struck deeper into Everard."

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Time Patrol, pp. 229-331 AT p. 254.

More to come but I am being cut off.

Consciousness Conquers Cosmos

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

I agree with Barrow and Tipler that life has covered Earth so, given enough time, life and intelligence might cover the universe and even, if this is possible, do something about the Heat Death. Post-organic intelligences are only starting to move in this direction in Poul Anderson's Genesis and Harvest of Stars Tetralogy. Intelligent beings influence later universes in Anderson's The Avatar and in James Blish's The Triumph of Time and survive into a later universe in Anderson's Tau Zero. Human and non-human beings start to influence the cosmos as a whole in Anderson's Starfarers. I know that there are cosmological works by more recent sf writers but I am not familiar with them. For me, as yet, Genesis is a culmination. I am going to try to understand the Final Anthropic Principle.

Life And Dimensions

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

"...a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."

-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7.

"...a universe where life of any kind was so rare as to seem well-nigh a miracle."

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART ONE, VII, p. 85.

Which kind of universe do we inhabit? I have heard it argued that the universe must be full of civilizations simply because of its size but that does not follow. The universe is expanding so its size is a function of its age but it had to reach a certain age and size before it could produce any life so we might be the first.

But, even if there are other civilizations, how frequent are they? One in every six galaxies in the entire history of those galaxies' existences? In other words, so few that they will never contact each other?

Barrow and Tipler argue that the Weak Anthropic Principle should have shown that the steady state universe was very improbable but I do not understand their argument.

Apparently, three-dimensional mathematical physics has properties necessary for intelligent information-gathering and consciousness so maybe we inhabit a three-dimensional cross-section of a multi-dimensional universe?

Important But Improbable

"...the people in the succeeding civilization are interested in the events that led to them, even if that history was most improbable, just as we are extremely interested in knowing the steps that led to the evolution of Homo sapiens, even though those steps were exceedingly improbable."

-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 135.

"'...I do not blandly consider that all worked out for the best. Had it not been for that damned war and its aftermath, we might stand here amidst flowering gardens and know that our people had already reached the stars.'

"'We would not exist,' said Orna prosaically.

"Danivar laughed. 'True. The trend of events must ever seem toward the best, since it is toward the one observing the trend.'"

-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Epilogue, p. 179.

The evolution that led to us is important to us but that does not make it inevitable and evidence shows that it was extremely improbable. We are back in Time Patrol territory.

Speculative Fiction And Military Science Fiction

Because Sean has mentioned it a few times, we are ordering a copy of The Physics Of Christianity by Frank J. Tipler, which I expect to be relevant to Poul Anderson's speculative fiction. For previous blog references to Tipler, see here. (Scroll down.) I have not yet read Darrow's and Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

I prefer speculative fiction to military science fiction. I am learning that the latter includes a lot of accounts of military activities both on and off battlefields but that should not surprise me! Like CS Lewis and Brian Aldiss, I want to leave Earth to find the Unearthly.

I will not describe the unsanitary living conditions of the barbarian mercenaries in SM Stirling's and David Drake's The Forge but I will ask:

Would any barbarians live in such conditions?
Would it be possible to survive in such conditions?
Would regular armed forces tolerate such conditions so close to their own camps?

We have a universe to win - although not to conquer.

Bergsonian Creative Evolution

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who is mentioned in Poul Anderson's The Peregrine (see here) (scroll down), is discussed on pp. 189-190:

"Evolution in Bergson's opinion was fundamentally creative in the sense that it always engendered something wholly new, something whose nature and whose coming-into-being could not have been foreseen by knowledge of what had gone before. Only if evolution worked in this way could Becoming and not Being be regarded as metaphysically primary." (p. 190)

The Peregrine cites Bergson as a philosopher of endless change but not of creative evolution. I think that the single novelty in evolution was consciousness. Naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. The emergence of consciousness was a qualitative change, unpredictable for two reasons. First, we can imagine sensitivity increasing indefinitely without becoming conscious. Maybe this has happened elsewhere in complex organisms that move, construct elaborate structures and exchange complicated signals while remaining unconscious. Secondly, preconscious beings cannot predict.

Evolution

First, natural selection did a very good job of displacing theistic Design arguments by Paley etc.

Secondly, reading about evolution increases our appreciation of Poul Anderson's fictional evolutions of Ythrians, Diomedeans, Starkadians and Didonians, all in his Technic History.

Thirdly:

"...the consensus of modern evolutionists is that the evolution of intelligent life on Earth was not only not foreordained, it is so improbable that it is most unlikely to occur elsewhere in our Galaxy...

"In section 3.2 we shall discuss briefly the reasons evolutionists have for believing intelligence to be an incredibly improbable accident. Additional arguments against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life will be found in section 8.7 and Chapter 9."

-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 124.

When he discussed this book, Anderson commented that he did not accept these arguments. I will have to read further but, for the time being, I am sceptical of other intelligent species showing up any time soon.

Teilhard de Chardin And Axor

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit whereas Axor, in Poul Anderson's The Game of Empire, is a Galilean. Despite their common Catholicism, they have little in common.

In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard thought that mankind would remain on Earth although he may have changed his mind later. He also thought that Terrestrial mankind would evolve toward a transcendent state that could be identified with Christ, the latter somehow regarded as "cosmic" in significance, whereas Axor seeks evidence for a second, extra-terrestrial, divine incarnation, which would be taken for granted in Hindu theology.

Teilhard theistically thought that evolution was directed toward an end point whereas secularist scientists assume that natural selection is merely a process that will continue as long as organisms exist. This secularist perspective is assumed in Anderson's works although his characters subscribe to diverse beliefs, e.g., the two Wodenite converts to Terrestrial religions, Adzel and Axor.