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Anthropic principle is a law, because it is tautology: conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.
by GoblinSlayer 2y ago
Anthropic principle is a law, because it is tautology: conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.
- soulofmischief 2y agoSince you seem to know this with certainty, perhaps you'd like to edit the related Wikipedia article [0]: > The anthropic principle, also known as the observation selection effect, is the hypothesis that the range of possible observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations are only possible in the type of universe that is capable of developing intelligent life. > The anthropic principle is often criticized for lacking falsifiability and therefore its critics may point out that the anthropic principle is a non-scientific concept, even though the weak anthropic principle, "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist", is "easy" to support in mathematics and philosophy (i.e., it is a tautology or truism). However, building a substantive argument based on a tautological foundation is problematic. Stronger variants of the anthropic principle are not tautologies and thus make claims considered controversial by some and that are contingent upon empirical verification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago> it is a tautology or truism >According to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the anthropic principle essentially just says that the conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 1. It already contains my claim.
- soulofmischief 2y agoIf you cherry-pick, sure, but you have to completely ignore the rest of the article. The excerpt you provided indeed points out it's a truism. The article also clearly states why that's problematic.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoThe article just lists existing beliefs (even mentions PAP) and some people believe it's problematic. Those beliefs look out of context of fine tuning problem, but they are presented in a rudimentary form, so can't be analyzed, so we have to accept these beliefs merely exist.