Arlo, Krim, Platt, I note Platt has been doing his Anthropic Principles research - credit to him (even though he jumps to "proof / disproof" as the only quality of argument he values - oh well.)
To you two, there is one point I need to reinforce. They're called "anthropic" because we humans are having the debate. They are actually about life and intelligence of the most evolved kind that happens to exist to have the debate in this (or any other) universe. So it's not just about "life as we know it" Jim, it's about any conceivable form of life and/or intelligence in any form / phsyical medium / other medium. Physical laws lead to particle / force / wave theories - that lead to atoms / elements and chemistry where there are only few conceivable chemicals from which to construct physical things. The chemistry of H, C, O, N, P, S, Si are not flukes according to those "laws". 3D is a very special Platonic dimension - 2 or 4 spatial dimensions and biological life is a no-no. H20 is a very special substance, only one or two conceivable alternatives could support any conceivable living processes - any kind of physical or chemical replication. Cosmic forces and temperatures would crush or vaporise any conceivable alternatives out of existence before mount improbable even appears on the horizon. In fact like the common sense views of time and causation - the very idea of "conceivable" gets stretched to breaking point. Like it turns out to be hard to conceive of "physically impossible" laws of physics even in a parallel universe. Possible and conceivable ain't so different. Add to that that time, causation, concepts and explanations are all aspects of human psychology in the first place - (metaphysics, physics and maths too as I said) - and we have a subject that no-one can easily dismiss - except through a pragmatists "holiday" - life's too short to lose sleep over. Happy holidays. Ian Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
