Arlo, Perhaps I should turn the Anthropic Principles debate onto a more positive footing.
The kind of sophisticated AP thinking I'm talking about is the kind that makes calculations and thought experiments and critical analysis about - say - varying the values of know physical constants and running the available cosmic histories and seeing what happens - the closest thing to empirical science in this space - so long as the phsyical values and cosmic histories are tested agains available comsological science. Statistically (it appears) any conceivable universes in which any kind of life or intelligence could emerge appear to need physical constants, laws and boundary conditions very close to those we already observe. This is not simple logic induced merely from observed / unobserved / ubiquitous / rare life. No simple jump from speculation to certainty here ? Of course the sophisticated AP's still leave plenty to debate - like how much our knowledge of the laws, constants and boundary conditions are themselves simply a matter of perspective, and in some cases, even to suggest that in fact we still have some of the "laws" and "cosmic histories" fundamentally wrong, and have accepted them only as a result of our misleading perspective, and many more. The fact that some AP's (including the CRAP) may be expressed simply doesn't mean that the logic that leads to them is necessarily simple. Am I teaching granny to suck eggs Arlo ? Or would you like some references for all of that ? Ian > [Arlo] > I suppose its the (apparent) jump from speculation to definity that I am > responding to. We are speculating the cosmos is balanced for life, but we are > basing that speculation on hypothetical thinking about the ubiquity of life. > Something like this (and correct me where this is wrong)... > > Life exists here. > Therefore life must exist out there. > Thus the cosmos is perfectly balanced to support life. > > This draws its theoretical conclusion using an unevidenced assumption (no > matter how "logical" or desired that assumption may be. Instead, I say this. > > Life exists here. > Despite effort and desire, we have little evidence to date that life exists > anywhere else. > Therefore the cosmos seem to be not balanced to support life. > > 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/
