Here’s the way I currently view the anthropic principle.
The universe’s physics are such that that life is possible, but only under very specific circumstances. Life can be described as self-preserving, self-replicating molecules. Now, every atom and electron in your body has absolutely no conscious reason or purpose for doing what it does other than following the physics of the universe. Under specific conditions which have yet to be replicated in a lab, carbon, phosphorous, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen come together to form nucleotide polymers (DNA or RNA). These nucleotide polymers, because of the way the universe’s laws are set up, organize the matter and energy around themselves in such a way as to preserve their existence, and they also create more of themselves. This seems incredibly fortuitous.
We are a narrative-obsessed species. Nature favors an inclination towards paranoia and conspiracy thinking. It’s good risk management – the cost of “false beliefs in conspiracies” (
that’s a predator rustling the bush about to attack and eat me! Oh never mind, it’s just a squirrel…) is relatively low to the cost of missed positives (
I wasn’t being vigilant or suspicious and the lion snuck up on me and ate me!). So we’re wired, in part for conspiracy theories, built to imagine gods and to put patterns and plans where there are none.
When you are a hammer, everthing seems a nail. When you are a hyper-telic, psychologically, everything seems designed.
Also, the endurance of physical systems is not enduring because it’s somehow “fortunate” or “charmed” in some
a priori sense; we say it is fortuitous retrodictively because it succeeded against the demands of the environment. This is a recapitulation of the antithesis of the Anthropic Principle: *polymers are adaptive to physical law, as opposed to physical law being adapted to support polymer formation.
Why should these polymers “code” for anything meaningful or useful?
Because that is what succeeds in persisting over time through replication. One might as well ask why the best equipped to survive/thrive survived and thrived. Across all the different permutations and experiments that developed in the environment, these are the configurations that didn’t go extinct.
Why should a particular arrangement of atoms be able to arrange another set of atoms so as to prevent the former arrangement from being annihilated?
The polymer formation is just chemistry. Physically necessary, automatic, in the sense that if put the right raw materials in the right medium and conditions, you will predictably get the same compounds. The reason the configurations you wonder about being around is because their structure and arrangement is amenable (and in many cases, remarkably adept!) at hanging around to be noticed by humans billions of years later. We wonder why the things that have survived are the things we notice that have survived?
Why should the nucleotide polymers replicate themselves and carry on meaningful information?
Out of all the interactions that took place, it was these configuration and arrangement, the iterative designs of a “blind watchmaker” that explored the search landscape successfully to find a configuration that promoted its own self-propagation and endurance over long periods of time.
Why should a lipid bi-layer form a sphere around the DNA to protect it? Why should organelles form inside this sphere to assist the DNA? Why should enzymes form and be able to reduce the energy barrier for certain chemical reactions necessary for the DNA’s existence? Why should these relatively huge and multi-faceted machines of molecules known as cells be able to function at all?
Same reason. Of all the various interactions that nature hosts, unthinkably many “experiments” in interactions governed by physical law (combining stochastic processes as well as deterministic mechanics), these are the configurations, step by step, that managed to persist in the environment, and then ‘survive’, once the configuration reached a complexity and feature set we would call ‘life’ (metabolism, etc.)
-TS
