Cosmology with a New Purpose?

In 1986, two books were published which take very seriously the possibility that presence of living and thinking things in the universe may have an important role to play in explaining the physical origin and nature of the universe. The first book to come out was John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, a 706 page book published by Oxford University Press, a highly respected academic publisher (which recently celebrated its 500th birthday as a publisher.) Barrow is an astronomer and Tipler is a mathematical physicist. The book contains a foreword by a leading theoretical physicist, John Wheeler. It is a demanding work, full of the concepts and equations of the most advanced physics of our day. The other book was a best-seller, John Updike's Roger's Version. Updike is one of the country's leading novelists, noted for, among other things, his perceptive predictions of cultural change. (To take a small example from a series of novels he wrote beginning in the early 1970s, he saw the importance of competition with the Japanese long before it was a fashionable topic of conversation, and made one of his central characters a Toyota dealer harassed by resentful American workers.) His nose for cultural news has led him to focus on the possible theological significance of recent developments in mathematics and physics, among them the anthropic principles discussed at such length by Barrow and Tipler. It is a lot easier to get a feel for what's at issue from Updike than from Barrow and Tipler. A briefer, but much less enthusiastic, rendition is given by Martin Gardner, in his review of Barrow and Tipler. On this one, I'm with Gardner, so I'll follow his lead.

Barrow and Tipler offer four ways of forging an explanatory connection between life and the universe.

-or, in simpler terms, since life has evolved, the Universe permitted it to have done so. Does this explain why the physical constants are as they are? Pretty clearly not, since all that WAP notes is that it is a necessary condition for life's evolution is that the Universe permit such evolution. Saying that this gives an explanation would be analogous to saying that entering a race explains winning it: entering is a necessary condition for winning, but it hardly explains a win.

SAP is stronger than WAP: it says not merely that the Universe does as a matter of fact permit life to evolve, but that it had to permit life to evolve - that it could not possibly have been other than it is in this way. Some physicists have tried to use SAP to derive precise values for certain physical constants. The idea is that if the constants had slightly different values, there'd be no life as we know it. (To use terminology that I'll explain further in discussing Behaviorism, the Universe has a strong disposition to have life evolve in it.) So SAP is sometimes claimed to have predictive power. Whether or not SAP is predictively successful - and that is a matter of some debate among physicists - with most saying that at best, it is not needed - we should not confuse prediction, even numerically precise prediction, with explanation. Here are two examples from other areas to remind us of the difference between prediction and explanation. The first is from medicine. Lupus erythematosus is a systemic disease, in the same general family as arthritis, in which the patient becomes allergic to some of her own body's tissues. The resulting inflammation results in much pain and destruction of body tissues. There is now a fairly reliable test for lupus - a blood test called the "Anti-Nuclear Antibodies Latex" test. It is an excellent predictor of lupus in the sense that if the result is in a certain numerical range, the patient's got the disease. But being able to predict lupus from a test is different from being able to explain it. No one knows why this test turns out as it does in lupus patients, and no one knows what the real cause of the disease is - so the search for an explanation continues. This example also reminds us of the difference between causation and correlation. To know the cause of lupus would be to explain it, but all we now have is a correlation between a positive ANA latex test and the presence of the disease. No one wants to say that the positive test result causes the disease.

The second example is from solid state physics. In some solids, the material has a highly regular structure of the sort that we associate with crystals. But this kind of regular structure is not present in many materials; for example, many plastics, concrete, soil, alloys, etc. have highly irregular structures. This makes it very difficult to predict the behavior of such materials - e.g., strength, thermal or electrical conductivity - and in engineering courses, experimentally discovered 'rules of thumb' are often used to predict their behavior. Such mathematical 'rules of thumb' come with limited ranges of application, but they are useful and within their ranges quite accurate. So they yield adequate predictions about the behavior of the material. But they are not even intended to explain why the material behaves as it does as a consequence of the fine structure that it has. In fact, it is only during the last few years that developments in mathematics - fractal geometry - have allowed physicists to develop plausible explanatory models. So, once again, prediction is different from explanation - you can know how something would behave even if you do not know why it would behave that way.

This is certainly a remarkable claim. It says that the Universe as it actually is would not even exist if some thinking things were not around to observe it. What could possibly prompt such a claim? Barrow and Tipler say this: according to some physicists' understanding of one current physical theory - quantum mechanics - a physical system is not in any definite state until it is measured to be be in that state. Until such time as measurement takes place, the system could be in any number of physical states, some of which it is more likely to occupy, but no one of which it actually occupies. Measurement requires observation, and observation requires a conscious observer. Hence, for the universe, or any part of it to be more than a mere possibility - for it actually to exist in some definite state - there must be conscious observers observing it. There is even an interpretation of quantum mechanics to go with this, called the "Many Worlds interpretation" (cf. Paul Davies, Other Worlds). There is, I think, no question that the mathematical theory called the "Many Worlds interpretation" is a respectable theory. But there is a reason to question how some people have understood it. The mistake, it seems to me, occurs when it is assumed that measurement requires observation by a conscious observer. This assumption, necessary for PAP, is not a part of any modern physical theory. What the theory says about measurement indicates that all that is really required is some sort of physical interaction between two things, one of which we can call measurer and the other of which we can call measured. There is nothing to imply that the measurer must be conscious or alive. Quantum mechanics may say some interesting things about the nature of physical interaction (e.g., about dispersion relations between physical magnitudes) but it is silent about the need for conscious observers.

FAP builds on PAP. It says that since the Universe needs us, or something conscious like us, we conscious beings will be around as long as the Universe is. How could life be necessary if it were to vanish soon after its arrival? What a pointless thing that would be! And of course, why stop at the beginning? Why not also postulate the continued development of consciousness, and see the Universe itself as evolving towards higher forms of self-realization, a necessary and unending progression towards the development of God. So God is not dead - he is waiting to be born, and we are both embryo and midwife on the long journey towards Ultimate Delivery and Ultimate Deliverance.

FAP is supported by absolutely nothing in any physical theory, and it is based on a chain of invalid inferences from false premises. It serves mainly as a reminder that scientists do not always abide by the highest cognitive standards.

Our discussion of anthropic principles is not in vain, however, because it helps to steer us clear of several serious mistakes in giving explanations. To summarize: explaining something is not the same thing as giving a necessary condition for it, predicting it or saying what it's correlated with. As a bonus, we also found that saying that two things are (strongly, positively) correlated is not the same as saying that one causes the other.

Additional Sources

2000 David F. Austin

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