Anthropic Principle

All definitions of the Anthropic Principle can be classified into two groups: the trivial and the wrong.

I know that the above assertion can be criticised for being too strong and too careless, and in some sense I must admit that there is a sort of radicalism in it. However, given that the probability of it being precise is high, it's worth the risk. I would expect that such issue would be longer settled, but over and over again I end up reading about the Anthropic Principle as if it is a really great and brilliant idea. In fact, I only decided to write about it because I was reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and he talks about it at some point. So let me explain the reasoning behind my point of view.

The detailed definition of the Anthropic Principle, with all technical terms and such, can be found in a summarised form in the Wikipedia Article about the topic. Technically, there are basically two versions that can be afterwards subdivided according to extra details. They are the strong and the weak versions.

The strong version says that the laws of the universe are such that at some point conscious observers must appear. The "must" is what makes the version strong. I have very little to say beyond the fact that this is a highly non-falsifiable argument. It claims that conscious beings are somehow an objective to be reached by an universe and that the laws of the universe should be such that they allow them to appear. Or that without these beings the universe cannot exist somehow. It's actually quite easy to smell a bit of deism in this kind of argument. You may argue that this has something to do with some kind of natural selection principle where universes with conscious beings are fitter, but in fact I do not know any convincing argument apart from shear speculation. The fact that it is not falsifiable should be clear. How would we falsify it? Well, we could if the universe did not have conscious observers from the beginning to the end. Too bad it does. We could construct this kind of universe... oh, but wait... if we are constructing them, then the universe that include ours and that one also contains conscious observer. This is the version I call wrong. I know it's too strong to call it wrong, specially for a philosopher, but it's basically true. 

The fact is that, in principle, there is nothing that prevents a version of our universe that is too fast to be able to sustain any kind of life, be it conscious or not, to exist. Mathematically, for instance, I see no problem. The issue is even deeper, because we don't really have a detailed understanding of the phenomenon of conscience or even of life itself. The only example we have of life is the one we can observe on Earth, which is hardly a fair sample of the whole universe. It's true that according to some calculations, a slight deviation from the known versions of the physical constants would have a huge impact on life as we know it to the point it would not be able to exist, but we are not really sure that some other kind of life would not. That brings me to the second group of definitions.  

The second group are collectively known as weak versions. These are the ones I am calling trivial. Again, I am exaggerating on purpose. They all say that the constants of physics must be such that they allow (conscious) life to develop. For example, based on the fact that humans exist, you can get a good estimative of some physical constants and the allowed range of the estimative falls very close to the real value. I hardly see the point of calling such and observation by the term "Principle". I tend to think that every person in the world which works with some kind of inference procedure, which obviously include science as well, should see that if you assume life and try to estimate a physical constant, it just shows that your model is correct, not much else. The fact that humans exist is data. It's given evidence. If you do your estimate and reach a wrong value, it would mean that you should work on a better model for your physics. Now, you can take every piece of evidence in the world and associate some kind of principle to it. For instance, let's talk about the 'Bread Principle'. It says that the physical constants must be such that bread can exists. Now, bread requires yeast among other things. So the 'Bread Principle' says that microscopic life must exist. And it must be such that the chemical reactions that take place in the yeast must occur in such a way that allows bread to grow (!). You probably see where do I want to get.

At the end, my point is in fact very simple. Any idea trying to justify the laws of the universe by requiring consciousness are relying on a phenomenon that we are not even close to understand at the moment and, to be honest, are nothing more that some sort of religious argument disguised in science cloths. On the other hand, the fact that the laws of the universe are compatible with our existence and that given the correct model we can calculate things backwards is just a statement of the obvious: the model must agree with the experimental evidence. I am not aware of any breakthrough provided by the so called Anthropic Principle idea, and I am willing to bet that none will ever come from it, besides of course the usual ones provided by probabilistic inference.