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Hi John: Thanks so much for your words of appreciation. I've been away from the list for many months, so it's nice to get a response from someone who found some value in my first post in what seems like ages. One of the reasons I like this list so much—I mean, other than the fact that its focus is RR's work, which is one of my favorite subjects—and always will return to it when I have any time to spare, is the fact that the discussions here have always seemed to me to be considerably less combative than in other forums. Of course, there are always exceptions...after all, we are all human, and as Judith frequently (and correctly) reminds me, we're not perfect. (She sometimes uses other, more colorful verbiage in her descriptions!) ;-) Your question about Frank Tipler is provocative. I don't mean that in any negative sense—that is, in the sense of "provoking dispute"—but rather in the sense that it stimulates a much larger discussion than I have time for right now. If I do revisit that discussion here, I promise to be careful to be mindful of the overarching purpose of this forum, which is principally the discussion of RR's work. (Which reminds me...I have never asked Judith about RR's views on theology. Whatever they are, I would expect them to be rational.) For now, I'll only comment briefly on my take on Tipler's views. As regards his religious perspective, I strongly disagree with much of what he thinks, but I also find a great deal of wisdom in some of what he says. I must admit that I have not read either of his books, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle or The Physics of Immortality, although I am somewhat familiar with the content of both. I am not a cosmologist, but I follow the subject. His hypothesis (he calls it a "theory") that the universe will end in a point seems consistent with the oscillating universe model, which currently has lost favor relative to the infinite expansion model. I still prefer the concept of an oscillating universe, as I believe that it is consistent with the general evolutionary course that all systems seem to follow toward greater complexity and greater self-referentiality. My reasons for thinking so are strictly my own intuitive impressions based on the evidence I see in the evolution of complexity. The evolution of consciousness seems to follow such a course. As for the strong anthropic principle (SAP) itself, I interpret it somewhat differently than Howard summarized it in his original post on that subject: HP: This sounds like the so-called "Strong Anthropic Principle" (SAP) which can be stated: The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage of its history. (Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 1988, p. 21)I'm not challenging Howard's articulation of the principle as it appears in Barrow and Tipler; I don't have the book so I can't check the original verbiage. (Howard: Please correct any misunderstanding I might have regarding your intent on this point.) Rather, I would say that I infer that SAP entails quite a bit more than just the development of life. I believe that the SAP actually goes further and posits the development of conscious life—in other words, self-aware volitional beings that think about what they think about. The extension of that concept shows up in John Wheeler's participatory anthropic principle, in which we as volitional beings actually have a hand in actualizing (or "reifying", as RR might say) the universe we observe. Philosophically, I'm inclined to agree for several reasons. First, although I don't think that humankind affects much on the cosmological scale, we certainly have a localized impact on our own environment. Indeed, one of the most significant characteristics of our own species' evolution is the ability to insulate ourselves from environments that are physically hostile to us, and to create those that are favorable to us. We are a species whose purpose has been, in part, to make our preferred environment "portable". Otherwise, no one would be able to live in Nome. Second, when viewing the system we call "human civilization" from a big-picture perspective, its stability depends on our ability to structure it in way that requires us to accept and be responsive to the consequences of our actions. In that case, the very last thing we want to do (if we want a stabilized societal structure) is to insulate ourselves from those consequences. In other words, a stabilized civilization is one in which its component individuals are accountable for what they say and do. That is certainly consistent with the original conception of the free society envisioned by the principal architects of the United States, particularly Thomas Paine. The price of freedom is personal responsibility. Now, I don't go quite as far as Tipler, an unreconstructed, unabashed reductionist who apparently still subscribes to the notion of Laplace's clockwork universe...at least he did a decade ago. (See this interview: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1430/is_n1_v17/ai_15831830) RR's definition of complexity—indeed, his entire epistemological frame of reference on the subject of complex systems—pretty well yanks the rug out from under Laplacian determinism as being anything more than an untestable hypothesis. If you can't develop a computable model for it, it's not much of a clockwork theory...at least not in the sense that any deterministic reductionist worthy of the name would like to be able to claim he could cough up. Nevertheless, contemporary physics does have something to say about the subject of the participatory anthropic principle, and it's no surprise that Wheeler would subscribe to it, being a good contemporary physicist. That brings me to my third reason for philosophical resonance with the participatory anthropic principle. Quantum mechanics has clearly (I mean empirically) established the phenomenon wherein the observer is inseparable from the observation. At the quantum level, we cannot make observations that do not affect the outcome of the very act of observation itself. Apart from the immediate effects of that phenomenon in the outcome of our experiments and our attempts to make meaningful measurements of physical systems at the quantum level, there are other entailments that suggest much deeper manifestations of the participatory anthropic principle—entailments that were (somewhat ironically) implied by the 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paper, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?" (Hint: No!) I say "ironically" because Einstein—whose dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics is legendary—turned out to be not far off the mark in pegging what he called "spooky action at a distance" as a necessary consequence of the quantum mechanical interpretation of physical reality. Although it wasn't his intention to do so, his challenge stimulated the subsequent emergence of Bell's inequality, which ultimately gave rise to the subject of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that has since seen robust empirical corroboration. Which brings me to my fourth reason for accepting the participatory anthropic principle as having a significant basis in physical reality—one that can't be ignored: the participation of human consciousness at the root level of the structure of physical reality via the very ingenious experiments in quantum entanglement—recently and notably those of Alain Aspect—has taken subjects that once were considered to be "metaphysical" (etymologically, "beyond physics", is the sense in which I'm using the word here) and stretched the paradigms of contemporary physics substantially to include them. I'm deliberately avoiding any theological implications here, although it's easy enough to infer plenty of them in endlessly fascinating discussions of what I would call "rational theology"; but that's off-point. The more appropriate point for this discussion is that, when guys like Frank Tipler talk about "physics" now, they are referring to a subject that is essentially different from what I think RR calls "contemporary physics". Physics has had its lid blown off as any kind of a static, traditional, classical subject. The revolution that seemed to come all at once with Einstein's discoveries a century ago, quickly followed by the even more radical paradigm shifts seen in the emergence of quantum theory, is no longer able to claim the title "modern physics", as it was called in my late 1960s undergraduate physics texts. The new "modern physics"—a physics that RR believed would have to emerge if physics is to remain one of the pioneering sciences—is evolving toward a more inclusive epistemological frame of reference. In fact, if one lengthens one's historical perspective beyond the last couple of years by a couple of orders of magnitude in viewing the history of science, a couple of centuries' worth of perspective reveals that physics—indeed, all of science—is frequently in epistemological upheaval as a normal condition. I think that's the perspective from which RR views scientific advancement, and from that perspective, he has done pioneering work. Pete John M wrote:
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