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The Anthropic Principle: A Primer for Philosophers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Frank J. Tipler
Frank J. Tipler*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Extract

Let's begin with a

Definition: The Anthropic Principle is the drawing of scientific inferences from a consideration of Man's Place in Nature.

There are various versions of the Anthropic Principle. The most conservative version of the Anthropic Principle is nothing but a systematic working out of the fact that the astrophysical (and other scientific) data we have is self-selected due to the fact that Homo sapiens is a particular type of intelligent being. This conservative version of the Anthropic Principle is called the

Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): The observed values of all physical quantities are not equally probable, but rather take on values restricted by the fact that these quantities are measured by a carbon-based intelligent life-form which spontaneously evolved on an earthlike planet around a G2 type star.

Again, the Weak Anthropic Principle is just a warning to take into account a grandiose type of selection bias when interpreting data.

Type
Part III. Natural Philosophy
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 27 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Frank Birtel, Michael Heller, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and John Wheeler for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number PHY-86-03130.

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