Implications of the Strong Anthropic Principle

As the human species gained familiarity with the nature of our planet and its relation with the wider cosmos, a curious question began to emerge: how is it that we find ourselves on a planet so perfectly suited for the development of complex life? The response that early philosophers of this question surmised is now called the anthropic principle. Simply put, it states that we must find ourselves on a planet perfectly suited for life, because on any other planet life such as us could not have developed to observe ourselves on that planet. In other words, our very ability to observe and question our place on the planet is contingent on existing on a planet where such observation is possible. However, the anthropic principle goes much deeper than that.

The strong anthropic principle is an extension of the anthropic principle to the selection of specific characteristics of our very Universe. A succinct description of this extension is put forth by physicist Paul Davies: "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned' for life.” Broadly speaking, the same principle as before applies: if the characteristics of the Universe were not perfectly tailored for life then there would be no consciousness like us to observe those characteristics. This is not to imply intent, or design, behind the Universal structure - although some will argue the case. Rather, we must simply note that this characteristic exists, and the implications are left open. The purpose of this essay is to discuss those implications.

So, by nature of conscious experience, not just a planet but an entire Universe is selected out which is suitable for human development. The conscious experience, which is always occurring now, finds itself in this Universe, on this planet, as those are the conditions which allow for that consciousness to exist. Western instincts will point to causality by explaining that the natural world has caused the development of consciousness (through physics, biology, evolution, etc.), but upon examination we find this prospect to be an unjustifiable jump in logic. To explain this, we must show that the principle of causality is itself an observation of correlation. We assume that the events in the past caused the events of the future, because the happenings of something in the past are correlated with the happenings of something else in the future. But we also know that correlation does not imply causation, so the correlation of events does not imply the causality of events. According to Einstein's special relativity all of time is happening all the time, so if you push a ball down a hill earlier in time did you cause it to move later in time, or did the moving of the ball at a later time cause you to push it at an earlier time? Seeing as we can only ever observe the correlation between these two events, neither one can truly be said to have caused the other.

So, how does the issue of causality relate to the strong anthropic principle? The question that must be asked is whether the Universe is perfectly tailored for life, and thus caused the development of complex life and eventually consciousness to observe that Universe, - OR - did the existence of consciousness create a reality which is consistent with its own existence? And, perhaps even more importantly, how could that consciousness (your consciousness) ever know the difference? These two events are intertwined like electricity and magnetism, each one creating the other until the distinction is more reasonably seen as equal perspectives on the same phenomena.

At this very moment, the present moment, conscious experience exists. That consciousness finds itself in a reality that is self-consistent, which is to say that the reality consciousness is in must always allow for the existence of that consciousness. This is a central attribute of consciousness, for without a reality consistent with its existence there could be no consciousness to be aware of the reality which is inconsistent with its existence. In that reality within which consciousness finds itself there will be explanations, and logic, and mathematics which align with that reality as an emergent phenomena. And so, our Universe, and our planet, appear to be perfectly suited for consciousness. Furthermore, in that reality in which consciousness finds itself, it should expect to find an underlying representation that explains (through the logic of its reality) how it is arising through some process. For example, we observe that neural activity is correlated with aspects of the conscious experience. For if there were no correlates of the conscious experience to be found in the reality in which consciousness finds itself, explainable through the logic of that reality, then there would be no logical explanation, again explainable through the logic of that reality, for the emergence of the conscious experience.

Going further, take, for example, the experience of consciousness at this very moment being that of reading a book. Western instincts will explain that this experience is occurring because the human generating the experience walked over and sat down, and that happened because the human was born one day in the past, and that happened because the human species evolved on planet Earth, and that happened because the Universe exploded from a singularity 13 billion years ago, and that happened because… But, by an alternative perspective, all of those preceding events occurred because consciousness finds itself, in a human, reading a book. So, in the reality within which consciousness finds itself, which humans call the Universe, there are a series of events that can explain through our human logic how this situation came to be - because if there wasn’t, then there wouldn’t be this experience. The present moment creates all of reality, and this is what I would like to call the very strong anthropic principle.

As a final thought, let us consider that consciousness finds the correlates of its own existence (in our Universe the mammalian neocortex and neural activity) within the reality within which it finds itself. Now, with advancements in technology, those correlates are appearing to be modifiable and interactable, changing our internal subjective worlds (conscious experience) by modifying this objective material world. If those substrates of consciousness can be understood to consciousness, then can it reverse engineer alternative states - and if it finds a new state which produces an experience which is self-consistent with the existence of the experience, is that experience any less real?