Anthropic Principle

I got to hear Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind talk on the subject on MPR via the net. Yet another great feature of the modern world, the net allows us to listen to what we want to when we want to.

I have blogged on his recent book and as I said, really enjoyed it, as I did his talk on the radio. What struck me as I listened was something from "Change or Die", a short little somewhat self-helpish / business sort of book that I picked up and read through recently that ties back to "Frames", ala a series of posts that I made on a George Lakoff book back in December '05 and January '06.

We humans run around with tiny time-delayed models in our heads that are less reliable because everything even manages to be perceived in those models must be filtered through a set of "frames", which are "meta-models" that tell us what conclusions are the most "beneficial" for us to "jump to". "News at 11", all experience is SUBJECTIVE, and "meaning" is even MORE biased!

It is completely unsurprising that a physicist that seems it as a "grave weakness" to "fall into" belief in God and realizes that we are even wired naturally to believe in a "higher power" would seek out nearly ANY explanation to justify how we could just "happen" to live in a Goldilocks universe "tuned" to 10 to the -120th accuracy to allow us to exist.

 The "Anthropic Principle" is essentially Descartes "I think therefore I am" writ large. "We are here and able to comprehend the universe, therefore it is obvious it would have all the parameters for us to be here".

How about folks like me that believe that God DOES  exist?

It is certainly an open issue if a finite brain can even "imagine the transcendent", but **IF** we have any hopes of escaping the "frame" of physical reality, the path would seem to have to lie in that direction. Our ability to have pure thought, mathematics, religion, love and I'd even argue boolean logic and computer programs takes us as close as we can come in this life to "slipping the surly bonds and touching the face of God". To even attempt to envision escape from the models, frames and incompleteness of the material world seems to me to give a HOPE for a "better perspective".