THE ANTHROPIC VIEWPOINT
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
(This song combines the concept of the “Anthropic Principle” as advanced by Stephen Hawking in his “The Universe in a Nutshell” with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, one of the central points of Douglas Hofstadter’s amazing “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, and throws in some strange ideas of my own. And it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.)
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
The only thing that I know for certain
In everything that you say and do
The only thing you know for sure is you
Believe in that and you will be okay
You could live to fight another day, some day
Pay no mind to those tiny little voices
Every day you gotta make some choices
Make ‘em right and you can carry on
Make ‘em wrong and you will soon be gone
And if it seems just a little unfair
Get used to it, cause the stars don’t care, don’t care
In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be
If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside
In the anthropic viewpoint…
So here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy
That’s the way that it certainly appears to be
What’s the reason, where’s the rhyme
How’d we end up on this line
All those other possibilities
They’re just as real, but they don’t have me
It’s no big deal, not worth a fuss
They’re just as real, but they don’t have us, have us
In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be
As I say in a previous blog entry about this song, the poor ol' Anthropic Principle has certainly had a rough ride, some people just plain refuse to take this idea seriously. In the wikipedia article about the anthropic principle, you will see there are many different flavors of this idea. Let me try to describe the particular version that appeals to me in the context of what we're imagining here: if there is a
multiverse of universes, with each universe springing from its own unique set of initial conditions, most of these universes would be uninhabitable by life as we know it. So how did we get so lucky as to be in a universe fine-tuned to our needs? The answer is that we couldn't exist in those other universes, so that's why "we" (that is to say, "life as we know it") aren't in them. The upshot of that idea, though, is that some of those other universes with completely different basic forces and structures could have within them organized bits of matter and energy that are completely and utterly alien to what we think of as life, and they could be marvelling at how miraculous it is that the universe they live in has been so finely tuned to their own unique needs!
