near to death episodes (Endings)

by whitecraw, Thursday, March 06, 2008, 20:26 (6104 days ago) @ John Clinch

'The weak anthropic principle is, on the other hand, a useful tautology possessing great explanatory power.' - Tautologies have no explanatory power. A tautology is any statement that is necessarily true (i.e. true purely in virtue of its logical form rather than in virtue of any fact about the world), such as 'Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.' or 'All bachelors are unmarried men.' Statements such as these have no explanatory power because nothing useful (indeed, nothing at all) can be inferred from them. - Interestingly, it has been suggested that the theory of evolution by natural selection is tautological, insofar as what it boils down to is the claim that those individuals in a population that are best fitted to survive and reproduce in a given environment will be those best fitted to survive and reproduce in that given environment. This is important because, if it is true and the theory is tautological, the theory would thereby be rendered non-scientific, since it would have no explanatory power nor would it be falsifiable, two of the cardinal requirements that need to be satisfied before a theory can enjoy scientific status. - Regarding your identification of the anthropic principle with Berkleian idealism: the two are not the same. The anthropic principle seeks to explain why the universe gives the appearance of having been designed to support life on earth, and does so in terms of the fact that we're around to ask the question. (Basically, the fact that we're around to ask the question teleologically requires the universe to be as it is.). Berkleian idealism holds that, in the absence of God, we have no good reason to suppose on empirical grounds that the world is 'really' any different from how it appears to its observers; i.e. that the world is 'really' an objective universe rather than a perspectival pluriverse. - Two very different theoretical devices designed to do two very different things. - Incidentally: a couple of observations on the anthropic principle. - a)	Contrary to popular belief, the anthropic principle does not entail intelligent design. It does not follow, from the principle that the fact we're around to ask why the universe gives the appearance of having been designed to support life on earth teleologically requires the universe to be such that it supports life on earth, that the universe was efficiently designed that way. To suggest that it does follow is to confuse two very different kinds of 'cause'; namely the final cause of our being around to ask the question and the efficient cause of an intelligent designer. Even if the fact we're around to ask why the universe gives the appearance of having been designed to support life on earth teleologically requires the universe to be such that it supports life on earth, the fact that the universe is so may still have come about by accident rather than design. - b)	The principle is, as you say, tautological. Basically it states that, in order for the universe to be as it is, the universe must be as it is. - c)	The principle is non-scientific. Because it is tautological, it has no explanatory power. Moreover, even if it weren't tautological, it would still fail to meet the standard of scientific explanation because it is teleological. To qualify as a scientific explanation, it would need to give an account of apparent design in terms of the efficient causes which produce it as an effect, thereby conforming to the requirement of methodological naturalism; i.e. the principle that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect and that, to qualify as scientific, an explanation must make no reference to anything outside that closed system, such as the 'final cause' of the anthropic principle ... intelligent life.