If Any One Synchronicity Listed Below Failed to Arise -
Our Intelligent Life Might Never Have Evolved

(Credit: A Short History of Nearly Everything: How to build a Universe - book by Bill Bryson. A lyrical description of the anthropic principle and about the cosmological singularity before the Big Bang- creation out of nothing. (some editing and addition to the original.)

Life and Mind in the Universe The Origin of Death by George Wald, 2001 I have come to the end of my scientific life facing two great problems. Both are rooted in science; and I approach them as only a scientist would. Yet both I believe to be in essence unassimilable as science. That is scarcely to be wondered at, since one involves cosmology, the other consciousness.

Cosmology:
How is it that we have a universe of matter at all? So we can take this to be a universe that breeds life; and yet, were any one of a considerable number of physical properties of our universe other than it is -- some of those properties basic, others seeming trivial, almost accidental -- that life, that now appears to be so prevalent, would become impossible, here or anywhere. I can only sample that story here and, to give this account a little structure, I shall climb the scale of states of organization of matter, from small to great.

Consciousness:
What we recognize as the material universe, the universe of space and time and elementary particles and energies, is then an avatar, the materialization of primal mind. In that sense there is no waiting for consciousness to arise. It is there always. What we wait for in the evolution of life is only the culminating event, the emergence of creatures that in their self-awareness can articulate consciousness, can give it a voice and, being also social creatures, can embody it in culture: in technology, art and science.
...the anthropic principle states essentially what I have just said: that the universe possesses the properties it does in order eventually to produce physicists.
...a universe - that to be - needs to be known and to that end has taken on a design that breeds and fosters life; so that life might eventually, here and there, evolve scientists who could cast back upon the history that produced them, and could begin to understand it. That, through their knowing, the universe could achieve increasingly the reality of becoming known, of coming to know itself.

Misconceptions about the Anthropic Principle A blog/forum by Sabine Hossenfelder, Assistant Professor for High Energy Physics at Nordita. (A relatively informed commentary follows) I keep coming across statements about the anthropic principle leaving its mark on physics that strike me as ill-informed, most recently in a book I am presently reading “The Edge of Physics” by Anil Ananthaswamy: “The anthropic principle – the idea that our universe has the properties it does because we are here to say so and that if it were any different, we wouldn’t be around commenting on it – infuriates many physicists, including [Marc Davis from UC Berkeley]. It smacks of defeatism, as if we were acknowledging that we could not explain the universe from first principles. It also appears unscientific. For how do you verify the multiverse? Moreover, the anthropic principle is a tautology. “I think this explanation is ridiculous. Anthropic principle… bah,” said Davis. “I’m hoping they are wrong [about the multiverse] and that there is a better explanation.” The anthropic principle has been employed in physics as a proposed explanation for the values of parameters in our theories. I’m no fan of the anthropic principle because I don’t think it will lead to big insights. But it’s neither useless nor a tautology nor does it acknowledge that the universe can’t be explained from first principles.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009. Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life - particularly consciousness - creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

Beyond Biocentrism Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death by Robert Kanza, MD with Bob Berman, 2014 - Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality - but that was just the beginning. In Beyond Biocentrism, acclaimed biologist Robert Lanza, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2014, and leading astronomer Bob Berman, take the reader on an intellectual thrill-ride as they re-examine everything we thought we knew about life, death, the universe and the nature of reality itself. It starts acknowledging that our existing model of reality is looking increasingly creaky in the face of recent scientific discoveries. Science tells us with some precision that over 95% of the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy, but must confess that it doesn’t really know what dark matter is, and knows even less about dark energy. Science is increasingly pointing towards an infinite universe, but has no ability to explain what that really means. Concepts such as time, space and even causality are increasingly being demonstrated as meaningless. All of science is based on information passing through our consciousness, but science doesn’t have a clue what consciousness is. Studies have repeatedly established a clear linkage between subatomic states and observation by conscious observers, but science cannot explain this linkage in any satisfactory way. Biologists describe the origin of life as a random occurrence in a dead universe, but we have no real understanding of how life began, or why the universe appears to be exquisitely designed for the emergence of life. (MG comment: Prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens or life with higher consciousness elsewhere in the universe, Cosmic Consciousness could have provided the observer for quantum creation. End MG comment)

Fine-Tuned Universe Wikipedia - The fine-tuned Universe is the idea that the conditions that allow life in the Universe can only occur when certain universal fundamental physical constants lie within a very narrow range, so that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different the universe would be unlikely to be conducive to the establishment and development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, or life as it is presently understood

Finding a Home in the Cosmos Smithsonian magazine, July 2006 by Jerry Adler. In a new book written with his wife, Nancy Abrams, cosmologist Joel Primack argues that the universe, far from being a meaningless void, was meant for us. Sort of. Primack was a particle physicist who became interested in cosmology in the late 1970s, coinciding with the field's transformation by inflation theory and supersymmetry - the latter a theory that relates the properties of particles of force and matter, giving rise to predictions about invisible, or "dark," matter with not even a convincing conjecture about the nature of "dark energy". The center of the universe is not, of course, a geometric point in space, but a metaphor for humanity's place in the cosmos and the authors' intent is to relate these discoveries to the macroscopic, earthbound realm of human perception as a meditation on our place in a universe of visably known, unknown and perhaps unknowable mystery. See animated version of Anthropic Dark Energy Animated

Proofs of God in a photon by Martin Redfern, 1995 - Since quantum physics, the idea of a purposeful universe has become scientifically admissible. Scientists themselves, however, remain firmly divided on the challenge to dualist thought, the nature of consciousness and the anthropic principle.

Emerson's Transcendental Insight Still Ahead of His Time by Frederick Turner Smithsonian Magazine May 2003. Born 200 years ago this month, Ralph Waldo Emerson prophetically mastered a wisdom that could have saved us all a lot of trouble by clarifying our place in nature. The ideas Emerson put forth in his prophetic second entitled "Nature," published in 1844, boil down to two concepts: first, that a purely scientific understanding of our physical being does not preclude a spiritual existence; second, that nature embodies a divine intelligence. Reconciling those views, he argued that we need fear neither scientific progress nor the grand claims of religion.

A New Physics Theory of Life by Natalie Wolchover, January 22, 2014 Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to MIT physicist Jeremy England, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature. At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. England has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. Sample Commentary: Great Mathematician Harold Morowitz after a long and exhaustive mathematical and statistical study computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the driving force, spontaneous emergence of single cell organism from random coupling of chemical is as Sir Freud Hoyle said “is about as likely as the assemblage of a 747 by a tornado whirling through a junkyard”

Did Alien Life Evolve Just After the Big Bang? by Katia Moskvitch, Space.com Contributor, 2014 - Earthlings may be extreme latecomers to a universe full of life, with alien microbes possibly teeming on exoplanets beginning just 15 million years after the Big Bang, new research suggests. Traditionally, astrobiologists keen on solving the mystery of the origin of life in the universe look for planets in habitable zones around stars. Also known as Goldilocks zones, these regions are considered to be just the right distance away from stars for liquid water, a pre-requisite for life as we know it, to exist. But even exoplanets that orbit far beyond the habitable zone may have been able to support life in the distant past, warmed by the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, says Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb. [The Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps Based on his findings, Loeb also challenges the idea in cosmology known as the anthropic principle. This concept attempts to explain the values of fundamental parameters by arguing that humans could not have existed in a universe where these parameters were any different than they are. So while there might be many regions in a bigger "multiverse" where the values of these parameters vary, intelligent beings are supposed to exist only in a universe like ours, where these values are exquisitely tuned for life. Albert Einstein identified a fundamental parameter- the cosmological constant, in his theory of gravity. This constant is now thought to account for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Also known as dark energy, this constant can be interpreted as the energy density of the vacuum, one of the fundamental parameters of our universe. Anthropic reasoning suggests that there might be different values for this parameter in different regions of the multiverse — but our universe has been set up with just the right cosmological constant to allow our existence and to enable us to observe the cosmos around us. Loeb disagrees. He says that life could have emerged in the early universe even if the cosmological constant was a million times bigger than observed, adding that "the anthropic argument has a problem in explaining the observed value of the cosmological constant."

Anthropic-Principle.org An essay by Mark Isaak that was published sometime before 2004 in geocities ...the creation/evolution debate has conditioned scientists to be extremely leery of implications for anthropic specialness that come with the principle, which extremist creationists constantly "nag at them" with...as the debate is chock full-o-prejudice that is expressed as a preconceived and dishonest slant on how evidence gets interpreted by either side. Neither side seems to have a real clue as a result of the fact that they're also having a culture war, and so many otherwise good scientists go into a strictly preconceived form of denial as soon as they hear the words... "anthropic principle", which are instantly associated with the term, "creationist"...or on another level, "geocentrist". This seems a more balanced presentation of the dialectic over the anthropic principle than his current writings that militate against all notions of creation.

The Entropic Anthropic Principle an important book, by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan - The thermodynamic connection justifies our seemingly insignificant human contribution, since the cumulative affect makes the biocentric need requiring that intelligent life be as common in our universe as the cosmological scale need for it demands.

Cosmic Coincidence - An Unlikely Story - New Scientist, 2010 From the creation of the early cosmos to the growing pains of our planet and life's daring evolutionary leaps - virtually everything about how we got here seems astronomically unlikely. Follow the trail as we visit 10 cosmic accidents that implausibly led to us. Authors: Stephen Battersby (1), (2), (3), / David Shiga (1), (2) / Michael Le Page (1) / Richard Webb (1) / Graham Lawton (1) / Anil Ananthaswamy (1) / David Robson (1) For abstracts of magazine articles go here In Search - enter: author + publication

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