[MD] Through a glass darkly

[Ham Priday]

Adrie and Mark (Mary, DMB quoted) --

[Mark]:
> Thanks Adrie,
> Interesting review
> Several comments:
> Life is fine-tuned for the universe, not the other way around.

Mark's comment refers to Hawking's statements about the "fine-tuning" of the 
universe.  According to the reviewer, Hawking says, "Our universe is 
fine-tuned for life, in the sense that if any number of delicate parameters, 
or physical laws, were tweaked, the conditions for making life as we know it 
possible would be removed.  As Hawking explains, the weak anthropic 
principle states that we must observe a universe whose properties are 
consistent with our existence, for otherwise we would not exist to observe 
anything at all."

The phrase "we must observe" in that last assertion sparks my curiosity. 
Does the atheist Hawking mean that we could not observe a universe whose 
properties were not consistent with our existence?  Or is he gratuitously 
singling out the "weak anthropic principle" to support his theory?   As an 
anthropocentrist myself, I would have expected him to say simply that the 
properties of the universe must be life-supporting; otherwise we would not 
exist.

But then physics gets the better of him, and he tells us that it's not 
"fine-tuning" at all, but probability that has made life possible in the 
universe.  "It's because there are so many of them, Hawking says. With ten 
to the power of five hundred universes floating about, each with its own 
different physical laws, it's unsurprising that at least one of them - our 
own - would randomly and contingently just happen to take the parameters 
making life possible."   That's a stretch of the imagination if I ever saw 
one!  (I wonder where the calculation "ten to the power of 500" comes 
from -- any physicist out there willing to stick his neck out?)

> Technically we are at the "center" of the universe.
>
> Yes, we can be seen as dark glasses, I prefer that we are one of the
> many eyes of God, as Ham and I have been writing

Evidently Mark is an anthropocentrist also.  When it comes to experiencing 
reality, however, I would chuck the dark glasses and return to my 'prism 
analogy' in which pure, undifferentiated Value is converted to a band of 
discrete values that are experienced as the properties of 
being-in-the-world.  (I offer this with apologies to the quantum physicists 
who try so hard to make objective data out of sub-atomic phenomena beyond 
the range of human sensibility.)

Actually, Mary and David came very close to capturing this concept:

[Mary]:
> Another way to put that might be to say that we create our reality
> from our experiences.  We see through the glass darkly and are unable
> to experience the entirety of all possible realities.  DMB says we dip
> our ladle into the stream of Quality and what we come back with
> we call reality.

Essentially speaking, you're all on my page,
Ham