[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 expressing 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.

Thanks, folks.
 Essentially speaking, you're all on my page,

--Ham