The Anthropic Principle
In the early 1970s, Brandon Carter stated what he called "the anthropic principle": that what we can expect to observe "must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers" (Leslie ed. 1990). Carter's word "anthropic" was intended as applying to intelligent beings in general. The "weak" version of his principle covered the spatiotemporal districts in which observers found themselves, while its "strong" version covered their universes, but the distinction between spatiotemporal districts and universes, and hence between the weak principle and the strong, could not always be made firmly: one writer's "universe" could sometimes be another's "gigantic district". Moreover, the necessity involved was never -- not even in the case of the "strong anthropic principle" -- a matter of saying that some factor, for instance God, had made our universe utterly fated to be intelligent-life-permitting, let alone intelligent-life-containing. However,......
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