Abusive Cosmology: The Anthropic Principle

A comment by Kallan.G on my previous Abusive Cosmology post inspired me to write this one. With one cantankerous rant already under my belt, I think I can kick it up a notch today. BAM! If you like your philosophy sprinkled with vulgarity and harsh invective, like some kind of belligerent cupcake piled high with foul-mouthed frosting, then this post is for you. Lucky you! Let's get started.

A lot of people think the simple fact that we exist is somehow "special." These people are stupid. If anyone ever tells you that the Universe is fine-tuned to support intelligent life, you need to punch him in the face immediately. Look at the Universe - just fucking look at it! It's not "for us" by any stretch of the imagination, unless your imagination is dumb. Most of it, even on the medium scale we're used to, is cold, sterile, empty space. There's a quarter-million miles between the Earth and the Moon, and only a tiny bit of that is habitable by life as we know it. Beyond that, it's unremarkable empty space in all directions for millions of miles, unless you happen to run into an asteroid, or head in the direction of Mars or Venus (even then, they'd have to be at least vaguely aligned with the Earth in order to be anywhere even remotely close to our neighborhood). Farther out, things get even worse: beyond our solar system, there is nothing but the darkness between the stars, until you get to Proxima Centauri. In all that space, the only place we know that there's life is a thin, hollow, semi-spherical volume comprising Earth's upper crust and atmosphere.

And yet some people claim that the Universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life. What is wrong with these morons?!

Looking at the Earth itself, the picture is hardly prettier. Pick any spot on the planet at random, for example by spinning a globe and then shooting it with a gun, and you'll probably wind up in the motherfuckin' ocean. For those of us who aren't marine biologists, most of the ocean is sterile saline. It's like a desert, except rather than being dry and teeming with life just out of sight, it's fucking soaked and harbors no life whatsoever - look, I don't know what it is with people and thinking deserts are especially lifeless, you'd have to ask them. If you managed to find a spot that did have life, congratulations: you've got fucking phytoplankton, which, while being more intelligent than your average Creationist, hardly qualifies as intelligent life. Sure, there will be stuff that eats the phytoplankton, and stuff that eats that other stuff, and so on and so forth up the food chain. You might wind up catching some humans in the act of fishing, or perhaps diving or in a submarine. Maybe a dolphin counts as intelligent when it's beating a baby porpoise to death - smart enough to hate, so why not?

When we up the scale, and look at things on a galactic level, the picture becomes even more disheartening. That's a nice way of saying, "People who think the Universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life do not qualify as intelligent life." Look at the Hubble Deep Field image: that area of sky, from Earth, looks pitch black, and is about the size of a dime held at seventy-five feet. It's fucking packed with galaxies, though! As far as we know, every single one of those galaxies is sterile. The light from them is probably so old that, at the time it was emitted, life may not have had time to get started yet even if the conditions were right. However, for life to arise organically, consider all that must happen: a star has to form, live its life, and burn out. It has to burn out in such a way that it's able to form a second-generation star, and then that fucker has to have enough dust orbiting it (not ejected, not consumed, just hangin' out) to accrete into planets. It will also need at least one gas giant to sweep up would-be meteors, but that gas giant has to leave the Earth-like distances relatively untouched. Then a rocky world needs to build up with a rotating, metallic, liquid core to generate a magnetic field to protect against the deadliest forms of solar radiation; it also needs a moon to stabilize its axis, or else it can "roll flat" along its orbit, with extreme polar seasons producing too much of an environmental variance for anything to tolerate; and it needs to be in a damn-near-circular orbit so it doesn't alternately freeze and bake during the seasons.

On top of all that shit, it also needs to have the right chemistry! Carbon-based life, boring as it may be to sci-fi writers, seems to be the only way that life can come about - that's because carbon is the shit. As for sulfur-based life, just look at the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean: plenty of sulfur there, and sulfur-based life could easily have gotten started along with or instead of the carbon-based variety. But it didn't (or, if it did, carbon-based life simply outcompeted and then ate it). Now look at Venus, a planet with a motherfucking ass-load of sulfur in its atmosphere, and what does it do? Oh, shit, son! All the sulfur is tied up in compounds that are inimical to life! Specifically, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid would in all likelihood break down any would-be replicators (more specifically, their distant chemical precursors) before they could really get started. As for silicon-based life... look, I'm willing to grant that some silicon-based life could be designed, I'm saying that it's even less likely for silicon-based life to evolve on its own. I had a million fucking footnotes here, but really, the whole paragraph just needs its own. So here¹.

These are the preconditions of life: a ruthlessly narrow range each of possible stellar pedigree, planetary arrangement, and homeworld configuration (which by looking at the Universe we can tell come in all sorts of life-preventing flavors) all have to come together before we even say the word Go. Whether or not there is in fact life elsewhere in the Universe is incidental at this point - the deck is already stacked the Hell against it! The Universe is not in any meaningful sense "fine-tuned" for life, intelligent or otherwise; it's fucking hostile and we're fucking lucky. The End.

Oh, but wait, we still got lucky. Christ on a bike, that's fucking right! Give that cock-sucker a cookie! (I'm gonna go eat a cookie now. Wait here, I'll be right back. ... OK, I'm back².) We got lucky, and so we're here to sit and think about all of that - and isn't that special? Well, define "special," shit-for-brains: if you just mean "statistically unlikely," then yeah, you've just defined your way to victory. Congratulations, asshole (no, really, it's OK - I define my way to victory all the time). You've won yourself a trivial tautology and nobody gives a cunt-suck. Or do you mean metaphysically special, like some kind of "cosmic significance" besides the idea that if you roll a die enough times, then it will eventually punch you in the kidneys? Doesn't it "mean something," in the warm-and-fuzzy sense, that we're here on this rock and not some other, much shittier rock?

Of course not, dumbass! What, do you think we were fucking planted here or some shit? Eat me. It's like this: if intelligent live does in fact evolve at all, then of fucking course it's going to evolve on a planet that meets the preconditions for that to happen! Fuckin' DUH! Did you think humans just sprang whole from the fabric of reality out in the dead of space? I didn't think so. You're damn right we can only come about to think about these questions on planets where this sort of thing can happen in the first place - that's fucking elementary. Yeah, Sherlock Holmes called (I have his induction on loan, which is why he's been stuck with deduction all this time), and he left a message for you: LRN 2 INFERENCE, NOOB. For any event, it is trivially and obviously true that it can only come to pass if the necessary preconditions are met - what shithead needs to be told this?! Did you know that bread can only be baked if the necessary preconditions are met, too? Does baking bread now also have cosmic significance? Fuck me running, this is getting stupid!

This bullshit line of reasoning touches on what's called "the anthropic principle," and in short, it's the idea that intelligent life can only contemplate its origin in a Universe which is capable of supporting intelligent life in the first place. We're doing that thing, so therefore we have to be in that sort of place - and that's exactly as far as it goes. What you don't get to say is whether it "ought" to be one way or the other, or whether that has "special meaning" aside from the fact that we got lucky. Jesus titty-fucking Christ, what is so hard to understand about this?

As for the likelihood of such a thing occurring, in the first place, it's purely incidental: no matter the chances of this sort of Universe happening, it did happen, and that's that. Count your lucky stars, if you're the simple-minded superstitious type. Feel good just 'cuz if you're not. In the second place, sorting out just what the odds are, as it turns out, is a tricky goddamned proposition. See, here's the thing: we don't have a lot of experience with Universes. Just the one, really. So whatever sexy math and pretty words we'd like to spout about initial conditions and variant laws and mutable constants, at the end of the day, we don't fuckin' know. Maybe there are other Universes, maybe it's just the one; maybe the Universe could have been otherwise, maybe it couldn't have; maybe there's a fucking multiverse and we only see one facet of it, maybe this is all there is to reality. We don't fuckin' know.

Now, don't get me wrong: all that sexy math is still sexy, and all those pretty words are still pretty. What we've been able to find out about the Universe just by looking at it carefully is, in a non-trivial sense, sphincter-clenchingly stupendous! But we need to be extra-special careful when we go about speculating on things beyond our ken, because it's still just speculation and these matters are still beyond our ken (at present, anyway). But I swear to porn, if any motherfucker tries to say that the mere fact of our existence indicates anything beyond the fact that our Universe is capable of producing that existence, I will pee on that guy's soul. And that's a stain that don't wash out.

Notes:

1. Yeah, yeah, I'm doing the same fucking thing here that I'm yelling about throughout the rest of this post, with one big BUT. Sure, sure, we all know that we're carbon-based life and all our retrospective stuff (which the parent paragraph to this footnote is based on) is only in the context of "looking at what carbon-based life does and/or needs." Fair enough. Still, I maintain that it is more rational to remain skeptical of S/Si-based life being possible until something shows that it in fact is. Could it be designed? Surely, and in a number of creative ways. But until or unless we can construct some causal story with some manner of empirical oomph behind it (and here, I'm not gonna be picky, so if there's anything out there on this, please send it my way!), I'm going to say it's more rational to remain skeptical of the possibility. All my yelling above is more or less to show reasons to remain skeptical, in a kinda-sorta analogous way to how we ought to be skeptical of life actually existing on other planets until we find it.

2. Damn, that was a tasty fuckin' cookie!

Abusive Cosmology: the poverty of the "how/why" distinction

I recently read a post over on Daylight Atheism where one of the stupidest and most obvious mistakes was committed by no less a figure than astronomer Allen Sandage. According to Ebonmuse, "In this essay, Sandage states that science is extremely effective at answering 'how' questions, but not 'why' questions (i.e., why is there something rather than nothing?), and he finds that theism answers these questions satisfactorily, although it cannot be proved by the scientific method." In the spirit of Randall Munroe's Abusive Astronomy, I am going to yell at morons until they stop hammering on this idiotic non-argument.

OK, look, it's time to learn some fucking philosophy of language, goddammit. Words have meaning, and these meanings are many and varied. Bill Clinton got yelled at for asking people to define the word "is," but that's a valid point and anyone who doesn't get that is a leotard: there are two words in English, both of which are spelled and pronounced "is." These words are "the 'is' of predication" and "the 'is' of identity." For example, two plus two is four, and this is "the 'is' of identity" at work: "two plus two" is exactly equal, or identical, to "four." The two are interchangeable. However, "My bra is black and lacy" shows "the 'is' of predication" at work: not everything that is black and lacy is my bra, and my bra is not all that is black and lacy. My bra certainly fits the criteria of being black and lacy, but "my bra" and "black and lacy" are not interchangeable. In short, "two plus two is four" in a different way than "my bra is black and lacy." What sort of inbred fuckwit can't understand this shit?

So we've got two different senses of "is," and as it turns out, there are also different senses of how and why, and pretty much any other fucking term in any goddamned language you'd care to pick! Shit! At root, this is no more an Ivory Tower concept than "language is complicated." I mean, for fuck's sake, didn't we all learn about synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and heteronyms in fucking grammar school?! (Judging by the page on antonyms, or opposites, I guess not.) Who forgets that shit? (Apparently, many people.)

There are three senses of "how," viz¹:

How_q: The quantitative "how." This concerns matters of "how much." If I say that you're stupid, and you ask how much, I'll respond with an IQ below 100. That's the quantitative "how" at work.
How_c: The causal "how." This concerns matters of "how come." If I say you're getting stabbed, and you ask how come, I'll respond with a story about how your stupidity has caused my stabbing. That's the causal "how" at work.
How_r: The rational "how." This concerns matters of "how so." If I say you deserve to be punched in the jeans, and you ask how so, I'll respond with a rationale about how being leotarded deserves jean-punching. That's the rational "how" at work.

There are also two senses of "why," viz:

Why_c: The causal "why." This concerns matters of "why come." If I say you're getting stabbed, and you ask why, I'll respond with a story about how your stupidity has caused my stabbing. That's the causal "why" at work.
Why_p: The purposive "why." This concerns matters of "why for." If I say you need to give me fifty dollars, and you ask why, I'll respond with an explanation of how your fifty dollars will help me get a knife for to stab you. That's the purposive "why" at work.

OK, now that we've sorted that shit out, let's get down to brass fucking tacks. How_r and why_p are very close in meaning, but they are in fact distinct: how_r presupposes a chain of reason, and why_p presupposes an intended purpose. There can be a chain of reason with no intended purpose for miles in any direction, and vice versa (so long as one conscientiously divorces one's purpose from reason). More importantly, how_c and why_c are identical: both presuppose an antecedent causal chain, which means that how_c and why_c are synonmous terms. How_c is why_c ("the 'is' of identity" being used here).

Now wait! Stop! Right there where you are, just STOP! This is the important part: "how" and "why" share territory, but are also distinct in some contexts. When someone trades on the former characteristic while ignoring the latter in order to slip something past you, this is known as conflation. When someone trades on the latter characteristic while selectively ignoring it (presenting it as though the former were all that mattered while not telling you what difference the latter part makes), this is known as equivocation. Both of these are serious argumentative missteps, and setting things straight is simply a matter of sitting down and rigidly defining your terms. Let's do this right the fuck now, shall we? Let's shall.

OK, now we're going back to the beginning, with the claim that "science is extremely effective at answering 'how' questions, but not 'why' questions (i.e., why is there something rather than nothing?)." We're going to first break down the "how" stuff, then the "why" stuff, and then we'll talk about the relationship between the two. Motherfucker (because I haven't cursed in a few sentences).

Science, as noted, is fucking fantastic at answering all three forms of "how" questions, viz:

How_c is there something rather than nothing? (Read: How come something exists, rather than nothing existing at all?) Proximally, because of the Big Bang, moron! Generally, we don't know². But don't go making shit up!

How_q is there something rather than nothing? (Read: How much of something is there, rather than nothing being there at all?) An amount equal to the total mass-energy in the Universe. Fucking duh.

How_r is there something rather than nothing? (Read: How do you figure that something in fact exists, rather than nothing at all actually existing?) Well, by asking that question, you're presupposing that I am able to answer it (or at least understand the question, and in order to do so, I must first exist), and that you exist to both ask the question and be answered (again, for this to make sense at all, you must also exist). So if you don't agree that something exists rather than nothing, yet still ask this question, then you're leotarded.

Now let's sort out the "why" questions:

Why_c is there something rather than nothing? (Read: Why come there is something rather than nothing?) See How_c, above. God fucking dammit.

Why_p is there something rather than nothing? (Read: What is the purpose of there being something rather than nothing?) You stupid asshole, you've assumed that there is a purpose to the Universe in the first place. This is an open fucking question. For the uninitiated (if you didn't understand that last sentence, then that's you), this means that it has not been established whether or not there is a purpose to the Universe. If you think that there is, 'splain how. If you don't, congratulations! You've embraced the null hypothesis and are therefore scientifically-minded - at least in this context. In other words, you need a fucking reason to accept something before you believe it, up to and including comfy-cozy propositions such as "the Universe has a purpose."

That's it. Game Over. Science, by which I mean metaphysical fucking naturalism, wins hands-down. The reason for this is that, for any given context, scientific answers are equal to or better than religious answers. This will require some unpacking.

OK, so now we have to lay some fucking ground rules for our argumentative discourse. This means that both sides will, as in a game of Chess, accept that they are both subject to the same rules for what qualifies as answering a question. You have to be coherent, of course: you don't win by answering "Gleeble gonk zork, therefore I win." Only a dipshit would accept that as an answer. You also have to accept one particular version of the "meet or beat" question - this is a borrowed gaming term, where "meet or beat" refers to what a challenger must do to succeed against a defender. "Meet" and "beat" should be obvious terms, and what is of interest is whether merely "meeting" succeeds, or only "beating." In games where a victor must be established, the challenger must either merely "meet" to succeed, or must "beat" to succeed; consistently applied, this results in a clear victor regardless of the particulars of the situation. In an argumentative context, however, a stalemate is a perfectly acceptable option - sometimes there is simply no clear argumentative victor, and the question remains open in a robust sense. In fact, this supports what I am arguing: science consistently meets or beats religion. There are in fact stalemates where no clear victor can be established; however, in all contexts where there is not a stalemate, science is the victor. Time for a demonstration!

We've already established in the inspiration for this post that science wins in the "how" department. I'll be reviewing things here simply as a formality. For how_q questions, science answers with comparative quantitative analysis: by measuring things in terms of numbers within a context of established relationships that allow those numbers to be meaningfully compared to one another. Five pounds, forty meters, twenty lumens, a hundred seconds, these are all quantitative terms that have specific meaning. With science - by which I mean looking at the world rigorously - we have specific and unambiguous meanings for all of these. Religion has contributed zero to comparative quantitative analysis. Science beats religion. For how_r questions, insofar as the question is an empirical one, science also wins hands-down: with the scientific method (and centuries of application), humanity has ventured into every field of inquiry and proposed at least passing explanations for anything you'd care to imagine. With that, we may explain by way of observation and inference what the rationale is behind any particular scientific principle. Religion's only answer to how_r questions, always and everywhere, boils down to "goddidit." That's where it stops: you'd have to ask God, and good luck getting that fucker to answer. Probing the mind of God is always a sticky matter. I will unnecessarily concede a point to religion by noting that sometimes a divine rationale is proposed which makes some manner of fucking sense, in stark contrast to the norm, and in this sense religion sometimes meets science. That's when we've got a stalemate. In all other contexts, however, science beats religion.

Now we're treading into "why" territory, because how_c and why_c mean exactly the same thing. Here, again, science meets or beats religion every single time. What most people gloss over, however, is that whether or not an infinite regress may be appealed to must be applied consistently. Either there is such a thing as an infinite regress, or there is not. In each worldview - one with infinite regresses, one without - we have separate contexts for answering questions. Let's start by allowing infinite regresses.

When we allow infinite regresses, we are saying that the Universe goes back forever. There is no "first cause," no irreducible starting point from which all flows forth. It just keeps going back. Religion posits God as the infinite regress, and says that God is eternal and goes back forever, and is the source of all that we see today. If we are allowing an infinite regress, then science may also put something in the God-spot, namely the Universe itself. If things can go back forever, then they can go back forever with or without God. It is not a permissible argumentative move, absent a clinching argument based in empirical observation, to say that the Universe can't go back forever but God can. Try that, and you lose, whether your opponent manages to convince you of the fact or not. If religion can answer the infinite regress, then so can science, The End. That's really all there is to it.

When we don't allow infinite regresses, we are saying that the Universe does not go back forever; it has an irreducible starting point, a "beginning." Religion posits God, science posits reality itself. But... wait... when we try to explain all that exists, i.e. "all of reality," appealing to God does not work if God exists (or "is real"). Really? Yes. Look: if what we're trying to explain is where everything started, then God is part of everything. If God is not part of everything, then God doesn't exist, period. If "everything" requires explanation, then so does God; if not everything requires explanation, then the Universe does not require explanation (if you'd like to say otherwise, then 'splain how, goddammit!). This looks like a stalemate: science says that existence itself is the irreducible starting point, religion says that God is the irreducible starting point. But there's one highly distinguishing mark between the two: science's irreducible starting point, reality itself, clearly exists. There is such a thing as existence. Religion's irreducible starting point, God, is an open question. We have not verified whether or not a god exists. Science wins.

So science meets religion on how_c/why_c matters when we allow infinite regresses (more accurately, both fail equally hard), and science beats religion on how_c/why_c matters when we don't allow infinite regresses. Now let's take a look at why_p questions. If psychology and neurology are accepted as legitimate fields of science, then so long as it is established that there is in fact a purpose behind something or other being the case, that purpose may be found out by science. We may also use the purposive "why" as part of a language of convenience, for instance by asking why a platypus has venomous spines on its hind flippers (answer: for to poison potential predators). This is a question of function, however, and is really just a how_c/why_c question in disguise - specifically, it is a how_c/why_c question directly pertaining to a context of "usefulness," which, while involving purpose, is not necessarily the same thing as having a purpose³. The fact that a platypus uses its venomous spines to poison predators does not establish that there is in fact a purpose to those spines, it simply establishes that the spines may in fact be used, and in what context. For the spines, or anything for that matter, to have a purpose, it must be established that there was some conscious intention behind them; and this, when we take it back to God, is another open question. In order to ask what the purpose of something is (and to have that be a pertinent question), one must first establish that there is such a purpose in the first place, and absent some demonstration of that fact, one may respond as one likes. So, simply respond, "I see no need for a purpose." Religion can spout all the purposes it likes; science will always meet or beat it (meet when purpose is not established, since asking after one is begging the question; beat when purpose is established, since science can reference psychology and neurology and religion cannot). The End.

All right, we're fucking done. At last. Now whenever someone tries to slip the how/why distinction past you, you can fucking jack them in the face, because they fucking deserve it.

Notes:

1. Viz is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase, videre licet, which means "it shall be seen" and is used interchangeably with "namely" or "specifically." It is not interchangeable with i.e. or e.g., which stand for (respectively) id est and exempli gratia. The former means, literally, "that is," and is interchangeable with the same phrase in English. The latter means "free example," and is interchangeable with "for example" or "such as." Dumbfucks who don't like to look up words before using them get these mixed up all the time, because they're dumbfucks. (OK, yeah, sometimes people get bad explanations, or have good reason for picking up a private definition which just so happens to be wrong; and language is a fluid thing anyway, so who cares, and yadda, yadda, yadda...)

2. Science, as a discipline and method of question-answering, yields three possible responses: "because this (so far)," "not because this (so far)," and "we don't know (so far)." Science either posits an explanation, rules out an explanation, or admits ignorance (which, point of pride though it may be, is of no shame in a laboratory setting). Note that all three responses are qualified with "so far." This is because science is provisional. That means something could happen which changes the context of our knowledge. No abuse here, this is a fucking tough concept for some people to grasp, and that's because it's a tough idea, not because of any personal failings. No scientific proposition - none of them, zero, not a single one - is ever solved once and for all, forever and always. That just doesn't happen. It is always the case that some such observation or other could come along and turn any scientific principle upon its head. It's possible. It might happen. Until or unless it does, we'll stick with what we've got - with the proviso that if something convincing enough comes along, we'll change what we've got. This is, fundamentally, what separates science from religion, rationality from faith. With science/rationality, anything and everything is subject to change, pain in the ass though it may be to go and do all that revising. With religion/faith, you've got the truth and that's that. The End. Needless to say, for mortal beings with imperfect knowledge and unreliable truth-generators (i.e. our brains), this is a supremely stupid thing to think.

3. If that confused you, then here is the difference between "use" and "purpose," as the terms have been used in that paragraph. For people who don't believe in coincidence, nothing will have a use without also having a purpose tied to that use (because "usefulness" cannot be coincidental). However, let's say that I flip two coins: if they land both heads or both tails, I may say that this illustrates the ultimate congruity of the Universe, that it is a sensible place where things are amenable to our attempts to understand them (or some such happy horseshit). If, on the other hand, they land mis-matching, I may say that this illustrates the ultimate discord of the Universe, that it is a stage of perpetual conflict where we must fight to uphold our values against the forces of reality itself (or some such happy horseshit). In both cases, I have used the toss of a coin to the same purpose: to spout happy horseshit. But I have used them in different ways - whether matching or opposed, the results of the coin toss had different use but identical purpose. Use, in other words, is a potential to follow after some end; purpose, by contrast, is the end to which things are used. Purpose requires conscious intention; use simply requires action.