Anthropic attitudes

Anthropic reasoning

Anthropic Principle

The human body is a constant flux of thousands of chemical/biological interactions and processes connecting molecules, cells, organs, and fluids, throughout the brain, body, and nervous system. Up until recently it was thought that all these interactions operated in a linear sequence, passing on information much like a runner passing the baton to the next runner. However, the latest findings in...

Anthropic decision theory

This paper sets out to solve the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. Given certain simple assumptions, it turns out to be possible to do so without knowing the underlying anthropic probabilities. Most common anthropic problems are underspec...

The Inverse Anthropic Principle

In the Middle Age, official science said wrongly we are in a very special location, but now it says we are living a special epoch. Indeed, in the famous article of Carr and Rees, 'The anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world', published by Nature (278, 605-612 (1979)) one reads “All these scales can be deduced directly from known physics except the mass and length scale of th...

The Anthropic Principle Revisited

The usage of the anthropic principle in modern cosmology is reviewed. It is argued that its recent use to explain the observed values of cosmological parameters as most probable values for an ensemble of universes, is not justified. However, the anthropic principle can be invoked to argue that a vast number of universes must exist, in which the cosmological parameters and constants of nature ta...