by Colin Wilson
Long before Carter thought of the anthropic principle scientists had been aware of certain interesting oddities about the relation between man and the universe. For example our planet just happens to be perfectly suited to the incubation of life. The sun had to be exactly at the right temperature: a few degrees higher or lower and there would have been no life. Gravity had to be exactly the right strength: slightly lower and there would have been no atmosphere; slightly higher and the struggle to move would have been too great for living things. Life on earth is balanced on a knife edge, and if Victorian divines had known about this they would undoubtedly have used it as a proof that God created the earth especially for man. This has been called ‘the fine-tuning effect’ and it applies to the whole universe: in short the universe itself seems singularly suited to the existence of life. The eighteenth-century theologian William Paley pointed to his watch as a proof of the existence of God, arguing that even a savage would recognize that such a complicated instrument must have a maker, and that this applies even more to man. The fine-tuning argument is in some ways similar, except that a better comparison would be a vast jigsaw puzzle, every part of which fits exactly into the next part. The physical constants of the universe interlock in precisely that way. And one inevitable result has been the creation of life.
So far the argument has remained within the bounds of the most rigidly materialistic science: we are merely saying that life is one of the inevitable side-effects of a universe such as ours. But some scientists — such as Fred Hoyle and the chemist Lawrence Henderson — took it a stage further and argued that the universe seems almost unreasonably suited to the existence of life. In the 1950s Hoyle was working out how the elements are created in the heart of the stars. He noted that in order to make carbon — the essential element for life — two helium nuclei have to collide, a contingency as unlikely as two billiard balls colliding on a billiard table the size of the Sahara desert. But when this has happened the new atom seems to attract a third helium atom to make carbon: no other element behaves in this way. Moreover if another helium atom hits the carbon it produces oxygen, another element essential for life. Then why has not all the carbon in the universe been converted to oxygen? Because the forces involved are so subtly out of tune that only about half the carbon gets converted to oxygen — a highly convenient accident for the creation of life. Hoyle came to the extraordinary conclusion that:
A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a ‘superintendent’ has monkeyed with the physics — as well as chemistry and biology — and that there are no ‘blind forces’ worth speaking about in Nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.
This is only one step away from saying that these laws have been designed to produce life. This is a startling conclusion, but not quite so anthropomorphic as Paley’s watch argument. When we add to it the impressive body of evidence about the fine-tuning of the universe, it seems a justifiable assumption — if only an assumption.
As we saw earlier (p. 242) Professor John Wheeler has taken this argument an astonishing step further. Wheeler’s argument is based upon Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The simplest interpretation of this principle is that we cannot know both the position and speed of an electron (or photon) because in order to observe them we have to ‘interfere’ with them. It is a little like trying to observe the development of a piece of film by shining a powerful light on it: the exposure destroys the photograph. However Wheeler and many other quantum physicists insist that the Heisenberg principle means far more than this. It means — according to Bohr and Wheeler — that the electron has no position until we ‘expose’ it by observing it. This means in turn that we ‘create’ it by observing it, for until we observe it, it is nowhere in particular. This interpretation of the Heisenberg principle led Wheeler to the strange position — reminiscent of Bishop Berkeley — that we may be creating the whole universe by observing it: after all, the universe is made of electrons.
Wheeler explained his view by describing a game of twenty questions he had once played at a dinner party. Someone is sent out of the room: an object is chosen, then the victim is re-admitted and has to ask twenty questions to try to determine the nature of the object. Wheeler noticed that his friends were smiling as he came in, and guessed they had decided to play a joke on him. What puzzled him was that when he asked the questions there was a perceptible pause before he received an answer, and the pauses got longer as the game went on. Finally Wheeler asked, ‘Is it cloud?’ His friends thought for a long time then said yes, and everyone burst out laughing. It turned out that they had decided not to choose a word: anyone could answer as he pleased, but all the answers had to be consistent. This, Wheeler says, is a good simile for describing Bohr’s view of the electron. Everyone assumes it has position and velocity before it is observed, just as Wheeler assumed that a word had been chosen before he came into the room. But there was no word: he created it by asking questions. And according to Wheeler there is no electron before the scientist creates it by trying to observe it.
We also noted in the earlier chapter the experiment in which, in some baffling way, a single photon appears to ‘interfere’ with itself. Wheeler has devised a slightly more complicated version of this experiment which he believes to be crucial to the participatory anthropic principle. A beam of light is split into two beams — at right angles to one another — by a half-silvered mirror, then these two beams are made to cross by reflecting them off two more mirrors. Now another optical device is introduced at their crossing point, so that both beams become a mixture of the two. This device can be so adjusted that one of the double-beams cancels itself out. (Imagine two lots of waves on a pond superimposed on one another so that they vanish and the surface becomes flat.)
What is so astonishing is that if the beam is dimmed until it becomes only one photon at a time, this ‘interference’ effect still takes place. That seems absurd: one photon has nothing to interfere with, so it should be able to choose either of the two paths. Why it does not do so is baffling. If a photon-counter is introduced into the system to find out just what is happening, this mysterious effect promptly vanishes and the photons behave just as one might expect them to, choosing either path. Wheeler argues that this proves that the photon does not exist until it is observed. And the same thing, he suggests, applies to our universe.
There is one obvious objection. We know the universe existed for billions of years before life came along. Is Wheeler telling us that it did not exist before there were observers?
He is indeed. He argues that if you use the light from a distant star for the same experiment, that light set out millions of years ago. Yet the same argument applies: the light does not exist until it is observed. So, says Wheeler, we are actually creating the past. His view is summarized by John Barrow and Frank Tipler as follows:
Wheeler points out that according to the Copenhagen interpretation, we can regard some restricted properties of distant galaxies, which we now see as they were billions of years ago, as brought into existence now. Perhaps all properties — and hence the entire universe — are brought into existence by observations made at some point in time by conscious beings. However, we ourselves can bring into existence only very small-scale properties like the spin of the electron. Might it require intelligent beings ‘more conscious’ than ourselves to bring into existence the electrons and other particles?*
In fact Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle is simply an updated version of Berkeley’s suggestion that we bring things into existence by seeing them, a position that we all instinctively reject as absurd. Most of us will take the view that if the Copenhagen interpretation leads to this preposterous view then the Copenhagen interpretation must be wrong. It seems far more likely that Einstein was correct and that the electron does have both position and velocity,
even though science has no way of determining them.
But even if we reject Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle, the two earlier versions remain unshaken. And, as Barrow and Tipler point out, they suggest one more logical step to a Final Anthropic Principle:
Suppose that for some unknown reason the strong anthropic principle is true and that intelligent life must come into existence at some stage in the Universe’s history. But if it dies out at our stage of development, long before it has had any measurable non-quantum influence on the Universe in the large, it is hard to see why it must have come into existence in the first place. This motivates the following the generalization of the strong anthropic principle.
Final Anthropic Principle: Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.
In other words, according to the anthropic principle the existence of life in the universe seems to argue that the universe was somehow designed to create life and that life is finally destined to colonize the furthest corners of the universe. It is not even necessary to subscribe to Hoyle’s view that some ‘superintendent’ has been monkeying with the physics to arrive at this conclusion. We merely have to recognize that a lifeless universe is a great machine in which there is no such thing as chance: everything has to happen as it does. And since it brought life into existence it follows that it had to do so. But until it reached the stage of intelligent self-reflection life had virtually no freedom: it was driven by blind biological urges. Once it developed intelligence it also developed some degree of freedom — and as far as life is concerned, freedom means freedom to expand and evolve. It seems possible of course that the mechanical forces of the universe will again squash it into extinction, but logically speaking that seems unlikely. Life is the power to defy mere brute force, to struggle for survival. If it can emerge into a mechanical universe and survive for half a billion years there seems to be no logical reason why its higher intelligent forms should be doomed to extinction.
At which point it must be admitted that in a sense, this whole argument is irrelevant. We are assuming, as modern biologists do, that life was somehow created out of dead matter by some kind of chemical reaction. This book has rejected such a position from the very beginning. If paranormal research seems to demonstrate anything at all it is that life is, in some fundamental sense, independent of matter. It belongs to another order of reality. In the universe of the modern biologist there is no room for clairvoyance, precognition, out-of-the-body experiences, poltergeists, time-slips or synchronicities, and there is certainly no room for life after death. Since — to anyone who examines it with an open mind — the evidence for all these things is convincing, the notion that our universe ‘brought life into existence’ must be rejected.
The only alternative is that life somehow entered the universe of matter from ‘outside’. This is known as vitalism. The vitalist view is that life is trying to insert itself into matter and to enlarge the ‘leak’ of freedom, its ultimate aim being total control over matter. So the vitalist version of the anthropic principle is that at a certain point in its evolution, the universe created the conditions that were suitable for the invasion of life and that life immediately took advantage of it.
However, the view expressed by vitalists like Henri Bergson and Bernard Shaw is that life was simply a blind force that gradually struggled its way — on earth — into self-consciousness. But again the evidence of the paranormal throws doubt on this view. If man possesses ‘hidden powers’, when did they evolve? Even the curious ability of mathematical prodigies to work out whether some eight-figure number is a prime defies what might be called the ‘simple vitalist’ view of evolution. If it has taken man so long to evolve to the present stage then it ought to take another million years or so to evolve an ability that surpasses that of our best computers. Synchronicities also seem to argue that the mind has some odd power of causing coincidences which is equally unexplainable in straightforward evolutionary terms. And if we accept the evidence for clairvoyance, precognition, ‘spirits’ and life after death, then it becomes clear that simple vitalism is hopelessly inadequate to explain our universe.
What have the mystics to tell us of the nature of the universe? Without exception they insist that there is a meaning and purpose which is invisible to our earth-bound intelligences. Even the simplest mystical experience seems to contradict our basic human experience of being in one place at one time. ‘My consciousness passed out across the ocean and the land in all directions, through the sky and out into space.’ ‘The boundary between my physical self and my surroundings seemed to dissolve and my feeling of separation vanished.’ ‘I understood that the scheme of the universe was good, not evil … .’ ‘I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence… . I saw that all men are immortal.’ ‘We alone are responsible for our sufferings and problems in consequence of the misuse of our free will.’ ‘In an instant of time I suddenly knew, without any doubts, that I was a part of a “Whole”.’
Such experiences seem to make so little sense that we are tempted to dismiss them as some form of drunkenness, or perhaps some variety of ‘dream consciousness’. But in the aftermath of dreaming or drunkenness we can see quite clearly that we were out of touch with reality. The mystics assert again and again that they felt their experience to be more real than our ‘ordinary reality’, and that this absolute certainty persisted when they were once again trapped in the normal world of human consciousness. If that is true then there ought to be at least a reasonable chance of learning to grasp their experience by means of our limited human awareness.
One ‘experimental mystic’, R. H. Ward, devoted a book to his own experiences with dental gas and the drug LSD, and this affords us some interesting insights.* The first thing that strikes us is the remarkable similarities between Ward’s experiences and those described by Ouspensky. Describing his experience of nitrous oxide gas, Ward says,’ … I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness… .’ Here again we have that basic assertion that the reason we cannot comprehend our universe is that our consciousness is so dull and dim. It seems capable of very little but focusing on what is under our noses.
Ward again emphasizes the unreality of our idea of time. ‘In one sense it lasted far longer than the short period between inhaling the gas and “coming round”, lasted indeed for an eternity, and in another sense it took no time at all.’
Ward was surprised that far from being rendered unconscious, he was suddenly far more conscious than usual. ‘For already I knew, I understood, I actually was, far more than I normally knew, understood and was … .’ He adds that he felt he was rediscovering those things ‘which had once been mine, but which I had lost many years before. While it was altogether strange, this new condition was also familiar; it was even in some sense my rightful condition. Meanwhile, what was becoming unreal, slow and clumsy was the ordinary world I was leaving behind.’
The meaning of these words is quite clear. Man has descended into matter — into this ‘outer Siberia’ of the universe — from some far more desirable condition. This also seems to be confirmed again and again by people who have been on the point of death. Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life, a study of dozens of ‘near-death experiences’, is full of phrases like, ‘For a second I knew all the secrets of the ages, all the meaning of the universe.’ There is a sense of knowledge, of release, of exaltation, which seems to suggest that the experience of dying is an experience of ascending out of matter, out of ‘Siberia’, and back into our natural condition. And this raises, obviously, the interesting question of why human beings should descend into ‘Siberia’ in the first place — particularly if, as Steiner suggests, it is our own choice.
Ward seems to have passed quickly into the realm that Ouspensky called a world o
f mathematical relations. Ward prefers to call it ‘a region of ideas’. But ideas, in the form of concepts, were quite unnecessary, ‘since one could manage perfectly well without them: this was a condition of complete and spontaneous lucidity, where there was not the slightest need to “think”. One simply knew; and one knew not merely one thing here and another thing there … one knew everything there was to know. Thus one knew that everything was one thing, and that real knowledge was simultaneous knowledge of the universe and all it contains, oneself included.’ In other words ‘separateness’ had disappeared; everything was seen to be connected. In this realm, he says, there was a marvellous feeling of ‘rightness’. Images and symbols had become unnecessary. ‘All was idea, and form did not exist. (And it seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist’s chair and the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato.)’ In this region of ideas, ‘everything lived and moved; everything “breathed”, but breathed with the “one breath” which is the universal inspiration and expiration expressed in the cardinal opposites of day and night, male and female, summer and winter. Indeed the wonderful and awe-inspiring livingness of everything seemed to be part of the interrelatedness of everything.’
Like Ouspensky, Ward realized that our human notions about subject and object are quite wrong. He grasped ‘a new realization of the relationship between subject and object … . One knew and understood this different world as a spectator of it, recognizing it as the object of one’s apprehension, but at the same time knew and understood that it existed within oneself; thus one was at once the least significant atom in the universal whole and that universal whole.’ (Barbara Tucker expressed it, ‘And suddenly I knew — or saw — that time past, present and future were all one, and that I was God, and yet at the same time was only the minutest grain of sand.’) Ward explains that it is necessary to ‘think inside out’ in order to understand this baffling new relationship beween subject and object.