The Biocosm Hypothesis

[bascule]

Let's start with a quote from the Wikipedia article!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocosm

 

The Anthropic Principle suggests that the Universe may be bio-friendly. James N. Gardner has created the "Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis" as a theory to explain this fact. Extending upon the earlier work of Lee Smolin, he suggests "that life and intelligence have not emerged in a series of Darwinian accidents but are essentially hardwired into the cycle of cosmic creation, evolution, death, and rebirth. He argues that the destiny of highly evolved intelligence (perhaps our distant progeny) is to infuse the entire universe with life, eventually to accomplish the ultimate feat of cosmic reproduction by spawning one or more “baby universes,” which will themselves be endowed with life generating properties."

 

The Biocosm Hypothesis draws upon the Omega Point theory of Frank Tipler and John Barrow, and "and forces us to reconsider how we ourselves are shaping the future of life and the cosmos". It would argue that life is its own meaning, and that the universe is not just a matter as Jacques Monod argued - one of chance and necessity.

 

So that's the idea... life plays some critical role in the structure of reality. I would like to think that life evolves into God and God re-creates the universe, but that's just me. Pretty wacky eh?

[Royston]

With Jacques Monod's quote...how are chance and necessity compatible ?

[island]

There's a more natural biocentric model which notes that a true anthropic constraint on the forces of the universe should necessitate a connection to the human evolutionary process. It would be silly to think otherwise, given that both are true, in other words, so the prediction is self-evident given these combined circumstances.

 

Meaning that there is a mechanism that enables a predominantly entropic universe to leap/bang to higher orders of entropic efficiency, just like we humans did when we lept from apes to harnes fire, and beyond...

 

So the fact that this is true for us serves as support for the validity of the hypothesis as a theory.

 

Instead of expansion/recollapse, multiverse, or, uh... "babyverses", the universe simply convolves traits or characteristics inherently forward by the exact same mechanism that we do, just as one really should expect from a true anthropic constraint on the forces of the universe.

 

In this context, the theory of evolution becomes the theory of everything when the anthropic principle explains *why* the forces cannot be unified... no many how times it tries for absoute supersymmetry.

 

It's all about the inherently imbalanced journey, "alfie", not arriving anywhere... when the second law of thermodynamics is *never* violated.

[SmallIsPower]

Quite wacky, but I'll bet some day it will be testable.

 

Does biocosm theory imply that before the dawn of man or life the Universe was different, because there was no one to think about it? Obviously, then it's false, because we can look through telescopes to billions of years past, and eeverything is the same or close to it.

 

If true, there must have been a phase change in the Universe related to intellegence or conciousness. There sure doesn't seem to be one. Oh well, at least we can use philosophy for enteraintment.

[bascule]

SmallIsPower, I don't think you understand the Biocosm Hypothesis whatsoever.

 

If true, there must have been a phase change in the Universe related to intellegence or conciousness.

 

The "phase change" comes about when intelligent entities consume the universe, not merely with the advent of intelligence which, until it starts to become more widespread, is rather ephemeral. Think of how many cosmic events could obliterate all life on earth.

[padren]

The concept of creating "baby universes" is interesting but it begs the question of what exactly is the "stuff" you use as the raw materials for such an endeavor, and if it could really be called creating a new universe, or just reshaping existing material in the... "greater universe" (not sure of a good term) to form a universe similar to our own.

 

 

So, is the theory basically saying that the rise of life in the universe and how far life ends up going in the universe is the result of a deterministic precaclulations by an "intelligent universe" (for a lack of a better term for when intelligence and life basically fill the universe as a single super-consciousness) that either spawned our own or is infact our own universe in the future that at its end formulated a desired beginning in a looping causality?

 

Of course if it is the latter, it would return the favorableness to life in this universe to the realm of purely random factors, unless something outside our universe did intelligently "kickstart" our self-creation cycle.