Al Collins, Ph.D.

The “anthropic principle,” which comes in various “strong” and “weak” forms, was the insight of quantum physicists who noticed that the universe is “finely tuned” to make possible awareness of itself via the phenomenon of human consciousness. In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, consciousness is the observer or experiencer of quantum reduction, the one who in some way “chooses” that Schroedinger’s cat lives or dies. This is a strong form of the anthropic principle: without experiencers there could be no universe, or at least one in which anything happens (see Rosenblum and Kuttner, The Quantum Enigma). However, philosophers like Nick Bostrom have pointed out that our “choice” of world is not free, though we are given the illusion that it is by “observation selection effects,” i.e, our natural tendency to claim particular significance for our chance placement in the world we actually see. In fact, we just happen to live in a world where quantum reductions—and specifically the ones we see—take place. This is the “weak anthropic principle,” which simply recognizes that a particular sort of observer necessarily goes with a particular sort of world. If we did not live in such a world we could not see it.

The Indian philosophical schools of Samkhya and Yoga (which are essentially the same, at least for our purposes) agree with the weak anthropic principle in viewing the nature of experiencers/observers as necessarily consistent with the world they inhabit. But it adds another level of consciousness, one “for the sake of which” (artha) experience takes place. This higher consciousness, called purusa in these systems (atman elsewhere) implies a new form of strong anthropic principle that I call the “purusarthic” principle. Everything that occurs in the world, on this view, is action motivated by the aim of giving enjoyment or experience to consciousness (so far this may be consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation) but also and essentially to bring about enlightenment or release from the suffering of finding ourselves, over and over, locked into the facticity of a world that has to be as it is. This release occurs when we recognize that experience is not for the sake of our everyday self, the one locked into the world of suffering (and even Schrodinger’s live cat suffers) but for the sake of revealing what Roger Penrose calls a “Platonic world” of mathematical and ethical/esthetic truth. The universe, then, does not labor to bring forth the mouse that is mankind but rather through humans (and doubtless other species on other planets) to realize its deep source in consciousness. In the purusarthic principle, what the world “just is” (the weak anthropic principle) points toward what it “truly is” (the strong principle).