The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (AP) is one of the most widely debated and discussed theories in contemporary science, and yet the literary community has been virtually silent on the matter. This paper is intended to introduce the Anthropic Principle to a wider interdisciplinary audience, pointing to some surprising and fertile correspondences between this new scientific paradigm and the concerns of narrative. It second goal is to sketch in somewhat more precise fashion the synthesis between literary and scientific discourse that this emergent paradigm makes possible without judging the scientific merit of the theory.

THE ANTHROPIC COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

The earth is quite friendly to life. Were the temperatures at certain times in evolutionary history different by only a few degrees, or were gravity much stronger or weaker, or were we further away from the sun or any closer, or were water less abundant than it is, or for that matter, if any of the laws of physics operated differently than they do, then life would never have occurred on Earth. Think of the enormous collaboration among accidents that made evolution itself possible. It becomes easy, then, to imagine an Earth devoid of human intelligence. Change any little aspect of nature and you get a sterile planet. Changing even one of the constants in physics -- gravitation, the speed of light, Planck's constant, the coupling constant of the strong force that binds nuclei, etc. -- would make life impossible. [Wesson, 1991 Carter, 1974]

But were these series of hazards and circumstances merely accidental? Or does the universe conspire to bring intelligence into being? Is it possible that one of the fundamental laws of the universe is that INTELLIGENT LIFE MUST ARISE? Or to put it another way, is it possible the universe as we know it couldn't exist unless we knew it? Approximately twenty years ago, Brandon Carter, a physicist and philosopher posed the problem, and initiated a debate that has raged since then, by pointing out an aspect of nature that is crushingly obvious and yet peculiarly postmodern: 

The conditions of the universe we observe must be such that they can produce an intelligent observer of the universe, i.e., humans.

This idea is at the same time both very disturbing and humorously Panglossian (or Liebnizian, I guess we might say, since Voltaire based his Pangloss on that physicist). Everything has been ordered so things come out for the best, from our perspective anyway. "In other words," as one physicist notes, "the universe has the properties we observe today because if its earlier properties had been much different, we would not be here as observers now." (Gale, 1981) This Anthropic Principle ("AP" for short) has a whole range of possible interpretations, from a rather weak formulation to very strong paradigm that involves metaphysical considerations, willy nilly. Weak AP inspects various physical phenomena with an eye to noting how they were constrained within limits that were favorable to the origin of life and to intelligence, looking for a collection of odd or striking coincidences that collaborate to make the human mind possible (Davies, 1982; Leslie, 1989).Thus, weak AP is a sort of functional gatekeeper on cosmological models, reminding the physicist that any narrative of how the cosmos came to evolve the way it did cannot permit factors which would preclude the emergence of life and intelligence.

By contrast, Strong AP suggests that water flows and protons and neutrons bind and DNA molecules zip and coil as they do because these phenomena made us possible as observers to catalog them. In other words, Strong AP suggests that the preconditions of the universe exist because they made it possible for us to arrive on the scene to observe them, a cosmic variation on the question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if noone is there is hear it. The strongest AP goes so far as to suggest that the universe has been purposefully organized in order to produce intelligence (Hoyle, 1984; Davies, 1983). This implies that the conditions for making intelligence possible feed back into the system, constraining which branches of possibility universal evolution can take.

AP has been strengthened by startling results from a variety of scientific disciplines as well as by some interesting speculations. Sub-atomic particle behavior; biological and chemical organization; formal set theory; coincidences in the recurrence of certain large numbers in physical formulas (first noted by A.P. Dirac and elevated to the status of a unifying theory by Eddington; see Dicke, 1961); the spontaneous emergence of complex, self-organizing systems out of chaos; fairly substantive speculations about the role of super-ordinate fields or multi-dimensional substrates that organize our three-dimensional material reality; and even an hypothesis that the universe is a giant super-computer designed to solve some unspecified problem, which sounds more like a Vonnegut paranoid fantasy than good cosmology, but it has received quite a bit of respectable attention (see Wright's 1985 discussion of Edward Fredkin's hypothesis). In addition to theological views that I'll explore below, these help support the case that there is something quite special about the interplay between the forces of nature and the existence of intelligent observers that goes well beyond the interrelationship of observer and observed in quantum physics.

REACTING TO ANTHROPIC COSMOLOGY

Even Weak AP present several shocks to our commonsense, modernist notions of how nature operates. The most obvious is the tautological "feel" of this reasoning: "everything is the way it is because if it were elsewise, they would be different (or more precisely, X, which we know to exist, would not have come into existence)." Filling the variable X with the idea of an intelligent observer is only a red herring, for it could just as easily be filled by "these brown wing-tipped Oxfords."

Of course Strong AP poses even greater challenges. Common sense tells us that the preconditions of the universe that made life possible caused life. In what way can our presence now possibly have influenced events which came billions of years before us? But our biases about causality are bound up in very human ideas about the arrow of time (Lewis, 1986) Physicists know there are many arenas of the universe where time's arrow must be viewed as moving both forwards and backwards in order to make sense of what we know, and so can ideas of causality. Quantum physics has exposed whole arenas of subatomic phenomena, and astrophysics and more orthodox cosmology, have potrayed regions around black holes where commonsense notions of causation simply do not apply. Furthermore, quantum mechanics has already shown us that there are events which cannot happen the way they do unless an observation is made of them. Check your sense of time, space, and causation at the door, ladies and gentlemen, we're entering the realm of postmodern physics.

Perhaps the most disturbing idea in AP is the tacit attribution of teleology - an intentionality or purposiveness - to the universe. As good modernists, we have been accustomed to view this cosmos as a blind, reeling, entropic, contingent, godless place, an egalitarian abode (in the Copernican sense) where the universe treats all things with equal indifference, granting no special status or favors to anyplace or any entity, a universal play where humanity makes a haphazard appearance on stage and yet where noone else is watching to appreciate our performance, or for that matter, the performance of nature's grand design.

With shocking simplicity, AP suggests the show is all for our benefit; we are the crown of creation. It's anthropomorphization (or anthropocentralism) on a scale we haven't seen since Medieval theology. It encourages discussions about reconciliations between ancient beliefs in God as Primum Mobile, man as created in God's image, and a re-unification of spiritual and scientific knowledge, of physics and metaphysics, on grounds favorable to metaphysics (McLean, 1991; Peacocke, 1991; Smith, 1991; Nelson, 1991). Certainly the Anthropic Principle in its strongest or broadest formulation invites an equation between the actions and characteristics of the Universe and some universal Intentional Impulse, a purpose, a because. We're here because the Universe brought us into being so we could worship (or at least observe) It.

The most cogent objection to this metaphysical brand of AP, it seems to me, points to a sort of tautology lurking in its premise: As soon as you look at the universe as a place with a purpose, then you are already giving it an intention, a mind.   Nonetheless, it is hard to resist the clear attraction of an emergent paradigm the lies somewhere between anthropic cosmology and anti-chaos or complexity which points to the inevitable creation of more complex systems out of less complex ones -- the rise of what Wiener called local islands of organization in the universal tide toward entropy -- which has created galaxies and the Earth's biosphere. It is also hard to deny that human intelligence represents the ultimate expression of that complexity, re-centering human life as an anti-entropic force. Even a moderately weak AP challenges the evolutionary view of how higher levels of organization and control emerge. In moderate AP, the matehamtics of blind variation and natural selection simply don't work out; mere accident cannot explain the remarkable fine-tuning required for the universe to have given rise to life, let alone human intelligence (see Balashov, 1991 for a review of this position; see Jantsch, 1980 for a rebuttal).

There is no space here to give more than this glancing account of the very rich literature and debate this emergent paradigm has provoked. The major and most rigorous discussion of AP occurs in a variety of reputable physics, astrophysics, general science, and philosophy journals. An encyclopedic account, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Barrow & Tipler, 1986) received such vociferous and voluminous reaction that one writer estimated that the letters and reviews alone would fill another volume of equal size. I would also refer my readers to a very good, recent summary of AP in the American Journal of Physics (Balashov, 1991), which also serves as a resource letter and bibliography about AP. However, for our purposes, AP begs some very provocative questions about how we view the relations between scientific discourse and literary narrative, and it also suggests a route to a synthesis between them, as I hope to show in the rest of this paper. 

LITERARY THEORY, NEO-CRYPTO-COPERNICANISM, AND STRONG AP: THE SELF-NARRATING UNIVERSE

Balashov (1991) frames the foundation for the Anthropic Principle in this intriguing way:

AP was proposed as a counterbalance to the unwarranted extension of the Copernican view that we do not occupy a privileged place in the Universe to its extreme dogmatic version that our place cannot be privileged in any way.

I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that most constructivists, poststructuralists, deconstructionists and New Historicists - and therefore much of the theory that informs debate in the humanistic disciplines today, even, I venture, at this conference - are orthodox Copernicans in this sense as well. We narrativists adamantly refuse to privilege any discourse or theory or paradigm that posits an a priori term or is nostalgic for an aboriginal source of meaning. Yet, as Balashov points out, this Copernican egalitarianism, at least from the point of view of nature, "is obviously untrue, since our mere existence as complex physiochemical creatures requires certain conditions that are met only in particular sites in the Universe and at some definite stages in its physical history." 

I call this cosmological model offered by Strong AP "The Self- Narrating Universe," since it views the Universe as struggling to give birth to intelligence in order to create an observer exactly like us. In this scenario, a mechanical device that registers events as they occur and merely records data won't do. Rather, the Universe requires a decidedly human observer who cannot help but abstract data, leap to conclusions, make metaphorical connections, invest silence with significance ... in short, Tell the Universe's Story based upon what it understands. I am even, at times, tempted to call AP cosmology "The Meaning Universe" because AP does not simply portray a world where intelligence narrates an idle series of events but rather invest the world with meaning.

Let me indulge a personal digression for the sake of an analogy. Here at Rensselaer I co-direct a research project - Autopoeisis - that has developed a "story-telling program." The computer simulates a series of events and encounters among characters in a microworld (simulator) and then recounts them as they occur, without regard to the coherence of the story or any other feature. Gameworld (as we affectionately call it) is no more intelligent, by this metric, than a digital clock that "tells" time. By contrast, an intelligent human story teller, even an unsophisticated one, chooses, rearranges, omits, embellishes and shapes any delivery of information. One of the questions my physician asks my five-year old son this week when he was taking his complete physical is "Can you tell a story?" And one of the great lessons of postmodernism for all disciplines is that there is no non-fictive narrative, no weightless, transparent delivery of information from one human to another. The human narrator is self-conscious and self-reflective always, implicitly or explicitly. AP implies a world where all events are meaningfully disposed towards creating the very intelligence that narrates them meaningfully, like a human, not the machine, storyteller. The result is a purposeful feedback loop, very much like postmodern stories where the function of the story is to demonstrate how it came to be told, and where the self-consciousness or tail-biting interplay between story and teller moves to the foreground of the narrative. In short, Strong AP implies a world where form and function, purpose and result, are united in the creation of an intelligence that can tell that story. Throughout his oeuvre Samuel Beckett's question was, "Am I the teller or the told?" AP suggests the answer to this ontological-epistemological question is "both."

AP AND THE SYNTHESIS OF POSTMODERN SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

C.P. Snow was right, in his own fussy way. The great dialectic of our culture is captured in the contrast between the discourses of literature and the discourses of the sciences. But this is not a result of simple differences in education, as C.P. Snow suggested, nor even in any hostility between scientists and authors as Snow implied, nor even one of mere temperament. Rather, it is the result of the devotion by scientists and litterateurs to two different epistemologies, two different ways of expressing what they are trying to know and two different visions of what it is valuable to know. And these epistemological points of view are as mutually exclusive and command as profound a commitment by their adherents as any fundamental faiths do.

A quick way to understand this dialectic is as follows: three hundred years of science persistently excluded or de-privileged the human self as an intentional, expressive object from scientific discourse. At the same time, science also lacked a coherent formal model of natural language. As the result of its rationalist inheritance and its persistent objectification of the observer, science relies on a discourse that has had inordinate difficulty enfolding or describing its own acts of knowing. From the very early days of the Royal Society when Wilkins and Sprat failed in their attempt to define a pure language of science, devoid of metaphor or embellishment, science has never successfully purged the messiness of metaphor and the polysemy of human language from its mise-en-scene. And while the Newtonian-Copernican-Carteisan paradigm pretended to exile the human observer from the stage of science, we now know that Newton's sleep was an aberrant age, a temporary hallucination that history will undoubtedly consign to a minority view. The postmodern sciences that bring this struggle into relief are quantum mechanics, the study of nature at the subatomic level, and cybernetics, the study of how information is used in systems of control and communication. By Norbert Wiener's own account (Wiener, 1947) cybernetics grew out of a direct attempt to remove the human mind from the picture of physics where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle had placed it- to banish the human mind from the epistemological loop. By giving an algorithm for the information required to reduce the probablism in the sub-atomic scenario, and by proposing a mechanical/formal explanation of control systems like the human mind, cyberneticists like Wiener, von Neumann, and Turing hoped to create a complete and consistent rational system that did not need a subjective observer to be understood. Nonetheless, these two phenomena - the intelligent self (the mind) and language - are certainly mirrors of each other. That is why Alan Turing believed that we know a creature is intelligent when it can use language intelligently and he positioned such a belief as the essential test of intelligence in a machine brain, a test that still informs AI debate. Yet when science comes to inspect the seat of intelligence, the brain/mind, it is virtually silent on the point of self- knowledge or self-consciousness and quite dumb on the matter of how language expresses mental events. Scientific language reduces or eliminates all those things that make literature interesting, exciting, stimulating -- or in a word, literary: ambiguity, competing interpretations, silence, paranomasia, passion, multiple meanings, mystery, and metaphor. By contrast, literature has always been, in part, a discourse that foregrounds the self using language.

So in this postmodern technological age, what I have elsewhere called the Cybernetic Age, when the question of how the mind uses languages has come to dominate center stage across the disciplines, a postmodern literature has arisen to underscore this difference in discourses. If the important literature of our age has any common feature, it is the shared attempt to register the difficulties of using language to capture knowledge and express experience. Some might even argue that such a concern is common to all literatures of any age. Yet many significant postmodern authors - William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Mark Leyner, Italo Calvino, Kathy Acker, Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Marianne Hauser, Laurie Anderson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., among others - record their struggle with language at the same time as they focus on their characters' struggles to know and articulate what they know. Curiously, these authors also have in common an interest in cybernetics. They tend to focus on cybernetics with irony, using it as an exemplar of the failure of scientific discourse.   This concern with cybernetics has not only persisted but grown, and has spawned a larger orbit of literary concerns, including cyberpunk, hypertextual fictions, and increasingly salient questions about the evolution of narrative modes as we move to the ever-more populous and interesting virtual suburbs of e-mail, e-pub, e-journlas, and cyberspace.

The motivation behind this choice of cybernetics is fairly obvious: after all, the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, and Alan Turing claimed to develop a rational and complete system for formalizing communication and information, especially human communication: in short, the very stuff of what literature claims as its own. However, in its relatively naive attempt to formulate a mathematics of information, science discovered something that all literary acts express tacitly: Information cannot be understood in a vacuum. Any significant communication cannot be calculated, let alone deciphered, apart from the disposition of the system of meaning in which it is imbedded. Indeed, as the literary text always signals, information is context. When treated as a simple quantity, information literally doesn't "make sense." You can refine the way telephones transmit information, but you can do little to make sense of what the information means to the people conversing on either end of the line.

For the postmodern author, negating this premise is simple. The author needs merely to use language with such a degree of complexity and meaningful indecipherability that he or she exposes the impossibility of creating a formal system to account for the amount of information in, say, even a single metaphor or turn of phrase. The message of these "cybernetic" (or better, "anti-cybernetic") fictions is clear: the artistic use of language offers a more complete, if irrational, discourse about the facts of our experience, including our experience of phenomena outside ourselves. In brief, what marks literary epistemology is a discourse which is explicitly concerned with itself as an act of human knowledge. As Julia Kristeva quipped, "The purpose of literature is to enlarge the domain of the human." In an era when the prospect of intelligent machines and the technologization or automation of human experience looms large, literature has a special urgency in pressing back.

In the intervening years, conventional science has done little to address this important distinction between information and meaning, or to paraphrase cyberneticist Gordon Pask, between a stipulation of a system's message and its purpose. In literary terms, we would say merely that science lacks an account of its own point of view. Science has no formulation for the fact of its own intelligent narrative that is as satisfying or as comfortable as the ones we normally assume in narrative disciplines like literature, where the fact of the human mind as both object and subject of discourse is the predicate for all other work.

I view this tension in science between the mind's meaningful narration and what it purports to observe, both in the external world and the internal , mental world as THE postmodern question, informing not only the sciences but giving a fertile territory for much of the interesting literature of our period. In essence, into the gap created by science's own inability to deal with the fact of the observer, rushes a postmodern literary program: to prove the relative epistemological potency of literature in the face of a general epistemological impotence of any other rational program. In other words, postmodern authors like Pynchon, Barth, Beckett, Acker, and many others have made irrational hay while the rational sun of science still shines.

Now, science's own methods have brought it to confront, almost despite itself, the question of the proper relation between mind and nature, and between the discourse of mind and the order of the cosmos. As a result, AP suggests a strong and more-than-metaphorical correspondence between the concerns of postmodern literature and science. Both Weak and Strong AP are united by the need to develop a formal model of the universe that will enfold or account for the existence of the human mind, as opposed to relying on formal mathematical descriptions of the dynamics of matter and energy interactions or of neutral information in a system. Rather than focusing on interactions among things in space-time or on the properties of spacetime itself, AP inspects all data in terms of how well it explains the fact of human intelligence, indeed the very same human intelligence that is examining those facts. Thus AP is a scientific paradigm that reads like a self-reflexive postmodern fiction.  So AP - an expressly postmodern science - shares an epistemological ideal with postmodern literature:

Descriptions of any intelligent system (and the Universe is obviously one; fictional texts create others) in order to achieve epistemolgoical potency must include accounts not only of how the system is regulated and organized, and of how it communicates among its own parts, but also of how it knows and describes itself.

In other words,

Any epistemologically potent system must include a discourse that enfolds its own intelligence.

The Cosmic Anthropic Principle, then, suggests a pure synthesis on the level of meaningful narrative between the two epistemologies of literature and science by offering the first scientific paradigm to embrace itself as an act of human knowledge. AP is struggling to describe how the human narrative of the cosmos is not mere reportage but fundamentally creative of and essential to the structure of reality.

SOURCES CITED

Barrow, J.D. and F.J. Tipler, 1986 The Anthropic Cosmological Principle Clarendon, Oxford.

Balashov, Y.V. 1991 "Resource Letter AP-1: The anthropic pricniple," Am. J. Physics 59 (12):1069-1076

Campbell, J. 1989 The Improbable Machine Simon & Schuster, New York.

Carter, Brandon 1974 "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with

Observational Data: Proceedings of the Second Copernicus Symposium , edited by M.A. Longair. D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1974.

Dicke, R.H. 1961 "Dirac's Cosmology and Mach's Principle," Nature 192 440-441

Davies, P.C. W. 1982 The Accidental Universe Cambridge UP.

Davies, P. 1983 God and the New Physics (Dent & Sons, London 1983)

Gale, George 1981 "The Anthropic Principle," Scientific American 243, 6:154-171

Jantsch, E. 1980 The Self-Organizing Universe Pergamon, Oxford.

Leslie, J. 1989 Universes. Routledge, London & New York.

Leslie, J. 1991 "Time and the Anthropic Principle," Mind 101, 403:525-540.

Lewis, David 1986 "Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrows," in his Philosophical Papers , II. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 32-66.

McLean, Murdith 1991 "Residual Natural Evil and Anthropic Reasoning," J. Rel.

Stud 27:173-188.

Nelson, James S. 1991 "Does Science Clarify God's Relation to the World?" Zygon 26,4::519-525

Peacocke, Arthur, 1991 "God's Action in the Real World," Zygon 26, 4::455-476

Pochet, T. et al. 1991 "The binding of light nuclei and the anthropic principle," Astronomy & Astrophysics 243:1-4

Porush, D. 1985 The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction , Methuen, London, 1985.

Porush, D. 1988 "Whatever Happened to Nature in the Postmodern Novel: The Three Umpires Conundrum" in Perceiving Nature edited by D.M. DeLuca. Honolulu, 1988: 178-185.

Smith, Quentin 1991 "The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil, and the Disconfirmation of Theism" J. Rel. Stud 29:347-350

Wesson, Paul S. "Constants and Cosmology: The Nature and Origin of Fundamental Constants in Astrophysics and Particle Physics" Phys. Rev 365-406

Winograd, T. 1981 "What Does it Mean to Understand Language?" in Donald Norman, ed. Perspectives on Cognitive Science. Norwood, N.J: Ablex Publishing.

Wright, R. 1985 "The On -Off Universe," The Sciences (Jan/Feb) 7.