Sunday, February 11, 2007

Karma - anthropic anlogue of evolution?

Science is all about hypothesizing and verifying hypotheses systematically and in repeatable way. Evolution is taught in science classes and it’s used for scientific explanations for many questions about our assumptions in life sciences. The problem with evolution is that it is not really verifiable. Nevertheless it is a conditioning that has proven to be useful heuristic for many practical applications for life. A similar kind of conditioning which is more anthropic in flavor is the theory of Karma. While the evolution does not center the humans it does center our perception. Karma unlike evolution is anthropic but like evolution does provides us with very satisfying explanations for many though not all events happening in life. Evolution also has it's cracks! Like evolution suggests survival of the fittest, karma also suggests to work hard to be fit and survive and motivates us to put efforts in the right direction. In fact the law of karma is one of the essential seeds of hope, which unquestionably is biggest strength of human mind. Karma can be called science if the anthropic principle is prevalent in science.

Now karma seems to be anthropic analogue of the theory of evolution. Do other theories or concepts have anthropic analogues or use anthropicism? Yes. For example we have anthropic computation, anthropicism in cosmology, in physics etc. As Scott uses anthropic computing to give a very strong argument against suicide, the anthropic principle used in life sciences (karma) can be used as a strong argument for hope! Do most theories or concepts benefit from looking for anthropic analogues? I don’t know but it would not be truly surprising if the answer is yes. What would be surprising is the process of it’s discovery and conceptualization.

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