The Universe…

Is softly anthropic.

What does that mean – it listens to quiet piano music by the light of warm candles while meditating on self-awareness? I just like that term better than weakly anthropic. There’s nothing weak about its anthropic nature. Strong anthropic principle is really the anthropocentric principle, and can be a disguise for creation by an all-powerful god. Weak anthropic principle is the true anthropic principle.

More about the anthropic principle.

Doesn’t care what we think.

What does that mean – that it’s cruel? No, that means it doesn’t care about what we care about. It…

• doesn’t define or categorize things, like mammals vs reptiles, or life vs non-life
• doesn’t calculate things, like quantum mechanics or relativity or three-body problems
• can’t be divided into holistic vs reductionistic situations, or matter vs space

More about the universe doesn’t think like we do.

Is its own minimal basis calculation.

Wha?? That means we can calculate things really closely, but for exact results no calculation is simpler than the real thing. For perfectly correct results, you’d have to build a replicate universe and let it run. Even then of course there’s fundamental randomness, so things will turn out differently.

Read about how the universe does it.

Can’t figure out the future without getting there, and doesn’t remember the past.

There is only the present. The future hasn’t happened yet, and the past is past.

This is related to the universe not caring about equations of motion for n-body problems. If you know the equation of motion, you know the past and future.

Minkowski space is useful mathematically, but it doesn’t represent reality.

Read about time.