How the world was built for us
Science, most people feel, has removed humanity from a central place in the universe: quite literally, in the case of the Copernican revolution, but in every other way as well.
Stephen Hawking: "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies."
Sigmund Freud: "Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.... The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.... But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind."
You get the idea. To argue that we are somehow important in the universe seems naïve or deluded. I think, though, that such an argument can be made, without resorting to religious arguments. I think that the Earth was (in a sense) created for humans, in a way unique among the species that have ever lived here.
The first part of this is just the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle is pretty simple to understand. Suppose you mail out a survey, and one of the questions on it is "can you read?" The results of the survey show 100% literacy among people who filled out the survey! Of course, what's happening is that only people who can read the survey can fill it out. The Anthropic Principle says something similar is happening on a cosmological scale. If certain aspects of the universe were different, intelligent life that is able to observe and comment on the universe wouldn't be around at all.
Our existence as intelligent observers places a constraint on the world that we see. We must find ourselves on a world where complex life can exist. The records of the history of the world, such as fossils, must show a history that ends up with complex intelligent life. The constraint causes the past to have certain properties.
A very weird thing happens when you place strong constraints in the middle of a physical simulation, rather than just at the beginning. This video shows blocks following physical laws-- conservation of energy and momentum, gravity, elastic collisions, and so forth. But halfway through the video, a particular arrangement of blocks was constrained to occur. This causes effects to propagate forward in time, but effects also seem to stream backwards from that moment. Although the laws of physics remain constant throughout the video, everything comes together as if it were being arranged, instead of collapsing into disorder. Effects propagating backwards through time is known as retrocausality.
Our own existence is such an ordered constraint on the world we could possibly see. As such, we should expect to find effects of our conscious, intelligent existence propagating not just into the future, but into the past as well. We should expect to see an unlikely set of coincidences that becomes more and more pronounced as it gets closer and closer to our time period. These coincidences wouldn't be of the physical arrangement type shown in this video because the constraint isn't on a particular physical arrangement, but they should be strong and detectable.
This also means that the world was very much built for us, at least in a way. If you build a spacecraft, you must meet certain constraints on order for people to be able to survive on board. Those constraints also must apply to the Earth. The temperature of the earth must be in the range we find bearable. The atmosphere of the earth must be in the range we find breathable. Additionally, the evolution of life must be of the sort that produces intelligent conscious creatures. Instead of everything decaying into randomness, evolution is constrained to have assembled something intricate and complex. Forgive the awkward verb tense, but our existence causes the world to have been this way.
If you find this idea interesting, I know of a few popular science books that touch on it. Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False inspired this post. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe by Julian Barbour touches on it. I first learned about the Anthropic Principle in A Brief History of Time when it was first published in 1988, but I think The Anthropic Principle: Man as the Focal Point of Nature by Reinhard Breuer contains a lot more useful information about it.
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