blake johnson

I read a really interesting paper by Sherrilyn Roush that provides an important insight into the way in which the weak anthropic principle is important to science:

The idea that we must avoid thinking of ourselves as special encourages us to think that the best epistemic policy for arriving at objective knowledge is to ignore the subject, the one who observes, even to the extent of never considering that subject except as an object, an extended body, or a thing. The general notion of a selection effect, and the WAP, encourage in contrast the valuable recognition that we do not arrive at objective knowledge except by correcting for the biases of the observing subject, and, further, that one does not achieve this correction except through a great deal of attention to the observing subject. It is not only naive self-love, but also naive self-loathing or self-avoidance, that must be rejected to come to an objective view.