The Strong Anthropic Principle Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Hawking (1988: 125):

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. We cannot, at the moment at least, predict the values of these numbers from theory — we have to find them by observation. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. … Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, most interpretations of the strong anthropic principle tend to mistake the causal relation of result for the causal relation of purpose; mistaking humans as the result of physical processes for humans as purpose of physical processes.

Since beauty is a construal of experience as meaning, the beauty of a universe depends on there being such a construal by processes of consciousness.