Mediocrity Principle
Anti-anthropocentrism is the idea that humans are insignificant. It is the opposing view of Anthropocentrism. It has risen to a universal principle in recent decades. It is fashionable to relegate humanity to the dustbin of insignificance based on the religion of Bayesianism. It goes by the so-called Mediocrity Principle — that earth, our solar system, and ultimately we as a species are all (probably) cosmically insignificant. It is a philosophical claim that holds more sway in the scientific community than in the general public.
It reduces us to objects drawn from a metaphorical cosmic urn. While intended to dispel hubris in our quest for objective knowledge, it achieves the perverse outcome of singling us out as ordinary. Its fallacy lies in the core arguments supporting the claim that gets dismissed as unworthy of explanation. Those are (a) our ability to reason and (b) its byproduct, the exponential knowledge growth. Before we critique anti-anthropocentrism, it helps to bolster its central theme.
Enlightenment
The Enlightenment movement got spurred by a severe allergic reaction to authority. Entrenched doctrines defending a constellation of bad ideas hindered human progress. The scientific inquiry was a slap in the face of the Geocentrism they espoused. As society realized its fears were unfounded, they had to crumble, dislodging us from our cozy anthropocentric perch.
Physical phenomena are impersonal, devoid of intentions of supernatural entities or immaterial spirits. And parsimoniously explicable without appealing to divine benevolence or wrath. Getting unshackled from the grip of bad memes passed down from antiquity must have been liberating. When viewed through this lens, anti-anthropocentrism seems reasonable, even necessary.
Abstract Reasoning
Consider a large urn filled with balls of different colors, not all equally numerous. A ball drawn at random, a stand-in for humanity or our planet or solar system, is more likely to be of the most common color — hence Mediocrity Principle. By invoking Bayesian calculus, it suggests we floor our expectations, justifying the claim that we are remarkably unremarkable.
With a few hundred apples per tree, it’s not hard to see why a randomly picked apple from the orchard should turn up extraordinary. When we swap planets for apples, the argument only gets sharper with countless planet-like objects in the cosmos. With approximately a trillion galaxies in the estimate, each with roughly a trillion stars, not counting the planets themselves, a remark such as Hawking’s “chemical scum” is easy to onboard. Once the idea gets assimilated, it beggars belief that the whole universe should exist for our benefit. That is anti-anthropocentrism in a nutshell.
Critique
Anti-anthropocentrism, like Anthropocentrism, is a radical perspective. The former is currently popular. It’s a rebound from the latter that was prevalent a few centuries ago. But both are pathologically detrimental to progress. Abandoning anthropocentric views was the right move for real progress in knowledge discovery to occur. But embracing the other extreme is guilt born of excess that requires two significant leaps — discounting knowledge growth and our unique ability to grow it.
Knowledge Growth
Ever since the Enlightenment, the phenomenal abundance that knowledge growth conferred on humanity, though impossible to exaggerate, gets overlooked by Mediocrity Principle. Its philosophical overtone is a perverse psychology of this abundance. It’s hard to reconcile our cosmic insignificance with how knowledge created by this chemical scum grew exponentially. Lounging in the comfort of our armchairs, sipping a latte, contemplating how we got to be this mediocre comes easy. The alternative to knowledge creation was stagnation — a status quo of our ancestors and their desperate plight eking out an existence that lasted at least a hundred thousand years. The period of phenomenal growth is a blink of an eye in evolutionary time scales. Our most remarkable attribute may be our use of creative thought in self-effacement, the story we tell ourselves despite progress.
Abstract Thought
Mediocrity Principle is an appeal to abstract mathematical entities. It requires abstract reasoning at its core to conclude that entities able to comprehend infinite quantities by manipulating symbols are commonplace elsewhere in the cosmos. In other words, using abstract reasoning to deride abstract reasoning is a fallacy.
Irrational Odds
What are the odds that intelligent entities capable of exponential knowledge creation exist? What are the odds of such entities discovering natural laws? Bayesian small-world arguments completely miss the mark in attempting to rationalize decisions under extreme uncertainty. In trying to wrap its arm around the vast cosmos, Bayesian epistemology overextends its explanatory reach. But is not Bayesianism a perfect recipe to model our ignorance about intelligent life elsewhere? No, it’s a misconceived view of knowledge growth. Knowledge accumulation has the unique property of wildly altering odds — its ability to expand our horizon and uncover a growing sphere of unknowns. Human existence may be an exception, not a rule on cosmic scales. There is no way to assign credence that we are likely (or probably) commonplace.
It doesn’t imply we climb back on a new anthropocentric throne. Nor are we justified in relegating ourselves to the cosmic scum-bin. Ironically, attributing self-insignificance requires the faculty to create a sound probabilistic argument. It’s ludicrous to suppose that bacteria can calculate odds, much less consider themselves scum based on it. And yet, with exoplanetology, we may be the only species that stands a chance of discovering that such scum is abundant in the cosmos.
Optimism
Our cosmic significance may never rise to any significant level by cosmic standards. But anti-anthropocentric sentiments rooted in Bayesian epistemology miss the profound universal leap — our unbounded potential for knowledge discovery coupled with the means (the scientific method) to improve upon it. There is an inherent asymmetry in knowledge creation — with its growth, our ignorance of what’s out there only grows faster. To undermine or dismiss us as chemical scum would be to surrender — a recipe for our demise as a species. That may very well happen, but we are cosmically significant chemical scum that knows how to ward off that outcome. Not by self-disparagement and nonsensical labels but with the only viable option of staying the course of open-ended knowledge creation until we find we are cosmically insignificant. That’s when we encounter something that justifies our claim.
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© Dr. VK. All rights reserved, 2023
