After viewing “The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi,” ep. 13, I can’t help but comment a little on Itsuki’s little spiel in the taxi cab. He introduces the rather intriguing (yet simultaneously a bit trivial) concept of the anthropic principle, mostly as an explanation for what’s going on with Haruhi’s “control” of the universe.
At least through the limited exposure I have had to this principle (read: a passage on the MCAT, and a bit of Wikipedia), I feel like there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here. The basics are right: essentially, the universe’s properties, at least this universe’s, take on the values and appearances that they do simply because they are the ones conducive to life. It might furthermore be thought that we, fascinated that c = 2.998 x 10^8 m/s or that ice is more spacious than water, are actually being silly little critters, for only under those constraints could we be in this situation to understand them in this way. There might be other universes where c is not fixed at all, or where a proton is made up of four quarks and not three, or a myriad of other situations to which we grant absolute “truth” without a clear reasoning for why exactly it must be so. For instance, it seems arbitrary that the mass of an electron is 1/1836 that of a proton. It may indeed be arbitrary, and just as how both birds and bees can fly, perhaps in a different universe, there might be a very different sort of electron. Then, maybe we don’t need to be in awe or attribute it all to mystery – things work the way they do because otherwise we wouldn’t be here!
In all of this local greatness, there is not really such a strong sense of the causality that Itsuki tries to emphasize. It’s not so much that the universe exists because we exist, but rather that this universe, which bore us, is now viewed by us, just as a newborn child would first see his or her mother. Thus, it is not really valid to say that, by analogy, Haruhi, by wishing for there to be espers, has caused espers to exist. It’s not as if we may decide the value of the speed of light.
On the other hand, one might say that we believe, or want to believe, in espers, because something about this corner of the universe leads us to do so, and perhaps that might imply their existence. This is of course very doubtful, but at least makes more sense than attributing a ridiculous amount of causal power to human beings which is certainly not granted by the anthropic principle, at least the reasonable statings of it (there are some really out-there versions that I find incomprehensibly far-fetched and ill-reasoned).
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