What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being su… - Roger Penrose

It's a very plausible thing now that the entropy should increase all the time... [T]hese volumes... are... enormously different in scale... I can't convey to you in the picture the absolute stupendous difference in the sizes of these volumes. So if you happen to find yourself in one of them, and you wiggle around, the next one you find yourself in will be overwhelmingly likely to be much much larger, and the entropy therefor goes up.

Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so. This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us—and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.

...the entire physical world is depicted as being governed according to mathematical laws. We shall be seeing in later chapters that there is powerful (but incomplete) evidence in support of this contention. On this view, everything in the physical universe is indeed governed in completely precise detail by mathematical principles — perhaps by equations, such as those we shall be learning about in chapters to follow, or perhaps by some future mathematical notions fundamentally different from those which we would today label by the term ‘equations’. If this is right, then even our own physical actions would be entirely subject to such ultimate mathematical control, where ‘control’ might still allow for some random behaviour governed by strict probabilistic principles.