Once you take away all the meta-purpose that is caused by anthropics,
then I really do think there is no more purpose left.
There’s also the possibility of “the adapted universe” idea—as laid out by Lee Smolin in “The Life of the Cosmos” and James Gardner in “Biocosm” and “Intelligent-Universe”.
Those ideas may face some Occam pruning—but they seem reasonably sensible. The laws of the universe show signs of being a complex adaptive system—and anthropic selection is not the only possible kind of selection effect that could be responsible for that. There could fairly easily be more to it than anthropic selection.
Then there’s Simulism...
I go into the various possibilites in my “Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses” essay:
There’s also the possibility of “the adapted universe” idea—as laid out by Lee Smolin in “The Life of the Cosmos” and James Gardner in “Biocosm” and “Intelligent-Universe”.
Those ideas may face some Occam pruning—but they seem reasonably sensible. The laws of the universe show signs of being a complex adaptive system—and anthropic selection is not the only possible kind of selection effect that could be responsible for that. There could fairly easily be more to it than anthropic selection.
Then there’s Simulism...
I go into the various possibilites in my “Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses” essay:
http://originoflife.net/intelligent_design/
Robert Wright has produced a broadly similar analysis elsewhere.