a theory of everything, cultural object or objective phenomenon?

If you are feeling somewhat mischievous today and fancy thinking about something different for a change, this could be for you.

For more on the idea of the ToE as a phenomenological event go here, for more work in logic go here.

The Theory of Everything, or ToE for short, is a strange and fun object to consider. You might never have heard of it, and as of right now, nobody would blame you as it doesn’t yet exist as a scientifically recognised object. This website is me having a stab at writing the only form I think it can take rationally -as an open-source research programme in epistemology, more specifically: in the formal and operational study of how humans construct, stabilise, and evaluate representations of reality under contextual constraint.

I do this to make it available for peer review and investor interest, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not what most people in the scientific community seem to expect it to be). Essentially, it would be what you can think of as ‘the theory Science would agree on as being the working theory with all the formulas required to understand, calculate and predict anything in the Universe as we humans can encounter it’.

If you think of how much our understanding of the world, science and society changed with the theory of relativity or even Newton’s theories, you can think of the Theory of Everything as another such game changer for us humans. At the every least it would do what those theories do and perhaps something more on top. But if anything, Science doesn’t know yet, yet the expectations with understanding everything are significant.

Classifying our thinking on Everythingnesses

I admit that at any rate, that’s an odd thing to think about, but can you imagine it? Somewhere there might a way of understanding reality that means we make fewer errors yet again. Function more efficiently, have more healthy humans living more satisfying lives. That’s an odd and valuable object to think about, and many out there are giving it more and more consideration in their studies.

Much of this study comes from physics, yet physics may not be the way to solve this problem. Its epistemology might be. Every science and body of knowledge has defining terms that include or exclude objects from categories available fo further analysis. That decision tree is based on categorisation, hierarchies and ontologies that structure a reliability and predictability into its own evidential system.

Unlike a green dining table or a blue apple that you can describe by what each looks like or is made up of, the Theory of Everything is one of these thought-objects that can more easily described by what it does. Not like an apple or cube, described by their value metrics, but like a wave, math or poetry by their action and effect. Also, and for clarity, this theory of everything would still have to be a “theory” not in the speculative sense, but in the sense of “accepted (by science) model”. Like Cell Theory, Quantum Mechanics or the Theory of Evolution.

Unsurprisingly, there are lots of theories and works that describe very well how certain parts of the world and even the universe work, but, as I said, there isn’t one, as of yet, that is accepted as describing how all of it works or can work (as it obviously seems to do). What is clear however, is that somehow any given ToE would have to both absorb or replicate all the bits that existing theories get right, and get right (or less wrong at least) the bits current theories get wrong.

In other words, we don’t know what it is currently, but the ToE would be a thing that could at the very least better describe the universe as it is, in scientific terms. What that does, is enable us to study it and understand it more correctly and reduce or cut out inefficiencies. When I say ”describe”, I very much mean “can predict everything, given you have the data to do so”. Or it would do, because as I said, no theory is as of yet recognised as the Theory of Everything, although some contenders are out there in the ring.

Does it have a future?

You also know we don’t have it yet because we (as the human species) don’t yet know or understand everything Q.E.D. Or you’d assume so much at least, because, as a theory, it would solve so many problems in so many places that there would be overwhelming and noticeable benefit to human society.

In theory, the Theory of Everything would, over time, help us humans solve many, if not all, of the remaining problems we face. From cosmic challenges to those at the smallest Planck scales, and with us humans in the middle. That may seem poetic but holds because friction, energy and suffering are just information exchanged and translated expressions of inefficiency. That’s why there is so much overlap between theories describing reality on any of those scales and each operating with their individual subculture and language. The work on this site seeks to improve translation across those divided systems.

There are many forms of “theory” about reality, including philosophical and religious accounts. However, when the term Theory of Everything is used in contemporary scientific discourse, it typically refers to a unifying framework in fundamental physics, one that aims to describe the underlying structure of the universe in mathematically precise and predictive terms.

This raises a prior question. Is this the most appropriate level at which to frame the problem, given the available evidence? Or does it presuppose that reality, as accessed by humans, is best understood as an objective structure independent of the conditions under which it is observed?

Physics, in its current form, proceeds by modelling regularities in observation and seeking invariant descriptions of those regularities. But this leaves open a different line of inquiry: whether what we call “reality” is, for human observers, more accurately understood not as a fixed object, but as the outcome of a stabilising process.

On that view, a Theory of Everything would not only describe what exists, but also how observations are transformed into stable representations of what is taken to exist. The question then is whether such a theory remains a theory in the classical, computational sense, or whether it becomes something else: a formal account of how states are rendered and change in a predictable way under conditions of observation and interpretation.

It is, to all intents and purposes, a study of the notion of what reality is made of, how it behaves and what makes it predictable. What makes things real, so to speak. Not something one thinks much about, yet is fundamental and implicit to every choice and decision we make. The product of earlier attempts to explain everything are all around us and are realistically very much what all industry and technology is made of. Newton and Einstein birthed and fostered theories that described reality absolutely, but, as it turned out, not absolutely all of reality. This in turn generated questions as to how both so clearly described reality, yet didn’t say the same thing and here we are now, musingly thinking about a Theory that could describe reality and make everything easier on us humans. Isn’t this fun?

When the fun stops

When I said “it is a theory that can predict anything”, my first thought is that we then must first really ask not “what is everything?” but “what makes something a thing I care about?”. What does it mean to be a thing? Because otherwise, why predict it in the first place.

When is a thing a thing? and other such delightful questions. Are a wave or poetry a thing in the same way as a boat, or are they an action, and what kind of thing are actions compared to objects? Everything with a name is ultimately a thing, even an action, but the question is more subtle than that, and invites us to look at how deep you have to dig to hit hard measurements. That, ultimately, is what thinking is. There is a choice of styles and depths of thinking you have to do to consider the blue apple or the wave as “real” in any specific sense. To consider a wave as an object in space and time, especially when compared to an apple, would be very complex, but as a movement it gets easier again. That is a matter of epistemic framing.

If you really want to describe the movement in detail, you can have a lot of detail to add to describe a poem, but the same can be said of a more detailed picture of a blue apple. This is the relation between quanta (the amount of thingness) and qualia (the nature of thingness). The reason this is important is because of the cost of computational complexity, and more importantly value of simplicity, tend to define the probability of a theory being correct.

So everything is ultimately a thing (even when it isn’t because then it’s the kind of thing that is not a thing) but it seems that the question is rather: when is a thing a certain style of thing relative to the other things we need to know to answer the question? Everything is a thing in some terms, the interesting question is at which moment and location, and what information (meaning) can be associate to it for what purposes? What is the metadata, so to speak and what does it mean to us, humans and users of theories.

It’s a tool after all

Because we are still speaking about the Theory of Everything. Theories, like a chisel, phone or math are tools, and like all tools they need a user to make sense, be recognised and have value. Without a user there is no performance valuation and without performance report (how well it performs), the object has lesser contentual and contextual meaning. It becomes a static and temporary object that needs to be approached and manipulated as such.

Skill comes into play here too, because the other aspect of any tool’s performance-value is derived from the skill of the user of the tool. This is where it gets more obscure because matter of Free Will come into play when discussing ToEs to muddy the waters. But what if opportunities to exert Free Will were emergent from epistemic patterns and ontological categories? That is what my Dot theory posits, and what it accepts is that we don’t yet know all the patterns because the previous perspective we took on reality was a bit fuzzy.

That is an unusual way to approach the idea of a ToE but with the change in focus on the data (you need the required data on priors to correct the lensing), this strategy offers a realistic model for predictive modelling of aspects of reality. One that will become more accurate as more observations on priors are made and lensing can be adjusted for more and more efficiently.

Written as a single theorem here and elaborated across this website as whole, this self-improving algorithm is perhaps not a ToE in the classic and expected senses but it is a way to code system functions, including Ai agents, into getting better answers based about what we can know, rather than the pursuit of a right answer.

Does that make it a/the ToE? and is there such a thing at all? … perhaps the point always was pursuit of betterment, rather than that of ultimately arbitrary rightness. Perhaps, that is the only way to stand a chance to know more about anything in the first place. No exciting prospects on physical time travel with this Dot theory, sadly, but excellent avenues in optics, decay pathways, education and health and wellbeing prediction. All are, after all is said and told, the interpretations of what really happens to us.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you found it interesting to read and think about the Theory of Everything and what it could mean to your life. Please go here for an overview: https://www.dottheory.co.uk/project-overview, or scroll toward most recent (below right), older or more recent papers (further below). Thanks again,

Stefaan

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