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.
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 it doesn’t yet exist (this website is me having a stab at writing it for peer review and investor interest), but it’s essentially 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. If you think of how much our understanding of the world, science and society changed with the theory of relativity or Newton’s theories, you can think of the Theory of Everything as another such game changer for us humans.
Part 1 (of 2)
I admit that at any rate, that’s an odd thing to think about, but can you imagine it? Somewhere there is a way of understanding reality that means we make fewer errors, function more efficiently, have more healthy humans. That’s an odd and valuable object to think about, and many out there are giving it more and more consideration.
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 only be easily described by what they do. Like a wave, math or poetry. Also, and for clarity, this 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 as of yet one that describes how all of it works. What is clear however, is that somehow this ToE would have to both absorb or replicate all the bits that existing theories get right, and get right the bits current theories get wrong.
In other words, the ToE would be the thing that could describe the universe as it is, in scientific terms. What that does, is enable us to study it and understand it more correctly and cut out inefficiencies. When I say ”describe”, I very much mean “can predict everything, given you have the data”. 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. 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 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 of humanity. From cosmic to the smallest Planck scales, 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 operate with their individual subculture and language.
There certainly are many different types of theories (in the assumptive sense) about reality, including some that are described by philosophical or religious texts, but when people talk about the ToE, the Western and scientific view is that we are likely talking about physics. This post asks the question then whether that is the right or best way to look at it, and whether it is really a “thing” like a lot of physicist are pursuing, or is it rather an “action”? Whether it is really a Theory at all in the classic computational sense, or whether it is instead a Theory in a whole new sense of the description of how a thing changes state predictably.
It is, to all intents and purposes, 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 to every choice and decision we make. The product of earlier attempts to explain everything are all around us and are 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 you are now, thinking about the Theory that would describe reality and make everything easier on us humans. Isn’t this fun?
part2
When I said “it is a theory that can predict anything”, my first thought is that we must ask not “what is everything?” but “what makes something a thing?”. What does it mean to be a thing? When is a thing a thing and other such delightful questions. Are a wave or poetry a thing? Or are they an action? Everything with a name is ultimately a thing, even an action, but the question is more subtle than that. There is a choice of styles and depths of thinking you have to do to consider the blue apple or the wave as “real”. 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. If you really want to describe the movement in detail, you’ll have a lot of detail to add, but the same can be said of a more detailed picture of the 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 computational complexity, and more importantly 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 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? What is the metadata, so to speak and what does it mean to us, humans and users of theories.
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. Without a user there is no performance valuation and without performance report (how well it performs), the object has less contentual and contextual meaning. Skill comes into play here too ofcourse because the other aspect of the tool’s performance value is associated to the skill of the user of the tool. This is where it gets more obscure because matter of Free Will come into play. But what if opportunities to exert Free Will were emergent from patterns? 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. With the change in focus on the data (you need the required data on priors to correct the lensing), this strategy offers a realistic predictive model 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, this self-improving algorithm is in essence an encodement of how to get a better answer, rather than the pursuit of a right answer. The pursuit of betterment, rather than of rightness. No exciting prospects on time travel with this theory about reality sadly, but excellent avenues in optics, decay pathways, and health and wellbeing prediction. All are after all 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.
Stefaan
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