Theory of Everything

My theory of everything is that everything is essentially a mystery.

This being because there may be something that completely ties in to life, and there is no way of completely eradicating life to find out what would happen.

Perhaps time itself is entirely dependent upon life; they are one in the same.:cheers2:

 

I think it's fairly amusing that we're still trying to figure it all out. We'll never stop even though we're no closer to the answers.

I guess our purpose in life is to search for a purpose in life.

 

What can we do but try to figure things out? I think we're much closer to the answers than we have been in times past, unless we're assuming that such answers are by their nature unknowable.

 

Since we're still discovering new answers I think it's a pretty good thing. Yeah, the overall drive to know everything can be amusing at times but it did gave us some remarkable insight nevertheless.

 

Fish got to swim,
Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder
"why, why, why?"

I think the ultimate cosmic irony is that we're smart enough to ask the questions, but not smart enough to understand the answers. Our brains have been wired via evolution to think of the world in terms of "find food, avoid being food".

That works great for thinking up new gadgets or explaining how photosynthesis works. We're clever creatures. But it's very difficult, maybe impossible, to think in some other modality when discussing the ultimate nature of the universe. The best we can do, so far, is ... "the kingdom of heaven is within you" and the equivalent, which actually might be the most profound words any human being has ever uttered. But it's hard to get a handle on such a thing ... it's too subtle and mysterious for our gadget-making brains.

I think the search for the so-called "theory of everything" is a fine thing ... quantum mechanics and particles and all that. There's something incredibly satisfying in understanding natural things.

Aside from that, lots of things in day-to-day life are pure constructs of the mind .... love, justice, beauty, happiness, etc. No one truly understands what those things are, either. Most people would say that trying to find a quantum mechanical foundation for "love", for instance, is absurd. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

Maybe understanding love is the key to understanding the universe. That's not an original thought ... the Hindus said the same thing millenia ago. The Beatles said it decades ago ... "love is all, love is you." When you're talking about love, you turn to the poets, who may not be so different from the quantum mechanics guys after all.

I like what Alfred Tennyson said about it ...

FLOWER in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;—
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

 

Also, you may not get an answer when getting all philosophical but I like it that some of us humans can find joy in wandering about these questions alone.

 

I'm saying you can't even possibly have a theory of everything, because if you can't possibly know how life ultimately relates to everything, which is something, then you're missing a piece of everything. So why would they even look? But I guess they're just trying to combine QM with GR. I wish they would be more exact.

 

Perhaps everything is too diverse to fit in one single theory? But I agree even if it could we probably wouldn't fully understand it.

 

I don't think The Theory of Everything means "everything". It means "everything that fits into the theory" ... lol

This is what I mean when I say our brains aren't wired to think this way. These kind of questions lead to paradoxes that are inherent in the way our brains work.

It's because of the way we evolved, I guess. Understanding the fundamental nature of the universe doesn't matter too much when you're just trying to avoid getting eaten by crocodiles.

 

I think scientists need to be more exact and recognize that they are messing with people's psychology. To a layman, Theory of Everything is the same thing as saying "Everything has been explained" and that's just dumb.

 

It also could be the case, I suppose, that you have to completely understand how life ties in to reality in order to combine QM and GR.

 

I'm not sure I agree with this..though maybe I do. You could argue that the attempt to tie Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity (basically by trying to make gravity fit into both) is purely a physical theory, and has nothing to do with life, or the mind..but then QM tells us that we can't observe a system without altering it's outcome..and our brains may operate at a quantum level anyway...so maybe we need to understand our place in the universe (or multiverse ) before we can understand everthing else. I think it was Caliente who said in a previous post that "Our brains have been wired via evolution to think of the world in terms of "find food, avoid being food". ", which is true...but then most of us no longer have to worry about these things, and our brains are amazingly plastic things (look at how we learn, or on a more extreme level, how someone recovers from a brain injury - our brain actually modifies it's physical structure to allow it to do new things). Combine this with the fact that our brains are possibly the most complex things ever to have existed, and I think the potential for us is pretty good. Then again, maybe not. I have hundreds of theories about this, most of which contradict each other...that's why I love thinking about it - it's a total mind-wank (like a mind-fuck but one that you do to yourself). It's great preciseley because it's so complicated - I'd guess that's why we're discussing it....

 

Yeah, maybe. I would think so, since QM is nothing without observation, and you can't totally eliminate observation in order to see what would happen. So you really can't have a theory of everything...right?

I deserve the Nobel Prize. C'mon, give it up.

 

Yeah, Ok <Prepares to phone the Nobel commitee>...Hang on..what if the fact that we can't observe anything without affecting it - that everything is subjective - is, in fact an illusion caused by a deeper level of reality that we have no current understanding of? Maybe the universe IS in fact entirely deterministic, Heisenburg was pre-determined to come up with his theory of indeterminacy, and we're pre-determined to think that we don't live in a deterministic universe? Then everything would, in fact, be completely objective, you COULD have a Theory of Everything unconnected to mind or life, if we only understood the underlying mechanism??

<hangs up phone without dialling and waits for response>
(And pleeeeease don't go down the route of arguing an even deeper level of subjective reality below the deeper level of objective reality lying under the current model of subjective reality....or we'll be here all night...well, forever actually, whatever that means).

 

Here's something else we've been forgetting ... Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I learned about this a few months ago and started a thread on it then.

As I understand it, the Incompleteness Theorem proved that basically it's impossible to understand everything. There will always be things that cannot be covered by any existing system of thought. This is not just fancy "lawyer's talk" ... it's a fundamental property of reality. It does not matter how smart we are, or how advanced our technology ... there will always be things beyond the scope of our understanding.

NeospectralToast, this might be what you've been saying all along.

That's a good point, but I don't think it alters my statement. The brain is indeed plastic from a physical standpoint, but even self-modification doesn't change its basic manner of thinking. Obviously, we are far beyond "eat or be eaten", but the way our brains work to form logical thoughts is no different than it was 100,000 years ago.

But anyway, given the Godel thing, I think the issue of brain capability is probably irrelevant.

 

You're very probably right, and I almost definitely agree with you (I'm actually a big fan of the fact that the universe is non-determinative and we therefore can never know "everything") - I just like arguing the toss for the fun of discussing it with smart an' interesting people. I've heard of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem but don't know enough about it to comment - just about to read up on it now Is your thread on it still active?

This is kind of different from the Theory of Everything (hereafter known as ToE) though I think. The ToE is an attempt to formulate a scientific theory that can explain everything we currently observe about the universe - QM, GR, Gravity, etc, etc...having a ToE doesn't imply that we KNOW everything, just that we can fit everything that we DO know together...at the moment we have two hugely successful theories that work perfectly..as long as they never actually meet...obviously that's ridiculous when they explain things in the same universe, and as far as I understand it (which admittedly isn't far) the ToE is an attempt to resolve this paradox. There's still a damn good chance - as you say - that there are things we'll never know...

 

Again I think I agree with you - our brains haven't changed that much - I'm sure a great number of Newtons and Einsteins were born in the stoneage (one of them was probably the guy or girl who came up with the idea that if they hacked four stones into a roughly circular shape and cut holes in the middle, the Ferrari might actually go somewhere..) but what you're ignoring is that to some extent human knowledge is built on the work of previous people - surely we know more about how the universe works than we did 1000 years ago? Or even 10 years ago? Also, methods of training, available technology and experminetal apparatus etc all improve...so while our brains may not be the same, the environment that they work in is definitely not.
As far as the "logical thoughts" bit goes, there's an increasing amount of evidence that most really brilliant human ideas and concepts proceed from a highly non-linear, illogical thought process. That's why women make better programmers, in my experience - they seem to find it easier to make highly lateral leaps which can create excellent code, especially in very non-linear languages like LISP...though I may be over-generalising, I am speaking from nine years experience of managing, working with and training programmers of both sexes, , and there's definetely a difference in the way they think. Though I think that's another thread all on it's own

 

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=363877&f=38

Yep. This point was made earlier in the thread. The ToE wants to unify Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, and probably some other stuff I don't know about.

That's not what we're talking about here.

 

Thanks for the link - interesting stuff. I did some reading last night but some of the posts there (including your initial one - it was a very good "idiots guide" to incompleteness theorem (which I need)) - helped clarify some of it for me. My only problem is this (and I'm sure this isn't actually a problem, but arises from my incomplete (haha) understanding) :

If Godels 2 Incompleteness Theorems are indeed theorems, then they must be derived from a number of axioms within the original theory...that being, as I understand it, (and I'm (mis)quoting you here) "there are mathematical statements that can never be proved to be either true or false"...if that's the case, the whole thing is surely subject to the Incompleteness Theorems itself - so the theory can never be proved or disproved..so it may not actually be true, or it may be, or (like the Liars Paradox) it may be both true and untrue at the same time (a truth value of 0.5). I'm glad you introduced me to this - I've loved the Liars Paradox and it's variants for years, and this kind of recursive proof and argument is fascinating - while completely melting my brain.

It's kind of (not really) related to one of my other favourite quotes (unknown author unfortunately) :

"To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion".

Anyway, we seem to be drifting more into theoretical mathematics rather than physics here....but that's cool.

Thanks.

P.S It's a shame there only seem to be three people in this thread ATM...any idea of anyone else who might be interested? It could turn into something really interesting (not that it isn't already).

 

Whew ... you're getting over my head here. But I don't think he's saying that all mathematical statements can neither be proved true nor false. Only that it's possible to find some.

LOL ... I managed them for 15 years. Oh, yes ... the difference in the workings of male and female brains has been well-documented. Makes things interesting, doesn't it?