King_Anarchist
Chrono Cadet
How can I troll my own thread? /ttiforum/images/graemlins/confused.gif
It's interesting that you mention theology because that's exactly what a ToE is about (at least for me). I'm a pantheist so one could say that I equate God to reality which is the totality of all that exists (whatever that might be). A study of reality is then a study of God.
A TOE must be a complete description of reality, otherwise it's not everything it's a theory of.
Reality contains much more than quanta, don't you think? Consider the abstract and Platonic Forms.
The discipline that deals with this kind of ToE is math, philosophy, and the philosophy of science and math. I don't think it's falsifiable so it's not a science problem, at least not as a whole. Science may one day come up with a ToEP, a theory of everything that is physical but that neglects everything that is not physical.
Let me try to be clear although much of this is covered in the link in the top.
If reality exists then it is structurally equivalent to a mathematical structure.
I'll call the antecedent the reality hypothesis (RH) and the consequence the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH). I seek to argue that RH implies MUH. (This is based on the works of Max Tegmark [1], for example -with some modifications.)
A complete description of reality is called a ToE (theory of everything).
<ul type="square">[*]The RH implies that for a description to be complete, it must be well-defined also according to non-human sentient entities (say aliens or future supercomputers) that lack the common understanding of concepts that we humans have evolved, e.g., "particle", "observation" or indeed any other English words. Put differently, such a description must be expressible in a form that is devoid of human "baggage".
[*]The RH implies that a ToE has no baggage.
[*]There are many equivalent ways of describing the same structure, and a particular mathematical structure can be defined as an equivalence class of descriptions. Thus although any one description involves some degree of arbitrariness (in notation, etc.), there is nothing arbitrary about the mathematical structure itself.
[*]Something that has a baggage-free description is precisely a mathematical structure.
[*]Therefore, the physical reality described by the TOE is a mathematical structure.[/list]
What is meant by the expression "mathematical structure?" [1] provides an intuitive explanation of what a mathematical structure is by saying, "all mathematical structures are just special cases of one and the same thing: so-called formal systems. A formal system consists of abstract symbols and rules for manipulating them, specifying how new strings of symbols referred to as theorems can be derived from given ones referred to as axioms." The precise definition is available upon request.
Intuitively, the "phrase reality is structurally equivalent to a mathematical structure" means two things:
<ul type="square">[*] There is a one-to-one correspondence between reality and the set of symbols of a mathematical structure and
[*] This one-to-one correspondence “preserves truth†when statements are translated from the language of reality to the language of a mathematical structure. Preservation of truth means a statement in a language of reality is true if and only if it is true in a mathematical structure.[/list]
[1] M. Tegmark, The Multiverse Hierarchy, arXiv:0905.1283v1 (2009)
[0905.1283] The Multiverse Hierarchy
I am familiar with the argument clinic skit. Superficially I see the resemblance between this and that. :D