Hi Sriram,
On 23 Jun 2010, at 05:12, Sriram wrote:
Can any one tell the basics of TOE? Because i'm very strange to this
with lots of interest.
The word TOE is for 'Theory of Everything'. It comes from physics, and
the idea is that reality are governed by forces, and nothing else.
Physicists have succeeded in unifying all forces of nature, except
gravitation, and the search of a TOE consists for them mainly to marry
quantum mechanics and gravitation (general relativity theory).
Tegmark, referred by Kevin, digs a bit more closely on the very nature
of reality, and seems to be open to the idea that reality is
fundamentally mathematical.
But virtually none among the physicists are aware of the mind body
problem. Most use implicitly both computationalism and the brain-mind
identity thesis and are not aware of my (oldest) work showing that
computationalism is incompatible with the identity thesis, and
eventually makes obligatory that reality is mathematical, even just
arithmetical, but also that the link between mind and body is far more
complex than usually people think.
So, TOE has a larger signification: unifying not just all the forces,
but also physical knowledge and consciousness/mind.
Here, when you postulate computationalism (roughly speaking: we are
digitalisable machine), it has been showed that eventually the whole
of physics has to be retrieved from the relation between numbers or
finite combinatorial structures. The emerging picture is that the TOE
appears to be elementary arithmetic (a bit like Pythagorus believed).
From elementary arithmetic, you can extract the logic of self-
reference of the (ideally correct) machines (a mathematical notion
making sense through Church Thesis), and from this you can study the
possible accessible realities, accessible by machines, and this
provides the constraints to isolate the physical laws.
The problem is that you need to be familiar with mathematical logic,
which is virtually unknown by physicists. The advantage (of taking
computationalism seriously, and thus machine self-reference) is that
we don't need to take all mathematical structures (a notion which has
no real mathematical sense). Another advantage is that you will
extract not only the quanta, but also the qualia (incommunicable truth
in any 3-person ways), thanks to the gap that all (ideally correct
universal) machines can discover when looking inward.
Morality: the TOE is already in your head and you can find it by
introspection, and if you are lazy, you can program a computer to do
just that and just listen to him (and to its silence, also). This
leads to "well known" modal logic describing abstractly such
introspective discourses.
This sum up my own work(*) and discussions we have on this list since
years. The problem: mathematical logic is not well known, and often
misunderstood, and since Penrose's books, which illustrates the gap
between physics and logics, physicists seems to be a bit stuck or shy
on logic. Philosophy of mind, and the subtlety of the mind-body
problem is rather not well appreciated too, by the quite common
Aristotelian scientists. To sum up again: if we are digitalizable
machine, then the TOE is just arithmetic, at the ontological level. It
is enough to explain the richer internal epistemologies and how the
couplings consciousness/realities emerge from arithmetic and from the
modal internal machines/numbers points of view. In that case the
fundamental science is no more physics, but machine or number's
psychology or, more accurately, number's theology. The term "theology"
is more accurate because it can be shown that computationalism relies
on an act of faith, and we have the important splitting between the
provable truth and the non provable truth, when self-reference is at
play, which happens when you expect the TOE to unify your first person
(unsharable) experience with your third person plural (sharable)
experiments.
Bruno
(*) see for example: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
(and references therein).
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