Thursday 22 December 2011

The Other Problem with a Theory of Everything

Is semantics. In this context, what is meant by "everything"?

This theory of everything would be a theory that allowed the precise prediction of any result of any experiment (in principle or in practice) in known physics. Without proving that everything in known physics is all the physics there is, there is no justification for calling it a theory of everything. This would be a theory of everything we have discovered thus far. However, as physics has nothing to say about consciousness, we can clearly see that this isn't even a theory of everything discovered so far (despite how little we may know about consciousness).

Whether you think this distinction is important or not is another matter. Being a pedant, I think it is.

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