Theory of everything

Questions: ‘Loaded dice’ and ‘a theory of everything’

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’What is a theory of everything?
Based upon the current idiom of science, it is a theory that can capture the whole of existence in a single factual or mathematical proof – as if that fact or equation can stand apart from the realms of theory, and as if reality dictates to theory that everything reduces to that one thing.

What is a theory of chance?
We are surrounded by chance events, which prompts us to ask whether the universe might have started that way. Chance can be seen to operate within certain boundaries to yield uncertain outcomes. For instance, rolling a die can have uncertain outcomes, but they are limited by the nature of the die, which doesn’t look like it got here by chance. Of course there may be additional uncertain consequences, such as an ensuing fight, but these are indirect and tend to remain only notionally connected. Normally, chance and probability are used to calculate the likelihood of an outcome, but that’s not quite the same thing as explaining it; however, other, more fanciful suppositions court the idea that anything can happen by chance – that a rolling rock could in theory turn itself into a die – although fewer still would go so far as to say it is theoretically possible for a rolling rock to turn into a chicken. Yet many hypotheses are promulgated, to varying degrees of nonsense, in the attempt to explain changes we can’t explain except by putting them down to chance – even to the point of decrying the importance of known non-chance events – as if the works of Shakespeare could, in theory, be replicated by placing typewriters in an infinite monkey cage. Other theories place chance at the origin of ‘life, the universe and everything’ – as the essential pre-existing or spontaneously exiting cause, or as a nexus in multiple universes.

If the answer isn’t ‘in the beginning’, where is it?
It’s likely to be in ‘an end-point’ outside of our reach. That’s why we prefer to look to beginnings – because they seem more accessible and there are still clues to be found, although we tend to treat each discoverable beginning as not the actual beginning of ‘it all’. However, an ‘ultimate beginning’ is not likely to be a repository of everything in any event, simply because of the fact that we can see things changing to become more than they were, and it is happening right before our eyes. So we are witnessing new beginnings all the time and remain challenged by the inexplicable facts of change, which we try to make explicable by looking in vein to ever more distant beginnings for a more ample cause. Meanwhile, theories of beginnings and ends remain highly theoretical – for isn’t every end a new beginning in the bigger picture of a dynamic universe where effects adorn the reality of their causes with something new? Furthermore, the idea of a first cause setting up a consistent chain of events, seems to suggest that ‘the dice were loaded from the start’, unless this consistency is an illusion of our place and time in ‘our universe’ – because the infinite variety of alternatives that are consistent with chance remain hidden from us in an unobservable ‘multiverse’.

Is there a purpose to existence?
This is a question we can feel more at home with, indeed we can also make some firm inroads towards an answer, because we already know there is purpose and meaning in existence, if only by way of our own presence, nature and outlook – and since we happen to be a real part of the universe we bear proof in ourselves of what can transpire. This change in the nature of nature is no less significant in cosmic terms just because we find it happens to be peculiar to us. But questions remain to be answered: where does it all lead and does it end with us? It seems that the answers lie in the bigger picture, where ends turn out to be bigger than beginnings – whereby our sense of meaning and purpose, despite manifesting as a part of us, may in fact be a staging point of a further beginning. (The question of ‘a bigger picture’ has been examined above).
So it may well be the case that we are privy to only a part of the answer, given that it is fair to assume that we exist in a universe that is bigger than us and that the nature of our being owes to more than we bring to it. Nevertheless, we can take comfort from the incompleteness of our situation, in the stark realisation that the purpose in existence is likely to be bigger than all we can make of it, just as the facts are likely to remain bigger than all we can make of them. Thereafter, the main obstacle to our progress is ourselves and our equally deficient observation that reality is confined to the facts of a purposeless nature that fixes the fate of what it all adds up to, which we uphold by promising ourselves that this explanation will win through in the end – as if we can deem ourselves adequate to explain the existence of existence or the extent of its nature and possibilities.

Mike Laidler

Loaded dice: The chances of a ‘theory of everything’.

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If the mystery of existence is that it exists, then that mystery carries through into every aspect of it, including our observations of necessity and all the explanations built upon them. Also the question of necessity persists despite all the revelations of observation and explanation – since we still don’t know how the universe came to be as a necessary fact, and if not, why it came to be at all? Meanwhile, the mystery deepens in the knowledge that everything can be observed to come down to something less than itself – indeed explanation seems to rely on this fact.

On the other hand, things can be seen to change to become more than they were – such as when the universe takes form, or chemicals constitute bodies that become alive, or thoughts emerge with knowledge to frame ‘the facts’. Yet things don’t change, remaining as they were beneath the surface, everything being reducible to the basic elements. So change is at the centre of the mystery of existence – being shrouded in the paradox that things change without changing in a universe that appears to grow from nothing in the same way – because everything is traceable to something less than it becomes, which remains unchanged beneath it all.

In short, explanation doesn’t do justice to the facts that are simultaneously one thing and another. For example, to claim that we are just atomic particles because ‘in reality’ that’s all there is, neither represents the reality of atomic particles nor ourselves, and does not instate atomic particles as the source of feelings, intentions and purposes. So a ‘reductionist’ explanation of the origins of the universe cannot count as ‘a theory of everything’. Neither can we expect knowledge, as part of the universe, to encapsulate the reality in which it is encapsulated – for it seems that realities, like dice, turn on outcomes and inevitabilities bigger than themselves in which the ‘laws of necessity’ get redefined. Meanwhile explanation is fated to chase perpetually the facts that outstrip it.

Furthermore, a theory of chance neither explains itself nor the necessities that come to overlay it, or how causes lead to change. Nor can explanation pin its authority on the consistency of causes – since the observation of a ‘necessary outcome’, in providing a premise for explanation, doesn’t yield an adequate explanation of its beginning in something less. Thus, in the paradoxical reality of fact, everything reveals the fact of itself in a reality bigger than itself; and reality presents ‘itself’ as a plurality of realities: in unity and diversity, stasis and change, explanation and contradiction – the plural ‘it’ encompassing the living and the unliving, chance and design, action and inertia, possibility and limitation, inevitability and uncertainty, coincidence and intention, necessity and choice, knowledge and oblivion, meaning and irrelevance. Then if there is more to reality in its outcomes than its origins, the ‘absolutes’ remain definitive only of truths that are incomplete truths in a reality bound to change, together with its mantle of explanation.

Mike Laidler