THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
Before developing a Theory of Everything, one might ask whether the human brain and its products are indeed capable of understanding the truths about the universe.
Karl Sabbagh, author of THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS, asks: "Why should we expect to be able eventually to understand how the universe originated, evolved, and operates? While human brains are complex and capable of many amazing things, there is not necessarily any match between the complexity of the universe and the complexity of our brains, any more than a dog's brain is capable of understanding every detail of the world of cats and bones, or the dynamics of stick trajectories when thrown."
Sabbagh invokes the complexity argument, but the fundamental problem is addressing the limits of our knowledge. Over 200 years ago, Kant divided the universe into two domains: phenomena and noumena, or in plain English, the knowable and unknowable domains. So that implies we must qualify ToE to mean: "Theory of Everything (knowable)" -- but then it is a misnomer because Everything does not really include everything. Perhaps the most interesting stuff is going on over in the world of noumena (like God playing dice to amuse himself in his infinite boredom). Or if one has any faith in decoherence theory (or the theory of multiple universes) there must be other versions of ToE which we cannot possibly access even in ordinary phenomena.
