Complexity argument

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.

Self? Language & everything else

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER

Suppose you have a complete theory of Everything (both knowable and unknowable), does it count if you cannot articulate it? A theory must be expressed in some language to make it comprehensible to another being. The limits of that theory is circumscribed by the limits of language, what language is capable of expressing. If something is ineffable, then it obviously falls outside of language, but more importantly, it falls outside of any possible theory.

Ask any mystic about his or her experiences, and I'll bet the conversation is about noumena. During discussions, we readily use the subject "we," just as I use "you" to address you. But who are "you" really? Some might say, body and soul. And there again the Kantian division between phenomena and noumena pops up -- for the entity "soul" cannot be pinned down in phenomena.

In his 1994 book "THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: The Scientific Search for the Soul," Francis Crick [co-discoverer of DNA] argued that the soul is an illusion perpetuated, like Tinkerbell, only by our belief in it. He wrote: "'YOU,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Oceanic Feeling

The Oceanic Feeling : The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India

vide Jeffrey Moussaieff's influence from Daniel H.H. Ingalls, professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, and Louis Renou, Indologist in Paris. Interestingly in his 1990 book _Final_Analysis_ he wrote, "[I] slowly began to free myself from a belief that they [Pali and Sanskrit texts] were 'the truth.' They were simply one among a myriad of beliefs that owed their power primarily to the fact that people were born into them, or had the ideas drilled into them over and over."

William James used the phrase "oceanic feeling" to describe mystical religious experiences.

Hofstadter's _I Am a Strange Loop_

David Deutsch writes in his review: 'I Am a Strange Loop is supposed to explain that a mind is a near-infinitely extendable, self-referential loop of symbols that suffers – or rather, benefits – from the hallucination of being an "I". Furthermore (Hofstadter says paradoxically), that hallucination is itself an "I". Hofstadter's "strange loop" is a bit like an ordinary feedback loop, such as the images in a pair of parallel mirrors facing each other, but instead of merely depicting itself physically, it symbolically refers to itself. And unlike ordinary self-referential statements, like this one, the symbol inside a brain that refers to itself as "I" is not used by anyone else: it is someone. [...] Hofstadter embraces irrationality itself: "Our very nature is such as to prevent us from understanding our nature." '