DocWatts

@Leo Gura You're very welcome, thanks for hosting this awesome space.

Greetings and salutations! I thought I might share this in-depth write-up I made which explores Theories Of Everything (or TOEs): not only the human drive for coherence behind these attempts at a Grand Syntheses, but the epistemic limitations that they run ashore of - and how to use them responsibly. Below is the first half or so of the article. The full text can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/so-you-say-you-want-a-theory-of-everything ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ So You Say You Want A Theory Of Everything One Theory To Rule Them All: What our attempts at a Grand Synthesis reveal about our hunger for coherence and the partiality of our perspectives “One theory to rule them all. One framework to find them. One perspective to make sense of it all, and in the ambiguity bind them.” — Some budding theorist who’s definitely figured it all out The Appeal Of A Master Key There’s something undeniably alluring about a Theory Of Everything. After all, what serious thinker wouldn’t want the equivalent of a universal cipher - a framework so elegant in its reasoning and so comprehensive in its applicability that no problem is beyond its reach? Little wonder, then, that these unified visions have been a perennial staple of our collective meaning-making. Whether they find their expression in the contemplation of a mystic, the precise technical language of a philosopher, or the speculative models of an ambitious scientist, the underlying impulse is the same. Uniting these varied approaches is an intrinsic hunger for coherence: that habitual drive to assemble fragmented observations and experiences into a living narrative that allows us to make sense of the world. This drive towards coherence is something we all do, regardless of whether or not we’re conscious of it as it’s happening. Theories of Everything are an attempt to bottle this process, and direct it towards more intentional aims. But how do these visionary ambitions pan out in practice - and what do they have to teach us about the partiality of our perspectives? A Theory of Everything (or a TOE, as we’ll be abbreviating it) is an attempt to integrate insights from a multitude of domains into one comprehensive explanatory framework. The aim of these unifying frameworks is to bring coherence to some core dimension of our lived experience - be it our internal landscape, or the external structures that shape this experience. As a result, the terrain these cartographies of meaning seek to chart can be incredibly broad. In one sweeping gesture, a TOE may cast its net over the structures of consciousness, the trajectory of societies, and the laws governing physical reality. For the most audacious, these domains, already worlds unto themselves, might be but a prelude to an expedition into the nature of existence itself. Call it hubris, but no one can fault their architects for a lack of vision. Yet there’s a tension that haunts these ambitious projects from the very start. Searching For Meaning On Seas Of Incommensurability From Daoism to the Great Chain Of Being to the Clockwork Universe of the Enlightenment, totalizing explanations have a long and storied history in our shared cultural frameworks. And within a more bounded intellectual landscape, a comprehensive map of the whole expanse can feel like it’s just within reach. Yet these boundaries are never stable for long - pioneers have continually pushed against them, just by venturing into new territories that entail greater degrees of specialization. And as these specialized domains solidify into walled gardens with escalating entry requirements, connecting them all becomes a game of trade-offs. Thus does every would-be cartographer face a choice: render a curated slice of this horizon from a familiar corner, or create a flattened impression of the whole expanse in broad brush strokes. And here’s the kicker: neither path escapes partiality - they just enact different flavors of it. None of these ambitious projects offers a complete guide to Reality, but that’s not really the point. A well constructed TOE illuminates something about the world through its partiality - holes and all. While the world stubbornly shrugs off our attempts to capture it in its entirety, don’t tell that to those who’ve already embarked on one of these quests. So what sort of geography are these mad cartographers working with? Not a unified landscape, but archipelagos of understanding separated by oceans of incommensurability - each region governed by its own logic, language, and assumptions. Together, these form a tacit grammar of meaning that doesn’t always map cleanly onto its nearest neighbors, let alone distant shores. Thus does every high-level synthesis bump up against epistemic constraints that no philosophical sleight-of-hand can resolve, because they’re baked into the territory itself. Buy the atlas, take the flight: there is no map apart from what it’s supposed to accomplish and where its users stand in relation to the world. With all of this talk about what TOEs are ‘for’, it might sound like we’re building towards some inevitable end point - as if the Goddess Coherence were patiently revealing herself through our storied attempts at a grand synthesis. But don’t get it twisted: this is no backdoor teleology, and what’s being captured isn’t some linear march from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ explanations - just a story of shifting motivations and concerns across different contexts and circumstances. A teleology is the belief that things inevitably develop towards some predetermined end goal. In practice, it’s often a sneaky way of projecting our own aspirations and values onto processes - like ‘history’ or ‘evolution’ - that no one is actually steering. What we’re witnessing, then, isn’t some fixed hierarchy of progress, but an endlessly creative process of adaptation, messy in all the best ways. One where TOEs shift in response to what we need from these integrative frameworks - with no fixed destination in sight. Yet the realities of this adaptation have reshaped the TOE-scape in some counter- intuitive ways. The sheer scope and complexity of the territory to be synthesized has pushed these integrative frameworks into increasingly remote corners. The Haunts Where Modern TOEs Take Shape The haunts where serious TOE-building takes shape today tend to be cordoned off from daily life. Ontology, hermeneutics, speculative cosmology: if these esoteric domains don’t ring any bells, you’re in good company. Most people don’t know they exist, much less what goes on within them. Small surprise, then, that the atlases they produce tend to linger far from the public consciousness. Even among those with a passion for big ideas and an informed interest in the territory TOEs attempt to chart, hardly anyone reads the dusty tomes where these totalizing frameworks are laid out. Today’s intelligentsia certainly isn’t cracking open seminal works like Whitehead’s ‘Process And Reality’ or Heidegger’s ‘Being And Time’ - and for good reason. These manuals have a reputation that precedes them: vast, dense, and intimidating. Yet scope and minutiae aren’t what keeps people away - at least not entirely. After all, millions will happily spend their hours poring over the sprawling lore of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but vanishingly few will make it through a dozen pages of Heidegger. Precise, technical prose that’s so dense it might as well be encrypted is a hard sell, even for the motivated. More fundamentally, without a way to connect these integrative visions to what we actually care about, there’s little reason to put in the effort. No small potatoes, as far as barriers go - which makes it all the more fascinating that some TOEs do manage to break into the broader culture. So what’s the catalyst for this transition? It’s not how finely they split hairs, that’s for sure. But before you mistake this for a knock against these breakthroughs, don’t confuse accessibility with a lack of depth - that’s just intellectual snobbery dressed as discernment. The point is that encyclopedic breadth and microscopic precision aren’t what strikes a chord with most people - it’s their ability to tell a story that makes the world feel coherent. Stories: Not Just Fiction, But Essential So what is a story? Not just fiction, though stories can certainly be fictional. When you strip them down, they’re a way of giving shape and meaning to some sequence of events. In practice, stories are how a bunch of stuff that happened is transformed into a coherent whole, with some kind of takeaway we can carry forward. A job interview or a date or a car accident isn’t just a disparate stream of occurrences - it’s a structured narrative that holds some sort of meaning for us, explicit or implied. Likewise, it would be extremely weird for someone to give a play-by-play of placing their right foot on a pedal while gripping a wheel and looking through a pane of glass at some colored lights. A normal person just says that they drove to work. So stories are structured, but that’s not the whole picture - they’re also adaptive. The same events can be narrated in different ways as our understanding evolves, or as the situation changes. Whether or not meeting up with someone for drinks is a date, for instance, might depend on how the evening goes! Given their ability to encompass and transform raw events, stories act a bit like containers for experience itself. Without them, day-to-day life would be a flood of disconnected actions and sensations. Stories allow us to bracket this activity into manageable chunks that we can understand, remember, and learn from. And this same principle scales all the way up to our relationship with the world itself. Humans everywhere generally want to know where we fit within the grand scheme of things, and what it all means for us. So we create stories that weave a larger tapestry of meaning out of patterns we’ve observed in nature, society, and human behavior. While each one of us inhabits a living narrative about the world, most remain unwritten and unsystematized. Nothing so formal as a TOE, our everyday meaning-making is more like an improvisational patchwork of tacit assumptions about how the world works. Not something we work out explicitly, but something we absorb just by living in the world. Storytelling Is Always Situated Within The World While this ongoing narrative is deeply personal - no one else has quite the same one - we aren’t its sole authors. Our imagined control over the loom where our personal tapestry is woven certainly feels intuitive enough - who but ourselves would be directing its course, after all? For there’s undeniable comfort in being the supposed master of our own destiny. Yet the pattern that emerges is never ours alone. The people who surround us and the systems we participate in aren’t a neutral backdrop - they’re our foundation for relating to the world. Which means that we’re embedded within the world before we start making sense of it. And this embeddedness determines the templates we start from, even if what we ultimately make of them is in our hands. Not because we have total control over how the pattern develops, but because we’re active participants in its unfolding. Those core threads that are so central to our identity - what we care about, how we define ourselves in relation to others - emerge as we take these initial templates and adapt or subvert them to fit our actual circumstances. The time, place, and body we’re born into don’t dictate who we become, but they do structure our affordances - playing a defining role in what we’re given support to pursue, what we’re discouraged from attempting, and what we must fight for. Thus our tapestries of meaning are both given and made - and each of us navigates this tension through our lived engagement with the everyday world. And the resulting stories we inhabit are both constrained and enabled by the social and material realities we navigate. Thus, these ‘stories’ are no superfluous fabrications - they’re vital scaffolding for how we perceive, interpret, and ultimately inhabit our Reality. And this is just as true for a factory worker as it is for a physicist or a priest. Which is to say, no one’s exempt from this because it’s part and parcel of being human. And while there’s a wide scope for building scaffolding that works, not every story serves a worthwhile purpose. Some are woefully mismatched for the terrain they’re attempting to chart, others serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests, and still others are little more than psychic wounds projected outwards onto others (hello, Adolf). So we’re right to be discerning about which stabs at coherence we take seriously. As we’ve seen, most attempts to systematize this living dialogue with the world remain obscure, for reasons that are deserved. Which makes the breakout successes all the more worth examining. So what does it take to humanize one of these esoteric frameworks in ways that connect to what people actually care about, while keeping its insights intact?

I'm anti-nuking the US, but if you wanted to smuggle some stink and glitter bombs into Mar-A-Lago, and maybe jam the toilets with paper towel, be my guest

Leftists and liberals have been dealing with threats of violence from MAGA for years, yet MTG can't handle a few weeks of being targeted by the political climate she created. Until MTG shows a genuine desire to make amends for bringing fascism to America, I have zero sympathy for her.

If Chomsky is indeed implicated in Epstein's sex trafficking ring, then fuck 'em. I don't really care what particular political ideology is attached to horrific behavior like this - you abuse children, you spend the rest of your life in prison. That said, nothing that Trump's DOJ puts out over the next 3 years can be trusted, since whatever version of the files that we get is going to be doctored and redacted to hell to protect their criminal boss.

Believe me, I'm well aware that a democracy that's rotting from within to the point that a fascist pedophile conman can become the head of state isn't the fault of just one political party. Plenty of rot within the Democratic Party as well, which people like myself are fighting as we resist Trump's authoritarian power grab

To be clear, I have no doubt that Epstein had ties to both Democrats and Republicans. If any Democrats are in the files, let them burn. But comparing previous administrations to Trump's intimate involvement with Epstein and the massive cover-up that's taken place over the last 10 months is like trying to equivocate punching someone in the face with a premeditated murder spree. The president of the United States who has an iron grip over the Republican Party and runs the most corrupt administration in the history ot the country was a client of a child sex trafficking ring. Rest assured that Trump's DOJ has been hard at work scrubbing those files clean of any mention of Republicans. Speaker of the House MAGA Mike Johnson shut down the House of Representatives to avoid swearing in Adaljita Grijalva, who was the 118th Vote to release the files. His recent about face means jack-shit: we're never getting versions of the files that aren't doctored and redacted to hell. Watergate was the equivalent of an unpaid parking ticket by comparison.

The difference is that prominent Democrats aren't going out their way to protect pedophiles, and Democratic voters don't belong to a Cult that gives its leaders a free pass for monstrous behavior. I don't give a shit if Epstein's clients are MAGA, liberals, or progressives - I want their asses prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Contrast this to MAGA voters who cast their ballot for for a KNOWN sexual predator, while the propaganda machine they get their news from is trying to move the goalposts on what counts as pedophilia (ie Megyn Kelly's recent remarks that a grown men having sex with a 15 year old doesn't 'really' count as pedophilia).

In the unlikely event that some version of them is ever released by Trump's DOJ, here's what we can expect:

This hasn't been getting nearly as much coverage as Mamdani's victory, but democratic socialist Katie Wilson won a victory over the centrist establishment incumbent to become the new mayor of Seattle.

It's important to set expectations, Trump's not going to jail for his horrific crimes. 'Going down' means a fracturing of the coalition that Trump would need to consolidate his authoritarian power grab. While the core of the MAGA Cult is closer to defending pedophilia than they are to admitting they backed an irredeemable monster, this %15-25 of the country that's A-OK with backing the client of a child sex trafficking ring isn't a large enough plurality to succeed in his authoritarian ambitions. Autocrats who survive are ones that are popular, and just 10 months in and Trump's fascist experiment is imploding.

Most kinds of evil are banal - the result of selfishness, bias, and diffusion of responsibility. If you want a really good book on this subject, I'd highly recommend 'They Thought They Were Free' by Milton Mayer. Mayer was a Jewish American who traveled to Germany after the end of World War 2, and befriended and interviewed a number of ordinary Germans who were members of the Nazi Party, and wrote a book about it. The book is an excellent deep dive into the mental gymnastics that people will employ to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. It's also a chilling case study in how evil systems are almost always built and maintained by ordinary people. ___ "The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946]. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it" "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D." "On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.” “The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know [about the Holocaust]. They didn't know because they didn't want to know; but they didn't know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.”

For as livid as I am at Democratic leadership for being the Controlled Opposition, when I put on my Game Theory goggles I also recognize that there's a basic asymmetry here. For all of their glaring flaws, Democratic politicians care, to a degree that varies enormously between individual legislators, about the well being of their constituents. While Republicans do not give a flying fuck about the well-being of their own constituents, let alone the health and lives of Americans who didn't vote for them. Trump and his enablers would let millions of Americans starve rather that surrender some of their power.

Turns out that America isn't enjoying its fascist experiment - last night's 2025 elections were a blowout for Democrats, winning elections and ballot initiatives across the country. In my mind, this leaves little doubt that: 1) Barring something totally unprecedented that upends the political landscape over the next 12 months, the 2026 midterms are going to be a bloodbath for MAGA. If you have a Democratic Senator or Representative - call them every day and tell them to KEEP UP THE PRESSURE. Fear of the wanna-be dictator is contagious, but so is courage. Trump's regime is weak, unstable, and historically unpopular. 2) There's a 100% chance that Trump and his enablers are planning to steal the next election - nothing subtle about the fact that the Trump and Miller are trying to acclimatize us to seeing US troops deployed on American streets. That doesn't mean that the outcome of Trump's next coup attempt is a foregone conclusion, but it does mean that we need to be preparing for massive protests, civil disobedience, and economic disruptions should the worst come to pass.

To add to what's already been said, the metrics that have traditionally been used to gauge how well 'the economy' is doing - the stock market, unemployment, inflation - have become increasingly decoupled from the well-being of the bottom 80% of the country. While on paper the United States had a world-class economy under Biden, the numbers masked a cost of living crisis that has made owning a home or starting a family an impossible dream for at least half the country. 'Unemployment' may be something like 4%, but a huge portion of those jobs don't pay enough to meet a person's basic needs, let alone provide a firm foundation to build a prosperous life from. Trump cynically used this crisis to lie and con his way into power, having no intention whatsoever of addressing these kitchen table issues. On the contrary, the last 9 months have been a process of intentionally adding jet fuel to this dumpster fire. 40 million Americans are about to find themselves going hungry due to an abrupt disruption of nutritional subsidies, thanks to Trump's government shutdown. Add to that that the US economy is being artificially propped up by a speculative AI bubble, which is poised to pop in the coming years. No one yet knows what the fallout from this will look like, but a second version of the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession isn't an unreasonable starting point.