So You Say You Want A Theory Of Everything

[DocWatts]

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

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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?

Edited yesterday at 02:08 PM by DocWatts

[Leo Gura]

Thanks for sharing your book here.

[DocWatts]

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