Philosophical Theory of Everything

[Bomzaway]

This is a summary of what I have been researching and writing in my spare time for the last few years. During that time, I was trying to find an audience in the science community, but despite a general attitude of "Hey! That's cool!", they had little use for it. The obvious finally smacked me upside the head and I realized that I should be looking along the path of philosophy. I've done some shallow diving into philosophy but little else, so I decided to take some classes. In those classes, I learned that there is no "theory of everything" (a bit like the theory of everything that physicist are searching for). What I mean is, I learned that there are essentially five wisdoms in philosophy; we can categorize philosophers into five groups because every philosopher falls into one of these five groups base on a different way of describing "wisdom".

1. a quest for the fundamental principles, ideas, perspectives associated with understanding all of reality.

2. a quest for moral and spiritual fulfillment - "the good life"

3. a quest for the foundations of knowing (the period from Descartes through Kant) regarding the use of science

4. a quest for speaking clearly, logically, and with meaning and truth - the use of language

5. a quest to enter into dialog to understand and resolve the major issues and conflicts in human personal and social life.

I believe this "Philosophical Theory Of Everything" encompasses all of these philosophies and more.

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Foreword

If you're at least out of high school, and you were a reasonably good student, then the information in this document is already familiar to you, but it is important to realize that we are among the first generations on this planet to be blessed with this vast picture of the universe. People - particularly scientists, artists, theologians, and philosophers - have in essence been trying to get a better view of this place, of which we are and it, us.

This document will outline the structure of this philosophy and hopefully instill within you a desire to speak more on the subject. I will supply few citations for this information because it is generally available in any high school science text. It is that simple, that elegant, and as you will see, beautiful.



Introduction:

To begin this journey, we must look into the past. Starting at the beginning of the Universe, milliseconds after its birth, all the way up until right now. Afterwards, we'll look at the next logical step, an idea that may drastically change the way you see your place in the Universe.



Quarks:

We start this trip at the smallest bits of matter we know of, at a scale that we cannot actually see, a scale smaller than that of the atom. So we turn to what is called "The Standard Model", which is kind of a tool and parts kit to make atoms. The Standard Model consists of three of the four physical forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, as well as a laundry list of particles of matter. This includes six Leptons, five known Bosons plus a postulated sixth called the Higgs Boson, and a sextet of the particle that is our main focus at this point of our journey, the quark. The six quarks are named Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom, but the two we are most interested at this point are Up and Down. This is because to make a Neutron, you throw together two up quarks and a down quark, as well as some gluons, which stick the Quarks together by communicating the Strong Nuclear force (hence the name glue-on), and Presto! you've got a Neutron. A similar recipe involves two down quarks and an up quark instead, which produces a Proton.

So again, a variety of quarks come together to become a Neutron or a Proton. This union is facilitated by the exchange of information, achieved through the utilization of the strong nuclear force and its gluon messenger particle.



Atoms:

"To see the nucleus, we would have to blow up the atom to the size of the biggest dome in the world, the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. In an atom of that size, the nucleus would have the size of a grain of salt! A grain of salt in the middle of the dome of St. Peter's, and specks of dust whirling around it in the vast of space of the dome – this is how we can picture the nucleus and electrons of an atom."

All the stuff that we know about, and most likely all the stuff we don't know about is made of atoms. And as Frijtof Capra illustrated so beautifully in the quote above, the amount of matter in an atom is miniscule. Yet because of the strong force in the nucleus, as well as the electromagnetic force, which works between the nucleus and the surrounding electrons thereby "solidifying" the atom, matter is able to transcend its existence and become something much bigger than the sum of its parts. This instance of transcendence is a dramatic example of one of the behaviors of matter that we're focusing on in this document_ We've seen it twice now, strings or quarks transcending to become protons or neutrons, and the addition of the electron to transcend to the state of being an atom.

But the processes that run this world have limitations. The number of protons, neutrons and electrons that Nature can pack into an atom is restricted because it would take an inordinate amount of energy to keep such structures stable. As it is, the elements at the heavy end of Mendeleyev's periodic table exist only for tiny fractions of a second. So if matter were to transcend any more, it certainly wouldn't do it through becoming obese at the atomic level. The Universe had to take a different route.



Chemistry

The science of Chemistry looks at all the different kinds of substances and how they interact with each other. Or better still, how the atoms that make up each substance interact with each other. As I said, it is uneconomical and unstable for an atom to grow through the gain of atomic weight. So Nature did the next best thing, and began combining atoms in order to gain the aforementioned transcendence. In a sense, history repeated itself. The actions I described at the quark level occurred in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang, those particles became atoms soon afterwards, and now the process repeats itself and the atoms become molecules. Furthermore, those molecules repeat the process yet again, and begin forming into pretty much everything. This continues to be the general theme of matter, the unification of atoms to form stable configurations.

As Richard Dawkins stated in The Selfish Gene:

Darwin's survival of the fittest is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated with stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough, or common enough to deserve a name. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation – rocks, trees, ocean waves – are all, to a lesser or greater extent, stable patterns of atoms. The earliest form of natural selection was the selection of stable forms and the rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this; it had to happen by definition.

But let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Dawkins was focusing on genetics, whereas we have yet to get that far. Let's finish off Chemistry first.

When elements are combined, they make compounds. This combining behavior occurs through the processes of covalent or ionic bonding. Whenever you see those ball-and-stick models of molecules, you're seeing a representation of ionic or covalent bonds. In order for these bonds to be possible, the atoms must negotiate the bond. If one atom passes electrons to another, each then has an electric charge and is attracted to the other like opposite poles of a magnet. This is an ionic bond, which metals tend to form. Nonmetals tend to make covalent bonds, which differ in that electrons are shared between atoms; the shared electrons are in a way weaving in and out between the bonded atoms. Another consideration to be taken when a deal is struck between atoms to become molecules is the number of chemical bonds available. Each element has a set number of bonds available by which it can connect to other elements. For instance, the carbon atom has the most chemical bonds at four, nitrogen three, hydrogen one, sulphur and oxygen each have two, etc. The process that allows individual atoms to combine into molecules requires that information regarding the number of chemical bonds be transferred between the prospective partner atoms. Much of the rest of chemistry involves the manipulation of these bonds through the application of energy, or the introduction of other materials. So as you can see, the core concept at this particular scale of matter (which we happen to call chemistry) essentially involves elements coming together, communicating their bonds through the utilization of the electromagnetic force, gravitation, and/or energy, to become the countless chemicals that populate the universe - the waters of the oceans, the nucleotides that make up our DNA, or large fiery balls of burning gas hanging in the heavens. Matter increases in complexity and transcends.



Cells

The first stirrings of life happened on the molecular level. As Carl Sagan explained in Cosmos:

"In those early days, lightning and ultraviolet light from the sun were breaking apart simple hydrogen rich molecules in the primitive atmosphere and the fragments of the molecules were spontaneously recombining into more and more complex molecules. The products of this early chemistry dissolved in the oceans forming a kind of 'organic soup' of gradually increasing complexity. Until one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose which was able to make crude copies of itself. Using as building blocks the other molecules in the soup."

"Four billion years ago, the ancestors of DNA were competing for molecular building blocks, and leaving crude copies of themselves. With reproduction, mutation, and natural selection the evolution of living molecules was well underway. Varieties with specialized functions then joined together, making a collective, the first cell."

And Richard Dawkins said the following in The Selfish Gene

Other replicators (DNA ancestors) perhaps discovered how to protect themselves, either chemically, or by building a physical wall of protein around themselves. This may have been how the first living cells appeared.

Endosymbiotic Theory

According to the endosymbiotic theory, mitochondria, the primary energy producers in cells, are the descendents of bacteria. That is, a primitive cell swallowed up some aerobic bacteria and rather than digest them, they developed a symbiotic relationship from which each partner benefited. This is not unlike the relationship that plants and animals have maintained between themselves and other microorganisms over the natural history of this planet. We ourselves have various microorganisms within us that we've developed relationships with. This "tradition of symbiosis" between plants or animals and certain members of the bacterial world would seem to have originated back in the days that the first cells were evolving. The argument for the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria is that they posses numerous genes whose sequences are much more similar to bacterial sequences than that which exists in the nucleus of the same cell. This strongly suggests that they originated from a different family tree than the rest of the cell.

So what likely may have happened was that some of these self-replicating molecules were able to make bubbles of protein for protection. And it just so happened that if those bubbles also happened to contain certain other molecules, they would all work in conjunction with each other in their pursuit of ruling the world or whatever it was that primordial single-celled organisms pursued. The different components or organelles of the cell, whether created by processes internal to the cell, or inherited by the absorption of entities that were originally alien to the cell, all work together to make a single base unit of self-sustaining life.

Nature selected and organized up quarks and down quarks although there are a variety of other quarks available. Protons, neutrons and electrons become atoms, although there are other particles on hand. There are millions of molecules in the universe; four of them have evolved in to DNA. Nature indeed selects and organizes parts of herself so as to transcend from one scale to the next. Although the exact mechanics and methods used to achieve the advancement from functioning molecules to cells is somewhat theoretical, it is clear that to do so, the component molecules required unification as well as the ability to exchange information with each other. By following those behavior patterns, those molecules became a truly complex and wonderful slice of life…the single celled organism.

Yet again, matter transcends. And upon reaching a level of stability, those cells found a need to continue these behavior patterns, and evolve into the myriad organisms that engulf this planet we call our home.



Biology and Communication:

At one point in the evolution of matter, single-celled life forms arose on our planet, the result of eons of trial and error on behalf of protein spewing DNA and others of it kind. Eventually, some of these single-celled organisms evolved into multi-celled organisms, and the race between hunted and hunter propelled the process forward from there. But in its struggle to obtain the resources required to stay alive, matter also required communication. Just as information exchange is vital to the stability of the atom and its parts, so it is for the living organisms that populate our earth. The first nervous system was born from the need for communication between the cells of multi-celled animals. As a simple example, we could imagine a primitive ten-celled organism, something like a worm. The cells of our imaginary worm would need to be able to communicate with each other, cell number one would need to know what cell number ten is doing and thereby cooperate, lest our worm rip itself apart. That communications network, which became the nervous system, is vital to all multi-celled animals. In fact, animal brains are born from the nervous system and probably began as something like an information router or hub.

Brains eventually developed sophisticated methods of communication between themselves. And now the human brain has found ways to communicate over very long distances. Communication, or the exchange of information, is a driving force behind matter and how it behaves. Communication and/or information exchange is achieved through the use of the gluons of the strong nuclear force, the photons of electromagnetism, the gravitons of gravity, the dance of a honeybee, the roar of a lion, or the ring of a phone. Communication is the catalyst for cooperation and unification.

Invention

What do you think are the five greatest inventions ever?

Some of the usual and most common answers to this question might be the computer, airplane, television, radio, the automobile, or indoor plumbing. Notice that each one of these advancements, directly or indirectly improves our ability to come together, to communicate, and to get along with one another (especially indoor plumbing). Expand your list to the 20 greatest inventions ever and I think you'll find that at least 75% of them share the same trait.

This is not a coincidence.

It's what matter does.



Love

What three things in your life are most important to you?

The usual and most common answers are family, friends, often one person in particular, community, country, the arts, religion, career. One obvious characteristic of each of these things is that they would not be possible without coming together, communication, and cooperation. Even some of the uncommon answers one might give, such as practicing a martial art, being a Dead Head or a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, owning a classic automobile, or coaching a youth soccer team, all these things, in order to be its most fulfilling, require communication and coming together with others, and in turn reward us with a sense of belonging. They require joining a dojo, or hanging out with fellow fans, or going to Hot August Nights in Reno, or teaching your players the finer points of a through pass. In order for any of these things so close to our hearts to be successful, even to exist requires cooperation and communication.



What is it good for?

But it's not all wine and roses, is it? The world is full of darkness and bad things. Much of this has to do with self-preservation, not just on a personal level, but also on a national level, which includes all those long marches and bloody struggles. Of course you realize this means war. All nations, tribes, kingdoms, dynasties, and empires at one point or another throughout history actively sought to (seek to) expand their borders. Although there are many reasons for doing so such as resources, wealth, etc. the underlying effect has been to unify as much of the world as possible under one rule. The conquerors would then assimilate the conquered into their societies, encouraging them through various means to subscribe to their religions, political systems, or other beliefs. Also note that when the conqueror engages in activities that go beyond normal warfare, such as ethnic cleansing or genocide, it is a greater affront to our sensibilities. War becomes more so an atrocity in those instances because the element of unification in war is in effect greatly reduced. As far as mankind is concerned, the most violent manifestation of this larger overall behavior pattern is war.

Fortunately, there are alternatives.



Business

In this modern day world, the act of conquering nations is frowned upon and discouraged by the global community. This is obviously a good thing since we are hopefully reducing the amount of killing that has so permeated our history. Therefore, humanity has found alternatives to war in order to continue unifying, and one of those is through international business.

Although the goal of business is the accumulation of wealth, there remains an underlying theme. For instance, over the past century, usage of the English language has propagated around the world because it is widely recognized as the language of business, at least for now. More recently however, international business has not only established a spoken language, but the mediums though which the communication travels. To do business with the likes of the US, Germany, Japan, China, India, or the UK, a country must possess the infrastructure required to communicate effectively, such as telephones, computers, LANs, WANs, the ability to understand EDI, XML, Rosettanet, as well as an understanding of other "languages" such as DOS, Unix, or C++. Whether through the communication between companies as business partners, or the cooperation between nations as allies due to mutual business-based agreements, the behavior pattern of unifying, communicating, cooperating, and transcending is illustrated quite clearly as vital to the existence of the very concept of business.



Trivial Pursuits

Why do we put bumper sticker on our cars, or modify the engine and/or stereo so you can hear the car before you see it? Why do some us want to drive fancy sports cars, while others, big four-wheel drive trucks? I know a number of people with personalized license plates. What purpose do they serve other than identify their vehicles?

It is all a form of communication; a one-way signal to the world that conveys a message, one that is personal in nature, varying from driver to driver. If you tried, you could probably discern a little bit about the personality of a car owner by just looking at their car.

Fashion is very much the same thing. As are tattoos, piercings, dancing, performing, bodybuilding, graffiti, and certain home improvements such as landscaping. These are all attempts to communicate a message to anyone who'll look. That message may be anything from "I'm rich" to "I'm sexually active" to "I'm an antiestablishmentarianist", or "I am rebelling against the utter futility and inherent evil of conforming to society". The primary purpose for engaging in these activities is to communicate. Even thought it's one-way, it's still communication, it's still compelling to many of us.

* * * * * * * * * * *

It should now be readily apparent that I am drawing parallels between human nature and a repeating behavior pattern in the nature of matter as viewed from a grander scope. Amongst all scales of matter, regardless of how small, how big, living or non-living, matter will unite, facilitated by an exchange of information, and become something larger than the sum of its parts. And then, upon reaching a level of stability, it does it all over again. Over and over, again and again.

It's what matter does.

This behavior pattern will be referred to as the Universal Behavior Pattern or UBP.



Entropy

If we consider the result of all this unification, communication, and transcendence, we see that a general resistance to entropy is really the ultimate goal. "Success" is to resist the inevitability of entropic forces acting against you by following the UBP. The very opposite of atoms transcending from protons, neutrons, and electrons, is decay, and decay happens at every level. Bodies decay, molecules decay, stars decay, cities decay. Everything falls apart; it's just a matter of time.

But for the most part no body and no thing wants to fall apart. And that would apparently include quarks, atoms, molecules, and cells. They don't even think, yet they know that coming together is a good thing. Matter wants to follow this universal behavior pattern to become more than what it is. Why does matter resist entropy?

Consider something else. There have been a number of projects implemented to research small robots and their uses. One curious finding during these experiments was that these relatively simple small robots would exhibit flocking behavior, much as you would expect from birds, fish, or ants. The robots are like ants in that each ant really only knows what it can sense in front of and underneath it, as well as the ant next to it and the piece of food an inch away. It merely responds to its local environment. But in doing so, it is quite curious that the tendency towards unification is also achieved. Dead or alive, matter exhibits this behavior pattern. A need to flock, a tendency towards unification, an opposing stance against entropy, because entropy is something that matter would like to avoid if at all possible. I realize that I am getting uncomfortably anthropomorphic here, but as I see it, since we ourselves are matter come to know itself, then the reasons we as humans resist entropy are just as valid a reason why entropy is resisted at the atomic, molecular or cellular level. Then again, we don't even know why entropy is resisted at those lower levels; so really, as far as we know the only answers to that question are the ones that we ourselves can give. Entropy is decay, rot, death, and destruction; as perfect an antithesis as Satan is to God. Life, love, a really great party, those are the good things in life. Entropy sucks. Why shouldn't we resist it?

But the dualistic nature of the universe would seem to dictate that entropy also has a good side and is a necessary evil. Whatever entropic event occurred that wiped out the dinosaurs, as horrible as it must have been, led to the eventual rise of humanity, which I consider to be a good thing. The American Revolutionary war was a terrible and bloody struggle in which the English were fighting to keep the colonies faithful to the crown and part of the British Empire, whereas the colonists were trying to break away and become a sovereign nation unto themselves. George Washington and the American founding fathers fought for an entropic cause. As a US citizen, I'm going to take patriotic license and say that was a good thing too.

So entropy, despite it being a primarily negative aspect of the universe, also has its uses. Matter, in its pursuit of coming together and transcending, will often encounter entropy in one aspect that might advance its cause in another. We eat, which is an entropic experience for our food, so that we can live our lives, which are likely far richer in nature than the lives of our food. Life is born from death.

Entropy also pushes living matter to improve. It provides impetus to strive for higher levels of complexity. Carnivores provide an entropic aspect to the lives of their prey. Therefore, the prey must constantly strive to improve. They must get better, stronger and faster to stay alive and avoid entropy. But this behavior is not limited to living matter. Since the very beginning of the universe, matter has strived towards complexity, the net effect of which has been a progression of transcendence, from the very small, to the very large, and any which way between.



Entre Nous

There is a deep and meaningful lesson that we can learn from lower forms of matter. Notice that despite this entire coming together and cooperating and communicating, the individual components of the higher-level entity maintain a certain level of sovereignty. No one nucleotide rules DNA, none of the three components of the atom is completely dominant, as are neither of the three quarks, monopolies are ultimately unstable, a father is part of a family and at the same time a man unto himself.

The future of humanity must contain components of coming together, cooperating, communicating, achieving a level of stability, and transcending, but at the same time maintaining respect for the individual. Although this only partially narrows the scope of the direction in which we are traveling, does it not make sense that upon gaining knowledge of the importance of this Universal Behavior Pattern that we begin considering our options? It's as if we've been coasting down a road, fortunate in our way despite the fact that nobody's in the driver's seat. Isn't it about time that we started steering? That we start thinking about how we go about coming together, communicating, and becoming something bigger and better than the sum of its parts?



Needs

If you consider Maslow's pyramid of needs, one can see how the UBP fits nicely within that framework. The lower levels of the pyramid are akin to maintaining stability as a sovereign entity (this is the realm of medicine) whereas the higher levels of the pyramid speak of belonging to something grander than oneself. This independent interdependence is much the same as the proton is independently interdependent within the structure of an atom, or as family members are independently interdependent within the structure of the family, or the Marketing department within the structure of a company. The UBP gives birth to things like patriotism, religion, labor unions, Sharks fans, quilting bees, chat rooms, cell phones, blogging, town hall meetings, the desire to start a family, or the need to find someone to spend your life with.



Runaway Anthropomorphism

PARIS (AFP) - Stars may be unable to grow beyond about 150 times the mass of our Sun, according to a study. The theory is put forward by Donald Figer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, who used the Hubble telescope to scan the Arches, a thick cluster of some 100 very big stars near the centre of the Milky Way. Published in the British weekly science journal Nature. In this region of space that is ideal for stellar growth, Figer saw no star that was bigger than 130 times the mass of the Sun, and suggests a "firm limit" for individual stars of 150 times. "If there are stellar systems more massive than the limit, then perhaps they are binaries (stars that revolve closely around each other) or products of mergers of lower-mass stars," Figer proposes.

Atomic particles, since they could not expand past a given size, had to find different ways of expanding to stay on pace with the expanding universe. It would seem that stars also have a similar predicament, and so similarly necessitating the need for galaxies and other star clusters.

It is Somethingness fighting or trying to keep up with Nothingness.

Matter is trying to avoid becoming insignificant, so it tries every way it can to be big. Sure, stars and planets are big, but not big enough all by themselves, so they form galaxies. But perhaps even galaxies are limited, so matter must find still more ways of making something of itself.

It seems that since the universe is expanding, matter must find a way to expand along with it, but matter is not expanding in the same sense that the universe is expanding. That is, universal expansion can be thought of like a balloon expanding, this is something that matter cannot do. No matter how big the universe gets, an electron will stay the same size. Therefore, at the risk of becoming insignificant, matter it would seem must find a way to become bigger than it really is, to transcend to a larger scale through the economic utilization of the available matter in the universe. Hence, we see transcendence of great proportions as in the case of atoms (remember St. Peters?), or economical use of materials in construction such as the use of water in life.

If matter did not follow this behavior pattern, if it did not unite and transcend, then matter would become very insignificant in the midst of space; a cloud of quarks or strings in some lonely corner of the universe. But through the laws of nature; be they the laws of gravity, or electromagnetism, or the strong nuclear force, matter has a larger "footprint" on the universe in comparison to the amount of matter that's actually used. And now that matter has come to know itself, it uses those same forces to unite and transcend in other ways.

Judging from the deeply rooted tendencies within human nature, as well as the nature of matter itself, it would also seem that we are now expected to follow in those footsteps, to find ways of becoming more that just the sum of our parts. We need to become big, but economically so, by utilizing as little matter as possible. Given that this is achieved through forces of nature, our use of electro-magnetism for communications might somehow provide the medium through which our transcendence will be accomplished (the Internet being a sure ingredient).

The importance that we as humans place on this behavior pattern is so great that to an extent it determines our "right" and "wrong". Actions performed for the better of the group or the entity to which we belong are often likely to be considered altruistic, such as "taking one for the team". Whereas actions performed that promote destruction of the entity are often likely to viewed as bad, selfish, or greedy.



Connecting Science and God

Hopefully, I have successfully and briefly illustrated to you a repeating phenomenon in the history of the universe. The science behind it is strong, and the sheer simplicity of the concept borders on childish. But there is distinct beauty behind this idea. The idea that if entities of matter unify and, through the use of effective information exchange or communication, cooperate in just the right way, then the next predictable step is transcendence to something that can quite literally change the universe.

Once again:

Amongst all scales of matter, regardless of how small, how big, living or non-living, matter will unite, facilitated by an exchange of information, and become something larger than the sum of its parts. And then, upon reaching a level of stability, it does it all over again. Over and over, again and again.



As a side argument to this philosophy, I am proposing that this may be the primary, and possibly only information that has been passed down to us from what might be a higher power.

[NeitherExtreme]

Hi Bomzaway! That made for very interesting and rewarding reading IMO. I might not be with you %100 on everything, but in fact, I rather enjoyed and liked your theory in general.

For one thing, you and I both accept the general idea of entropy. You've just gone a different direction with it than I ever had. So, could I do your theory partial justice with the statement that (contrary to normal intuition) entropy itself is a driving force behind order? And if so, would you say it is A driving force, or THE driving force? At this point I'd probably venture to say that it would be A driving force, while the nature of matter is the other. Your thoughts?

Also, two questions from my Theistic perspective, but which would not in any way discredit your theory: Have you come to any ideas about where or from what matter and energy came from in the first place? And also, have you come to any ideas about why matter should behave as you have described it? (With the "desire" to transend and then survive?)

[Aedes]

I think it's a mistake for you to incorporate science into a philosophical theory unless you're willing to have your philosophical theory live or die with the strength of the underlying science.

Some philosophers have good literacy in science, some don't. But not even scientists have a comprehensive enough knowledge in science to speak authoritatively outside their own field. So if a philosopher takes for granted the changing field of science, then that philosopher can be completely arbitrary in accepting or rejecting certain findings, and that philosopher can be stuck defending theories that are no longer tenable once the science changes. Furthermore, how can a philosopher even be sure that they understand science? Your understanding of entropy has essentially nothing to do with entropy as a scientific concept, so you're just using the word idiosyncratically (or at best colloquially).

Does the world care if physicists come up with a unifying theory of everything? Not even all physicists do. So what, we may some day have a rational mathematical statement that is the result of zero experimentation and a lot of highly caffeinated pontification that invokes theoretical dimensions. Does it get us any closer to understanding ourselves? Is it philosophically necessary? Is it physically necessary?

So I am not really satisfied with the project you've presented, at least in the way you've presented it. If you really want a philosophical theory of everything, your incorporation of science must boil down to one of the following statements:

1) Existence is fundamentally defined by the physical parameters of the universe.
2) Existence is NOT fundamentally defined by the physical parameters of the universe.

If you're a dualist, then you're going to go for number 2, because there will be a spiritual or metaphysical or divine realm that is not beholden to physical parameters.

If you're a pure scientist, then you're going to acknowledge that ALL science (including the scientific explanations behind human self-consciousness and psychology) is a matter of discoveries within the physical realm, and therefore cannot be all-encompassing about the physical realm. In other words, all the details, like quarks and atoms all the way up to macroeconomics, is simply incidental to the whole statement.

Incidentally, there HAVE been theories of everything. Existentialism simply states that we exist, first and foremost, and everything else including meaning comes secondarily. Descartes attributed everything to the two fundamental givens of human consciousness and God. The Scholastics put God central to everything. Analytical psychology had its own theories.

1. a quest for the fundamental principles, ideas, perspectives associated with understanding all of reality.

2. a quest for moral and spiritual fulfillment - "the good life"

3. a quest for the foundations of knowing (the period from Descartes through Kant) regarding the use of science

4. a quest for speaking clearly, logically, and with meaning and truth - the use of language

5. a quest to enter into dialog to understand and resolve the major issues and conflicts in human personal and social life.

I believe this "Philosophical Theory Of Everything" encompasses all of these philosophies and more.

You're facing problems of both contingency and epistemology here. How do we know anything, and what depends on what? These are all human questions, and can be reduced to what I think are some of the fundamental aspects of philosophy:

1. Philosophy only exists within human minds. It is a human endeavor.
2. We create philosophy because we are forever tortured by the fact that we are both a person and a thing. As a person, we prioritize, we rationalize, we organize, we make sense of things. As a thing, we hurt, we live, we die, and we need (in a biological way). This conflict spawns dualism, transcendental thought (i.e. a justification for something longer lived than our collective biological lives), and it also spawns theories about subjectivity.
3. All your questions are an explosion of this conflict in number 2 -- take the complex human experience, throw it into a prism, and out of it you get ethics, metaphysics, science, religion, as well as everything from organized philosophy down to solipsism.

Science has epistemological strengths, but it has metaphysical limitations. Thus, it's a misappropriation of science to 'transcendentalize' it. I, for one, think of metaphysics as little more than an ornate act of denial on the part of people who like to celebrate their own rationality, and it lives or dies solely based on the crafty use of language (rather than reason). That's not that I would transcendentalize science, far from it -- but that's because there is a difference between the physical principles of physical existence, as opposed to science which is the human intellectual endeavor to uncover and understand those principles.

[Bomzaway]

Originally Posted by Aedes

I think it's a mistake for you to incorporate science into a philosophical theory unless you're willing to have your philosophical theory live or die with the strength of the underlying science...

You response suggests to me that you've misinterpreted what I've written (except for your comment on my use of the word "entropy" - which I agree with but I've not changed yet)

First of all, YES, I am willing to have my philosophical theory live or die with the strength of the underlying science. That’s because I can state with extreme confidence that the underlying science required to “see” what I’m talking about is comprised of some of the most rock-solid theories in scientific history, including the Standard Model and Evolution. These truths are very unlikely to change. I’m not drawing my conclusions from obscure theories out of the university of nowhere or the results of some mind experiment performed by two guys on LSD, these are basic and extremely fundamental scientific theories.

Second, your perception of my emphasis on science is skewed such that you seem to think science is somehow required for this theory to exist. However, the truth is that the UBP exists regardless of science. It’s not a result of science, it’s a discovery of science; just as a new planet is not a result of science, but a discovery of science. From the beginning of time (as far as we know) the UBP dovetailed out over the eons to the point where it soon became ubiquitous. It’s everywhere, and undeniable. The science itself is only required in order to recognize that the first thing the universe started doing after the Big Bang was the UBP – after that the instances of UBP increase exponentially such that it’s essentially a vast and expansive truism.

Does that narrow things down any?

[Bomzaway]

Originally Posted by NeitherExtreme

Hi Bomzaway! That made for very interesting and rewarding reading IMO. I might not be with you %100 on everything, but in fact, I rather enjoyed and liked your theory in general.

For one thing, you and I both accept the general idea of entropy. You've just gone a different direction with it than I ever had. So, could I do your theory partial justice with the statement that (contrary to normal intuition) entropy itself is a driving force behind order? And if so, would you say it is A driving force, or THE driving force? At this point I'd probably venture to say that it would be A driving force, while the nature of matter is the other. Your thoughts?

Also, two questions from my Theistic perspective, but which would not in any way discredit your theory: Have you come to any ideas about where or from what matter and energy came from in the first place? And also, have you come to any ideas about why matter should behave as you have described it? (With the "desire" to transend and then survive?)

Assuming that we're using the term entropy as a catch-all term for "destruction and other similar actions", then yes, I think it is A driving force.


As for your other questions, I don't know. There's no reliable data available to tell us "from what?", or "why?" of the universe. I cannot comment.

[NeitherExtreme]

Originally Posted by Bomzaway

Assuming that we're using the term entropy as a catch-all term for "destruction and other similar actions", then yes, I think it is A driving force.


As for your other questions, I don't know. There's no reliable data available to tell us "from what?", or "why?" of the universe. I cannot comment.

Fair enough. Thanks for the response.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Bomzaway

First of all, YES, I am willing to have my philosophical theory live or die with the strength of the underlying science.

Then can you consolidate your theory? Can you attribute all philosophy, all philosophical problems, etc, to the neurobiologic underpinnings of the human mind (which in turn arise from the underlying physics, chemistry, biology)? Because even if I take for granted that even belief in God is ultimately the result of neurotransmitters and synapses and neuroanatomy (which I do believe), that still leaves us with the dissatisfyingly young science of neuropsychology, in which we really cannot scientifically account for complex thoughts. That's not to say that complex thoughts should be doubted -- but we certainly don't know enough to bridge the gap between neurobiology, and it's very likely that we never will.

I can state with extreme confidence that the underlying science required to “see” what I’m talking about is comprised of some of the most rock-solid theories in scientific history, including the Standard Model and Evolution. These truths are very unlikely to change.

They constantly change. Evolution can be summarized concisely, but evolutionary science is constantly added to and amended as science changes. So I guess it comes down to your degree of resolution -- how much variability in a live, changing science are you willing to incorporate? How abreast of it do you need to stay in order to keep your theory up to date?

these are basic and extremely fundamental scientific theories

While I agree, unless you're going into the evidence, you have to take it all for granted, which philosophically is a precarious position to be in.

Second, your perception of my emphasis on science is skewed such that you seem to think science is somehow required for this theory to exist. However, the truth is that the UBP exists regardless of science. It’s not a result of science, it’s a discovery of science; just as a new planet is not a result of science, but a discovery of science. From the beginning of time (as far as we know) the UBP dovetailed out over the eons to the point where it soon became ubiquitous. It’s everywhere, and undeniable. The science itself is only required in order to recognize that the first thing the universe started doing after the Big Bang was the UBP – after that the instances of UBP increase exponentially such that it’s essentially a vast and expansive truism.

I like your ideas -- but they almost have more romantic power than philosophical power. They express that a theory of everything is nearly synonymous with an eternal human quest for knowledge, and the theory is, basically, the 'state of the art' in this human quest.

[Justin]

Bomzaway, this is a splendid post. I like your explanation and it would certainly be a good start for anyone interested in philosophy, thanks!

One thing, about the DNA and covering it with proteins. From what I've researched, the DNA is covered by protein. The DNA doesn't actually do anything other than provide a blueprint for the RNA and it would do that once the protein is released. I'm led to believe perception controls this and essentially is the control of the atom. - another discussion.. We touched on it in this post.

Anyway, fantastic summary and well written. Enjoyed, indeed.

Life is rather simple... we just keep complicating it.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Justin

From what I've researched, the DNA is covered by protein. The DNA doesn't actually do anything other than provide a blueprint for the RNA and it would do that once the protein is released. I'm led to believe perception controls this and essentially is the control of the atom.

Indeed a whole other topic, but I'll summarize it briefly. We have several families of large organic macromolecules in the body: nucleic acids (DNA + RNA), carbohydrates, lipids (fats), and proteins. Proteins are by far the most diverse and complicated in terms of their roles, structures, functions, etc. A protein's primary structure is determined by its sequence of amino acids. The sequence of amino acids is stuck together in order in the ribosome (a structure made from protein and RNA) according to the nucleic acid sequence on a messenger RNA.

The messenger RNA is the reciprocal sequence of the gene (DNA) that encodes that protein. Yes, there is some post-transcription modification to that RNA, but basically DNA encodes proteins via RNA as an intermediary. An enzyme called RNA polymerase is what reads the DNA and synthesizes the complementary messenger RNA (mRNA).

Now, DNA is coiled up around proteins called histones, and as such it is inaccessible to RNA. The process of regulating histones is an extremely active area of research, and there are things like chemical modification (like acetylation) that control them.

Once DNA is exposed, however, it is transcribed (i.e. expressed) because each gene has a 'promoter sequence' that gets recognized by RNA polymerase. The efficiency of this recognition depends on the sequence, can be modified by numerous other functional proteins (that will up-regulate or down-regulate expression), and this regulation (in many cases) is stimulated by extracellular or intercellular signals like hormones and cytokines and drugs.

Perception may control some of this by virtue of the neurotransmitters and downstream neurendocrine effects of our neurologic sensations. It all boils down to the atom in the end, but I think atomic physics loses the forest for the trees in this case -- the uniqueness of this biological system happens at a different level, i.e. that of macromolecules and molecular interactions.

[iconoclast]

I read your post and can confirm that I identified something similar in my own research. I described it as ‘the development of forms of informational organization.’ I wasn’t able to make much of it and adopted biological evolution as my basis, but I do know the next step, the next transcendence – what it is, and how it can be achieved.

You are correct to identify (and wonder at) the progression of forms of organization: physics, chemistry, biology, awareness, knowledge, invention – and to view these as a progression, each arising from the last, toward greater complexity, in contradiction of entropy.

What troubles me is that you do not identify a cause, but as a parting gesture suggest this UBP might be ascribed to a higher power. It could be that there’s a fundamental paradox underlying the existence of the universe – giving rise to the particular physical conditions that give rise to chemistry as a means of addressing this paradox, in turn giving rise to biology, awareness and so on, this paradox being worked out by the development of forms of informational organization. I don’t know enough about physics or chemistry to entirely understand your explanation of why a physical universe gave rise to chemical properties, but I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t because God said ‘Let there be hydrogen.’ (or is it helium, or beryllium first?)

Nonetheless, this borderland is where I’d look for clues, for without identifying a real cause, we require the return of your higher power for every physical effect, every chemical reaction, every biological coupling – and were this your assertion it is accounted for by pantheism – the idea that we and everything else are aspects of God. Yes, you have described ‘a repeating phenomenon in the history of the universe’ but I’m sorry to say I don’t see how this accounts for any of the 5 aims you identify.

• A Theory of Everything – no, for you rely on a higher/external power not explained in terms of the theory.
• The Good Life – no, your philosophy seems to condone any collective activity from spelling bees and little league through to capitalism and warfare.
• Knowledge – again, this philosophy doesn’t tell me how to apply reason to achieve valid knowledge.
• Language – no, this doesn’t tell me what’s meaningful or how to communicate truth.
• Conflict resolution – again, I can’t suppose that the behavior of elementary particles will predict the behavior of my neighbor.

It’s clear you have a sincere interest and I really do think you’re onto something, but I do not think you can simply omit the meaningful quality of human existence. As I say, in my own work I kept this idea in the back of my mind and wrote with biology, or evolution as a basis, for in these terms the present moment can be resolved – whereas it’s very difficult to resolve the present meaningful reality in terms of atoms, let alone quarks.
As an analogy consider trying to resolve ‘the firing of a gun’ in terms of 99% the speed of light over two miles. While there’s some all embracing temporal continuity it would be ludicrous to suggest the two events could occur at the same time because in the time between the pulling of the trigger and the striking of the hammer, the light has traveled there and back and there and back again.
Regarding the next transcendence, if one flips the whole equation 180 degrees, looking at it in terms of what we do know, the real, demonstrably valid practical science of it all, if humankind began to behave in accordance with their knowledge of reality – not only could they survive into the long distant future, but harmonize with the developmental continuity you allude to, running throughout the very fabric of reality – and which, almost as a function of our being we come to knowledge of!!! It’s like all we have to do is step onto the indicated spot and we can sort energy, climate, hunger – the works. It’s all scientifically possible – and who knows what it might be possible to achieve in such a future. That so, it’s always tempting – when one finds a way in, to skip through the long grass out into the endless meadow of philosophy as if one had not a care in the world – but believe me, there be monsters here. Read more widely and do something you shouldn’t – regards, iconoclast.