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And that, to put it succinctly, is the problem. In the pursuit of a Theory of Everything, you wind up with a Theory of Anything. If there's no particular reason

And that, to put it succinctly, is the problem. In the pursuit of a Theory of Everything, you wind up with a Theory of Anything. If there's no particular reason why things are the way they are in this universe, then you're reduced to the simpler observationally-verifiable model anyway since the elegant overarching framework is essentially useless. It becomes a philosophy of the ought rather than a description of the is. A theory that predicts everything predicts nothing.

lalalandland 10y ago
The reality sting theory try to describe is more general than the reality we can observe. It's like finding the primes for what is possible. The meaning of the primes on the next level up is moot.
sampo 10y ago
Say, you shuffle a deck of cards, and shuffle really well. Now you could spend forever by drawing cards from the deck and analyzing the sequence and trying to think of theories how to predict the next card. But the is no ultimate reason behind why the deck was shuffled into this order and not some other. Perhaps the shape of natural laws (the four fundamental interactions) and the values of natural constants have been arrived at by a similar process. Perhaps there is a multiverse of different universes with different variations of these natural laws, and we just happen to live in this one. If this is how our universe came to be, shouldn't we be ready to accept it, instead of searching meaning where there is none? Then again, this is just an idea. And not really even falsifiable. So it's difficult to say if this is even a scientific idea, in the strict sense. Or perhaps Einstein was right, perhaps God didn't play dice (I am really misusing this phrase here), and there is an underlying mechanistic model which explains everything. Who knows.
- lgas 10y ago
  The deck of cards analogy is sort of getting to the anthropic principle -- the natural laws could have come out any number of ways, but most of the other shuffles wouldn't result in us being here to contemplate them.

lalalandland 10y ago

The reality sting theory try to describe is more general than the reality we can observe. It's like finding the primes for what is possible. The meaning of the primes on the next level up is moot.

sampo 10y ago

Say, you shuffle a deck of cards, and shuffle really well. Now you could spend forever by drawing cards from the deck and analyzing the sequence and trying to think of theories how to predict the next card. But the is no ultimate reason behind why the deck was shuffled into this order and not some other. Perhaps the shape of natural laws (the four fundamental interactions) and the values of natural constants have been arrived at by a similar process. Perhaps there is a multiverse of different universes with different variations of these natural laws, and we just happen to live in this one. If this is how our universe came to be, shouldn't we be ready to accept it, instead of searching meaning where there is none? Then again, this is just an idea. And not really even falsifiable. So it's difficult to say if this is even a scientific idea, in the strict sense. Or perhaps Einstein was right, perhaps God didn't play dice (I am really misusing this phrase here), and there is an underlying mechanistic model which explains everything. Who knows.

lgas 10y ago
The deck of cards analogy is sort of getting to the anthropic principle -- the natural laws could have come out any number of ways, but most of the other shuffles wouldn't result in us being here to contemplate them.