Interior Dialogue

In modern popular science writings which discuss the search for the most general and fundamental laws of nature, two different notions are being confused: unification and the “Theory of Everything” or TOE. It is often assumed that once a theory is achieved which unifies all forces in nature in the same framework, then that theory will be a TOE. However, it is easy to see that unification is necessary but not sufficient for a TOE, because a true TOE cannot be testable. One consequence of this is that a TOE, if it exists, must be tautologous, it must be a TOE-tology.

I argue that tautology is nothing to be ashamed of, the best illustration being the fact that mathematics has gotten by just fine for millenia. In the context of empirical science, however, tautology has remained beyond the pale, except for a relatively recent development: the emergence approach.

In the article available here, I argue that the radical emergent view, which holds that all phenomena are emergent, is equivalent to the statement that a TOE exists.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2009.