A Question about a "Theory of Everything"
As science advances, the quest for a unified theory of physics has been labeled the pursuit of a theory of everything. Does physics possess explanatory power so great that deserves a title as the exclusive fundamental science?
It seems to me that biology can not be completely derived from physics, because physical laws apply to both life and lifeless forms and draws no distinction between these forms. Thus, the biological distinction of life forms from lifeless forms can not be physical. Consequently, a unified theory of physics can not explain biology completely.
If we require that a theory of everything should explain such a important subject like biology, then physics falls short of the task. It opens a question as to what may constitute a real theory of everything beyond physics.
I'm not a expert in philosophy, but it seems that the quest for a ultimate theory of everything deserves attention. May I ask about your opinion?
It seems to me that biology can not be completely derived from physics, because physical laws apply to both life and lifeless forms and draws no distinction between these forms. Thus, the biological distinction of life forms from lifeless forms can not be physical. Consequently, a unified theory of physics can not explain biology completely.
If we require that a theory of everything should explain such a important subject like biology, then physics falls short of the task. It opens a question as to what may constitute a real theory of everything beyond physics.
I'm not a expert in philosophy, but it seems that the quest for a ultimate theory of everything deserves attention. May I ask about your opinion?
Comments (42)
This statement needs something to hold it up. A fullfledged watertight argument may not be at hand so I won't ask for that but surely you can tell us what led you in this direction.
I expect it's possible to reduce everything to a collection of physical things in principle, but a metaphysical perspective makes things even trickier than a biological one since there would still be unexplained phenomena requiring physical import, such as causation and the logical imperative of causal closure, which doesn't seem to be the kind of thing observation and measurement can positively verify despite being a crucial aspect of physicalism. Events, facts, states, kinds and properties also seem to present problems of a similar flavor, and unfortunately they're both necessary and invisible.
While I'm confident our species will find a way around these explanatory gaps and generate a decent "theory of everything" with the assistance of computers, that theory in my opinion will likely feature at least one clunky appeal to practicality, where one variable must be substituted manually as required, rather than being the smooth mathematical description we would prefer. However, this is obviously highly conjectural and there are others I'm sure may like to offer a more robust take on the situation.
Are you saying that life isn't a necessary consequence of known physical laws?
Firstly, given that most, if not all, experts, time and again, remind us of how less than satisfactory our understanding of the universe is, I'd say we're not in a position to make any definitive claims like that.
Secondly, life evolved because it is simply one of the myriad number of possibilities that physical laws allow and it just happens, out of sheer luck, to be actualized in this universe.
You seem to be under the impression that for physics to explain biology, it must always lead to life and that's wrong for the simple reason that the right ingredients for bios (life) need to converge at a single location in time and space and that may not always be possible.
As an analogy, I offer a simple form of fire - a match fire. To light a fire with a matchbox, we need 1) the match and it has to be struck against 2)the striking surface of the matchbox. To light a matchstick both 1 and 2 have to be in the same place and at the same time. If not, we can't light the match.
(Similarly) A world with the same physical laws we know of but having no life could simply be one in which life-conducive conditions didn't gather at one place and not because the physical laws themselves are lacking qualities that can enable life to evolve.
:chin:
Whether or not the possibility or necessity of life would also fall out of such a theory is also unknowable but unlikely. But the colloquialism "Theory of Everything" should not fool anyone into thinking that if we only had the formula, there would be no more problems or mysteries in the world.
:up:
Last I heard on that topic, admittedly the best part of a decade ago, it was a philosophically contested claim. Back then, there were some philosophers of science looking at how quantum chemistry might provide a reductive bridge between the concepts employed in chemistry and those employed in physics. I was not aware that the debate had been so clearly resolved, do you have a reference article I could read?
This is very much in contention and , given your usual thoroughness and scope I'm very surprised you would slip this in in such an offhanded yet apparently authoritative manner. Chemical properties are clearly not reducible to the mechanisms of physics. The entire science of Systems Theory (which offers a much better basis for a fundamental theory) is based on the emergence of new properties governing emergent realms, like chemistry, biology, psychology, etc.
e.g.
"After a long period of neglect, the philosophy of chemistry is slowly being recognized as a newly emerging branch of the philosophy of science. This paper endorses and defends this emergence given the difficulty of reducing all of the philosophical problems raised by chemistry to those already being considered within the philosophy of physics, and recognition that many of the phenomena in chemistry are “epistemologically emergent”."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009932309197
More to the point of the OP, @Yuting Liu singles out the problem of ontological reduction: "the biological distinction of life forms from lifeless forms." But ontological reduction is generally problematic in inter-theoretic relations, and even chemistry-to-QM is no exception (as some works referenced in the above linked article argue). So my point remains that there is nothing special about biology in this regard. The inter-theoretic reduction program is difficult and contentious at just about every level.
Agree. It is one of the 'myths of the Enlightenment' that the laws of physics can be thought to account for everything in existence. That is one of the reasons that the discipline of semiotics has had to be introduced to biology. 'Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of biology and semiotics and proposes a paradigmatic shift in the scientific view of life, in which semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic features' (ref). This is because signs and signal interpretation operates on a plane that is ontologically distinct from physical laws, thereby giving the lie to the original premise of physical reductionism.
The logic here seems to be...
Physics applies to what is alive and physics applies to what is not alive; Therefore physics cannot explain the difference between what is alive and what is not alive.
It's invalid.
That's literally not my logic whatsoever. That's totally a strawman.
I already did. Any set of propositions can either be 1) incomplete and coherent or 2) incoherent and complete.
That's been proven with mathematics by Kurt Godel. Disagree? Then disprove his theorem. Or prove your own mathematical theorem.
That's not "my logic" that's his. I'm just repeating it. It's all I'm good for. Repeating things other people say to sound smart.
It's confusing the simulation for the simulator. The description for the thing described. The signified for the signifier. The thing-in-itself with the thing being perceived. Blah blah blah.
One thing that's being assumed, that isn't remotely proven to be concretely a thing, is induction. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as well as Hume's "Human Understanding" have shown that induction is just assumed. We assume ceteris paribus. We assume that things behave the same every time, every day, every second. Totally unjustified assumption. In fact, one that scientists have identified as possibly being the case recently.
I actually do believe in laws of nature, but I don't believe our limited human knowledge can adequately account for or describe what those laws are. Our descriptions of those laws are the like the turkey getting fed.
Yeah, not any. Propositional calculus is complete and sound.
What I took exception to was Quoting h060tu
He didn't. Because that theory of everything is not what he was addressing.
You are just being really untidy with your terms.
lol So, Kurt Godel who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century didn't know propositional calculus existed? Who's more likely to be right?
And yes, theory of everything would fit the definition of a closed system. So, you don't know what you're saying. No reason to continue talking here.
There is a bewildering variety of notions concerning reduction and emergence in the philosophical literature, but I think that the sort of hand-wavy weak emergence that you outline is not very controversial. However, anything stronger or more rigorous than that - such as ontological reduction that the OP brings up - is rife with problems, starting with just setting out the precise meanings of these terms.
Godel proved that first order logic was consistent and complete, you dummy. This discussion has nothing to do with Godel's theorems.
I went through an Intertheoretic Reductionism phase, and it is tortuous stuff. I recently came upon Popper's writings. He maintains that this type of science, even though it cannot reach the answers it seeks, nevertheless is excellent for leading us down different paths, and opening doors to new areas of research (leading to new metaphysical research programmes) .
I'm not sure if I'm just unfamiliar with this area of ontology somehow or if it just seems so transparently confused to me, but either way I don't really see what problem is remaining. If we can study how (ordinary multicellular) living things work, what makes them alive or not, in terms of the operations of their bodies made of tissues made of living cells, and we can study how those cells work in terms of non-living molecules, and we can study how those molecules work in terms of ordinary particle physics... then what questions are really left? Clearly then life is reducible to physics in that way, so what is still unanswered?
That isn't to say that biology and chemistry are useless fields and we should just be doing physics, just that the things the fields study relate to each other in a hierarchical way, each being an abstraction of aggregates of the objects of another field. Even within physics this is already done: temperature is an abstraction of aggregates of mechanical motion. It's often useful to consider those higher levels of abstraction; nobody (that I know of) is suggesting we should study biology as some kind of gigantic yotta-particle interaction. Those nanoscopic details don't matter at that level, and it makes perfect sense to sweep them under the rug. But that doesn't mean that anything magical happens when particles end up arranged into the shape of a cell: the cell's life is just something the lifeless particles are doing.
It's called the Incompleteness theorem.
Anyway, no point talking to people who don't understand what they're talking about.
You are the jerk, foghorn.
Maybe so, but at least I have a better mind than ignorant morons like you whose philosophical insights and intelligent conversations are a victim of intellectual constipation, awaiting a suitable laxative.
I think you're taking your inevitable demise too harshly and projecting it on other people. You think it justifies you somehow, but really you're just a joke.
I pity you. But it's too late for you; you made sure of that. You do have worth, however, and life will teach you that.
You may as well try to learn now. I mean, there's little sense in being deliberately stupid. But I doubt you will. I think you're just an ornery little puke.
If you only say that different levels or scales loosely supervene on or ground or compose each other, and aren't too particular about what that means and how that comes about, then you won't get much argument from anyone. The devil, as always, is in the details. There is extensive literature on reduction, emergence and supervenience. The more traditional take on these issues was skewed towards the philosophy of mind, but in parallel with that a more general discussion of inter-theory relations has emerged (), which I personally find more interesting. The SEP article Scientific Reduction gives some idea of the problematics.
Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.
Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists. Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe.
A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.
Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." A mundane example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself. By applying vision and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience. Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley [and arguably Pierce]), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them.[/quote]
I myself tend towards transcendental/epistemological idealism. The empirical/phenomenal/sensory domain is real but not (in Buddhist terms) ‘self-existent’, i.e. it doesn’t possess an inherent or mind-independent reality. It is the basic assumption of naturalism that the sensory domain is in some sense self-explanatory, or will be in the fullness of time, when all the research has been done. But like many religious philosophies, I view the empirical domain as being lacking or absent its own ground, cause or foundation. Discovering what that means is the curriculum of philosophy, in my book.