Month: April 2023

A ‘theory of everything’ would be, to a physicist, a theoretical description of how all the fundamental interactions of physics come together. Don’t expect that here. I’m looking to describe something else. Nothing physical.

Consider this the first real post of this series. This post addresses what kind of thinking I try to piece together. And how that relates to science and philosophy. And to you.

Depending on how crazy you are, you may make all sorts of wacky claims about reality. Figuring out which claims are credible is the business of science, or sound reasoning in general. Piecing together available information, judging evidence, doing statistics and figuring out what are the facts: All of that stuff falls in the same category. Let’s call it physical reality, and cognition to know and understand this reality. Both of those are very complicated, and not what I’m trying to figure out here. Their existence is a piece to the puzzle, but the whole story begins before all that.

Because when we’re talking about the physical world, we’re talking about an idea. A compelling idea, I will admit, and one that I will happily buy into. But what is really going on is: we are experiencing something, which is understood as an idea, which implies something about some notion called the physical world. And when we’re thinking about non-physical things, we’re still just experiencing thoughts.

My interest goes out to what lays below that. The nature of experience itself, and how thinking emerges from that. In understanding the relationship between experience and reality, we may see what else there is besides thought. We may even see how that other stuff behaves, and how is governs our lives. And how we can live a better life. Or lives.

To start I propose that experience is real. That is, experience is. It just is. As it is. Whether reality results from experience or experience results from reality is a question which cannot be answered. I argue it cannot even be defined, and I insist that whatever may come out of this treatise must be indifferent to this question. Invariant. It shouldn’t make a difference which position you take. Experience, now, is.

Further, we must assume that there is a reality which relates somehow to experience. We can make some observations about what we experience, and reason about what this implies about reality, but must acknowledge that there is no accurate observation about experience; there is only experience of a thought following some other experience. The first is gone by the time the ‘observation’ emerges and there is no possibility of falsifying the observation’s implications. This limitation lay at the root of why it is not my aim for me or anyone else to think about their thinking. That will yield no wisdom or truth.

We can suppose, however, that there is some state of reality which corresponds to an experience. We may experience thoughts about another experience, suggesting that if we are to understand experience we must see it as variable. Equivalently, reality may be seen as changing. I have no hard justification for this, as nothing remains unanswered by simply insisting what you experience now is all there is. Yet I am interested in the dynamics of experience and reality. So I must entertain the notion that they are variable.

My ideas draw inspiration from countless sources: artificial intelligence, Bayesian probability, the work of Douglas Hofstadter, Buddhism, mystics, sages, you name it. In formal treatise, I will try to keep my writing plain and simple, though, without trying to link everything to mysticism and what not. You can have fun with that., though, and I’ll do the same in informal posts.

What should you hope to find in these posts, then? Best case scenario: a theory of ‘exact psychodynamics’. That is, one which explains how experiences forms and changes, and how that affects other experiences. Physical reality may exist as a fully detailed complement to this, but it’s out of scope here. We can’t hope to understand all the details of what’s going on. But I want the bigger picture, and I will consider physical reality just a piece to the puzzle. Let’s see where this goes.

See you next time,

Oscar