Fabric of Reality Book Club
Showing only those parts of the discussion which lead to #2260 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Perhaps it’s premature, but I’d love to discuss:
why DD thinks the four strands already amount to a theory of everything
why DD presents quantum mechanisms as having already subsumed general relativity
what other (proto)strands we could envision and why they are indeed a meaningful addition to the 4 strands
Yeah (3) is interesting. Constructor theory is the contender I can think of for a future fifth strand. Any other suggestions?
Yes, but that inhirent in biology (evolution) right? I see it as part of the evolutionary strand for this reason.
In that same vein, why couldn't we class biology (evolution) under epistemology?
I still see epistemology as distinct, and I'll try to make my case for it. Epistemology explains how humans create explanatory knowledge — unlike biological evolution, which also produces knowledge, but not explanations. Explanatory knowledge is special because it allows us to understand the world. Deutsch even suggests that this kind of knowledge tends toward convergence — a unified theory of everything — implying a deep connection between reality and its capacity to be explained.
Economics, on the other hand, isn’t distinct in the same way. It deals with trade-offs and scarcity — principles already fundamental to biology. Life itself is about managing limited resources and the trade-offs that come with them. Evolution, in turn, discovered increasingly effective strategies for doing so — including cooperation, exchange, and other relationships between and across lifeforms that facilitate these trades.
May have misunderstood, but do you mean that explanatory knowledge corresponds to truth, whereas biological/evolutionary knowledge doesn't?
I think that was refuted by Lucas Smalldon and others: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/
Undestanding does not flow from explanatory knowledge the way you imply. I understand Dutch and English, but a lot of my understanding of it is inexplicit.
You say that trade-offs and scarcity are fundamental to biology. I agree, and this implies economics as a more fundamental science than biology or evolution. It still applies in our computer models, where biological details may not.
Guess: We can generalise economics further and let it be subsumed by epistemology.
When we choose to try to solve certain problems, we always make trade-offs from a place of scarcity. Likewise, our conjectures wouldn't evolve without the competition enabled by scarcity in our minds.