Fabric of Reality Book Club
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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.
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.