Fabric of Reality Book Club

Showing only those parts of the discussion that lead to #3283.

See full discussion·See most recent related ideas
  Log in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.
Discussions can branch out indefinitely. Zoom out for the bird’s-eye view.
Edwin de Wit’s avatar
Edwin de Wit·#2081

Perhaps it’s premature, but I’d love to discuss:

  1. why DD thinks the four strands already amount to a theory of everything

  2. why DD presents quantum mechanisms as having already subsumed general relativity

  3. what other (proto)strands we could envision and why they are indeed a meaningful addition to the 4 strands

Erik Orrje’s avatar
Erik Orrje·#2090

Yeah (3) is interesting. Constructor theory is the contender I can think of for a future fifth strand. Any other suggestions?

Dirk Meulenbelt’s avatar
Dirk Meulenbelt·#2257

Economics as a fundamental study of trade-offs.

Edwin de Wit’s avatar
Edwin de Wit·#2259

Yes, but that inhirent in biology (evolution) right? I see it as part of the evolutionary strand for this reason.

Dirk Meulenbelt’s avatar
Dirk Meulenbelt·#2260

In that same vein, why couldn't we class biology (evolution) under epistemology?

Edwin de Wit’s avatar
Edwin de Wit·#2261

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.

Criticized1*
Dirk Meulenbelt’s avatar
Dirk Meulenbelt·#2278

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.

Criticism of #2261Criticized2*
Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin Davies·#3283

Economics is simply at the intersection of evolution and epistemology.

Criticism of #2278