THE STRANGE REQUISITES OF A TOE
What Is a TOE
In contemplating a theory of everything, we are expressing an implicit faith that there is in fact a transcending order to the whole of experience, an eternal reality that outlives our short sojourn here on this tiny backwater planet. This transcending cosmic order is more than a human theory. It strains our mental resources to their breaking point to imagine it, and yet we intuitively know that it must be there. It is not something that can be harnessed behind an engine of rational logic and dredged into existence from a quagmire of chaos. It is the engine. It is what pulled us into existence. It is what has endowed us with reason, intelligence, and a capacity to gaze out to the limits of the cosmos and wonder about its nature. It is what invests our words and signs and symbols with meaning. It is an intelligently ordered substrate that determines the structure of experience, all experience.
Everyone Has One
We all implicitly believe this even if we deny it. Even if we say that this entire universe is a meaningless accident and when we die we are psychically annihilated, we believe that this is true for all sentient creatures everywhere in the universe. We believe this to be an intelligent assessment of the cosmic order that transcends our own birth and death. We believe it to be universally valid, eternally true, even though it is a contradiction in terms to a more discerning perception. We should hardly be inclined to cling to the eternal idea that we are the only one in the universe condemned to oblivion. And how can we believe an idea of ours is eternal when we are not? So all this is more than just an arbitrary matter of opinion.
Age and Our Brain
We may say that we are so many years old are and yet we are being reborn every moment of our lives. Our cells are continually replacing themselves. Even our brain cells are renewing their molecular constituents. We are physically a mere couple of years old. At the same time our every thought and feeling is indebted to our evolved structure as human beings, as we climbed up through the vertebrate lineage, our three brains expanding in stages over a span of 400 million years. We are indebted to our animal ancestors for the primal feelings that animate us via our ancient limbic brain. We are indebted to our cultural heritage that has evolved out of the jungle over many millennia, for refining those feelings in socially acceptable ways through our cultural conditioning. The process has been further facilitated by our educational institutions that have accumulated vast stores of learning over the centuries that give direction to our rational thought processes and our social commitments, via our language-bound left-brain.
The Third Brain Worldview
So our bodies are very young while the feelings that animate our thoughts and actions are very old. As if two brains were not enough, we seek an invariant theory about how the whole process works, from the stars and distant galaxies to how life has evolved and why. This is a right-brain intuitive quest that cannot be fully formulated in words. We intuitively need a world view in order to function, to integrate and make sense of diverse fragments of experience. Things have to make common sense. So we seek a theory of everything that is universally valid and that never changes even though it determines the process of all change. We are very young, we are very old, and we also seek the eternal.
Eternal Understanding
We seek an eternal understanding that transcends our birth and our death and we have every reason to expect that it should invest life with transcending meaning and direction. It is universal truth that we seek and truth is not a physical thing. It is a value that is intuitively recognized. In this respect universal values are the ultimate reality in which we all share. It is values that intuitively inform us when we meaningfully integrate our experience. And yet intuition must find translation in socially relevant ways that are appropriate to current circumstance.
The Strange Requisites of a TOE
A true theory of everything must be a very strange thing. It must give us a living insight into a cosmic reality that transcends birth and death. It must embrace all possible varieties of experience, physical, biological, social, and spiritual. It must prescribe a universal basis to all meaning that is more fundamental than language and that determines its meaning. It must regulate how natural processes evolve. And it must provide insight into the nature of intelligence itself and why we must seek an eternal basis of understanding.
For more on Our Three Brains and the cosmic order see www.cosmic-mindreach.com


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