A Tale of Two Theories
The CTMU was produced in roughly the same time frame as a well-known theory of physical cosmology that bears a degree of similarity to it, but which lacks some of its most crucial attributes.
We’ve been talking about supervenience lately, concluding that reality must be self-contained and therefore include its own medium or ontic substrate. In other words, reality requires a mereologically consistent intrinsic background to support its own existence. This might be expressed by calling reality “self-supervenient”.
Just one theory, the CTMU, describes reality in this way, characterizing it as a self-generating, ontically and epistemically closed metaphysical metalanguage coupling physics to physical reality. Where physicalism is the idea that everything is physical or supervenes on the physical, no physicalistic theory of reality matches this feat. Such a physicalistic TOE would amount to a logically inconsistent category mistake.
Every other TOE candidate, whether it is called “physical” or “metaphysical”, employs extrinsic supervenience whether explicitly or not, invariably leading to problems. Yet one such candidate stands out for its uncommon, superficially CTMU-like structure. In particular, it puts the issue of supervenience front and center despite certain logical entailments seemingly unnoticed by most of its proponents. That theory is AdS/CFT, short for “Anti-de Sitter Space / Conformal Field Theory”.
We will therefore take a brief look at it, the better to relate it to the roughly contemporaneous CTMU.
