Givier or Gettier? Physics at the Crossroads

Will physics give way to metaphysics on the Big Questions, or will it stand fast at the Gettier end of the spectrum?

First things first: Happy Independence Day! Long live the United States of America, the sacred ideals of its Constitution, and the inspired dreams of its Founding Fathers.

Though we be envied and resented in every corner of the globe, no other nation has the standing to question our existence and legitimacy, deny our European origin and colonial history, threaten and excoriate our traditional population, subject us to mass Third World invasion and demographic conquest, or oppose our determination to preserve human freedom, human dignity, and the future of mankind.

And now, back to our “Theory of Everything” discussion.

Introduction

In the last post, we discussed category mistakes and the not-even-wrong “physical theories of everything” based on them. Such theories are “not even wrong” because although physics and the physical universe are real, they are not self-explanatory, and this makes physics unsuitable as a TOE. Specifically, it fails to explain, or justify, the aspect of reality called “physics”.

We saw that because “everything” and “physical” are not synonymous, the assumption that “everything is physical” is a contradiction. Theories based on contradictions are not only unfounded, but wrong and gravely misleading. In fact, a true theory of everything can be comprehensively and consistently formulated only in a metaphysical metalanguage of physics spanning both physical theory and its physical universe of discourse. Metaphysics, properly formulated as the CTMU, is simply the metalanguage which describes how physics and the physical universe are related to each other.

Remember, physical means observable, and physics is an object language in which the physical universe, its object of reference, is theoretically described in terms of physical states and observable quantum properties or observables, linear operators associated with CTMU identity operators or “quantum observers” operating on the states.

In the CTMU, physics and the physical universe are related through “metaformal quantization”, a mereology under which reality is effectively defined to not just contain observers, but to consist of generic observers as components.