Why There Will Never Be a True “Theory of Everything”
Reality seems to be diametrically opposed to human comprehension
It’s generally assumed that physics provides us with objective truths about reality. The general consensus seems to be that we are slowly but surely figuring things out, getting gradually closer and closer to understanding everything there is to know about the universe, and all of reality may someday be understood through the unbiased lens of a perfect, objectively truthful “Theory of Everything.”
This optimistic outlook, unfortunately, is completely unfounded. There is no objectively truthful way of describing reality on a fundamental level, and there never can be.
To understand why, we could start by examining language, the ways we communicate our knowledge. All of human language is wrought from metaphor and is inherently non-objective. There is no sentence in any language which is not modified in some sense by an individual’s experiential bias or by the presence or absence of contextual information, which itself will be rooted in further metaphors and require explanation ad infinitum. If I write, “Donald Trump sure is a smart guy!” the reader would obviously need to know whether I am being ironic or sincere. The meaning of the sentence is modified by the bias of the reader, and by their individual perception of bias within the speaker…
