Posted by Bob on 9/20/2007, 1:35 pm From Wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything_%28philosophy%29 In his 1996 book The Conscious Mind,[4] David Chalmers argues that a theory of everything must explain consciousness, that consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical, and that therefore a fundamental theory in [merely] physics would not be a theory of everything. A truly final theory, he argues, needs not just physical properties and laws, but phenomenal or protophenomenal properties and psychophysical laws explaining the relationship between physical processes and conscious experience. [Bingo] He concludes that "[o]nce we have a fundamental theory of consciousness to accompany a fundamental theory in physics, we may truly have a theory of everything." Developing such a theory will not be straightforward, he says, but "it ought to be possible in principle." In "Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy",[3] a 2002 essay in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Mark Alan Walker discusses modern responses to the question of how to reconcile "the apparent finitude of humans" with what he calls "the traditional telos of philosophy--- the attempt to unite thought and Being, to arrive at absolute knowledge, at a final theory of everything." He contrasts two ways of closing this "gap between the ambitions of philosophy, and the abilities of human philosophers": a "deflationary" approach in which philosophy is "scaled down into something more human" and the attempt to achieve a theory of everything is abandoned, and an "inflationary", transhumanist approach in which philosophers are "scaled up" by advanced technology into "super-intelligent beings" better able to pursue such a theory.
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Here is what I think is a concise summation of some of the cosmological topics which we have discussed in this forum. It is not (for me) the easiest thing to read, but worth the effort.
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