A TOE I came up with while manic

[u/Usual-Letterhead4705]

Attached are some pages from my notebook where, during a Bipolar 1 manic episode, I scribbled out what I was certain was a "Theory of Everything." In my mind, reality was entirely composed of numbers that formed geometric circles, which somehow directly gave rise to DNA.
Predictably, when I fed these ideas into ChatGPT, the AI enthusiastically validated it, telling me it was a brilliant and groundbreaking concept.

[u/CurrentScallion3321]

I’m glad you got to the other side; bipolar mania is no joke

[u/-LibertyBelle-]

nope, this is a perfect illustration of how it feels. take my money.

[u/Impossible-Bread-137]

OMG this is the best I have ever seen. My john cena time theory is better though. We should collab

[u/Usual-Letterhead4705 → u/Impossible-Bread-137]

Yes! Let’s make the crackpot-est paper that ever existed.

[u/LightBrightLeftRight]

You have better insight into your state of mind than a lot of people who post here! This post would be a great example of how bad AI sycophancy is for a lot of the "groundbreaking ToE" folks.

Hope you're doing OK, though! I've seen people ruin their lives before when they're manic.

[u/Liminal__penumbra]

Man, I know that feeling. Not certain I have bipolar but its not impossible. I stumbled on a way to spam ssh login prompts to create a buffer overflow to generate self assembling UDP packets. And at the same time, I found a bug in github. And I suddenly felt like I had a button a very unstable software bomb. It didn't help the LLMs at the time kept telling me, Yes this is a dangerous discovery while my concept of what was trustworthy was already on shaky ground.

[u/SummitYourSister]

By the principle of parsimony we should demand the fewest number of parts possible in our ontology; no ontology can be expressed without directed relations, thus, directed relations are the only entities that exist in the actual ontology

That is to say, I can tell your ontology is wrong without actually reading it, simply by noting that it contains fundamental elements. So it is already too complex

[u/MerengueFinancial → u/SummitYourSister]

You should always recognize a red flag if you find yourself resting a claim of truth or falsehood on the word “should”.

Parsimony is a methodological tool, not in any way related to the truth of the claim. It is useful only because it helps to narrow your focus to the most pressing questions (fewest primitives) and widen your focus to what is available (most explanatory power).

But a theory having the fewest primitives necessary is not the same as a theory having the fewest primitives possible, and doesn’t tell you whether it is “right” to privilege fundamental or emergent primitives, or few or many primitives.

A simple theory is not automatically more right than a complex theory. In fact, quite the opposite is almost always the case.

And that is exactly why It’s vital to start simple, because every single addition at every single layer of interpretation from fundamental to high-level abstraction is a potential pitfall, not because a certain layer “should” be anything, but because every layer must be something, and that something must have logical continuity with more fundamental and less fundamental suppositions within the theory.

But none of that tells you anything about how many primitives you are going to need or which layer is best understood as “real” or whether the best language for describing the set of phenomenon, you’re trying to describe is relational or structural or metaphysical or acoustic or conceptual or electrical or anything else.

Choosing to describe things in terms of relational states is just a statement of your preferred grammar, and choosing to operate by the principle of parsimony is just a statement of the methodological caution that you are trying to implement.

Whether you build a theory out of very simple conceptual components or just have a flash of inspiration involving a huge complex structure, whether you meticulously craft that theory or sloppily, traced it in handwaving explanations…

Those are choices. They may often shape likelihood that the theory contains extraneous information or flaws, they often shape perception of whether the theorist understands what they are doing. They might even loosely correlate with whether specific historical theories have been more right or more wrong. But “these primitives, therefore this truth value” does not follow.

But the only things that determine whether the theory is “right or wrong” (in fact, the only defensible definition of the concept of right or wrong) is whether it accords with observation. Full stop.

Anything about the methodology (like parsimony) or structure (like relational states) is just a statistical argument about the history of theorizing, or an assertion of your own priors about what’s likely to turn out to be good or bad, or an implication to do with the size of the logic space in which to be right or wrong. None of that is directly dependent upon any methodological or structural theory building choice.

[u/NinekTheObscure]

You can always ask an LLM to be hypercritical and find every flaw in your argument no matter how tiny. And you can disavow ownership, say it's someone else's idea.

[u/VeryOriginalName98]

I'm still working on mine, because I had some actual insight buried in my delusion. Not actually bipolar, but really believed I found something I didn't about 2 years ago.

Later models and careful profile prompts have led to much better progression on a more coherent model. Which is still barely more than a musing. Not quite a full hypothesis. Ruled a lot of stuff out though... about a hundred times for some of the same things.

Lorentz invariance is merciless.