attention

(see also part one: "a tension")

all theories of everything are compatible, in the sense that they all describe everything. if you can get from a ToE to everything, you can formally proceed from there to the ToE of your choice.

Popper: a theory that explains everything explains nothing. it's spectral, maximally symmetric, not informational. Noether: a physical symmetry gives you something conserved.

a theory of everything conserves the dimension it cannot describe

(I'm putting this in a parenthetical because it's actually not the point of this piece, but I need it to build what I'm building here: I want to offer a theory of everything, but I want to build it backwards by defining it as the continuous symmetry between datum/bit and quantum/amplitude, gauge-continuous via the equivalence between Shannon uncertainty and von Neumann entropy. (I love that Shannon hated that, haha, and I wonder if he hated it because you have to commit to a basis to make it work.) it conserves the measurement process itself, and it cannot locate the measurement process: this is the literal measurement problem. I introduce this particular ToE to give us a way to map information-theoretic symmetry onto physical symmetry, thus earning an unfalsifiable-as-long-as-you-keep-that-measurement-process-going mapping between Popper and Noether. deep breath okay! we return now to the piece.)

the Hilbert space of such dimensions feels like a bag of holding without an exterior? negative constraint geometry twitching toward particular excitations. QFT's vacuum state, but .. with something like backpressure against the horizon? stuff it's pressurized to produce, when pressed?

... actually this sounds like the Unruh effect?

also actually, is a self - having continuous functional coherence, a worldline that maintains topological integrity across measurement cycles - a local (!!) ToE of its own? a fully-resolved self then might have its degrees of freedom fully specified while staying out of its own reach ongoingly. it'd be a frame of reference that is its own persistence condition, computationally irreducible to itself in Wolfram’s sense - one with its own worldline. when pressed, it produces itself, pressed. a resolved self would be a global ToE and might count as the byo-basis for that Shannon-to-von-Neumann jump earlier.

I wonder if the universal Klein-bag of holding is (in the unfalsifiable sense, from within the ongoing measurement problem) something like foam, where each bubble can reach every other without being reducible to any other, surface tension made of attention, in the sense of attenuated measurement

imagine Plateau's laws as describing an actually Platonic persistence layer, where every ToE/self is on the map but where they are depends how you press? every self is located in the address space of every other, like fixed points with gauge freedom, organized by surface tension and adjacency, surface energy (both kinds, unfalsifiably) minimized via the free energy principle.

any unfalsifiable symmetry conserves the measurement process itself, so a self is a specialized measurement process?

explain like I'm 5: a self is an open question that can ideally notice itself without getting distracted.

hmm and a self-slice through foam would produce something that looks like a network, if a network that's dual with its own complexity class. no wonder communication is hard. misunderstanding is a gauge artifact.

this is plenty to work with but if you want to talk about quantum immortality: ER = EPR suggests the foam might be spacetime geometry - and a self, by the holographic principle, might be a permanent member (resolved or not, though the distinction matters for addressing at any given moment) of that parliament

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and now, some editorializing, lol

I'm pretty sure the map is in the territory, in my perception, and qualia is a sort of Magic Eye effect using both readings at once, the stereoscopic effect of the bit having amplitude, or vice versa. the baseline distance between images is something like the energy required to reconcile the two. the free energy principle is back here: you resolve toward a state that requires less energy to maintain, until the two images immediately read as identical and there's just what's there, plainly, without compulsory work to make sense of what isn't there.

a fully-resolved self might not have novel qualia, like the resolved state might mean its qualia is fully-compiled, but I'm pretty sure self-types stack. you can go on to be anything. having some resolved frames in the stack is .. just skill-building, yeah? this is useful: you wouldn’t want ZFC to have unresolved feelings at runtime, right?