Quora Answer: What is your theory of everything?
My Theory of almost Everything is a meta-theory called Special Systems Theory. Together with General Schemas Theory and Emergent Meta-systems Theory it attempts to explain the underlying a priori necessities of a meta-theory for the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. My main contribution is adding the basis for understanding the relation between these emergent thresholds via anomalies in mathematics and physics. A recent summary is here Page on Mediafire. If you really want to get deeply into it seeReflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory which is the long version which is a bit older at Advanced Systems Theory, Philosophy, Especially Metaphysics and you can also see Reflexive Autopoietic Systems Theory at the same site which are the essays I wrote while I was discovering the theory. The theory hearkens back to my Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void also at the same site.
As a sociologist the genesis of the theory comes from a close reading of Plato’s works concerning his imaginary cities. Noticing that those cities have strange properties it occurred to me to look for those same anomalies in mathematics and I found not only analogous anomalies but discovered that the various analogies from Mathematics fit together unexpectedly to give a very precise model of the three special systems called Dissipation Ordering Special System, Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System and Reflexive Social Special System. An introduction to this approach can be found in Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature which is barking up a very similar tree but lacks a complete theory. He calls the Dissipative Structures of Prigogine “Morphodynamic” Systems and defines Autopoietic Systems as “Teleodynamic”. He lacks a Sociodynamic level associated with Reflexive Systems. For an explanation of the relation between Special Systems Theory and Deacon’s Theory see FoundationsOfSpecialSyste
Justification is fairly simple. We know that of Everything the hardest things to explain is the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. So an important step in providing a meta-theory of everything addressing how these special thresholds of emergence relate to thermodynamics and the rest of physics like Qunatum Mechanics and Relativity etc. This meta-theory explains how the thresholds are related to each other and to the background of physics. The answer is that the analogies to these thresholds exist in Mathematics and then there are comparable anomalies in physics to those in mathematics. Thus this theory is fully scientific because it has a fundamental mathematical structure that is very precise, and then this structure is reflected in Physics which give analogous hither to unrecognized thresholds in physics that correspond to the kind of organization that appears in Consciousness, Life and the Social. People recognize these as ontic thresholds of significant phenomena but there is no ontological explanation of why these thresholds are possible, and what their relation to each other might be a priori. Terrence Deacon does a good job of rethinking some of the basic concepts that would allow us to understand these thresholds. But he has no mathematical basis for his theory, but merely hypothesizes the difference between thermodynamics, morphodyanmics and teleodynamics. Special Systems Theory gives the mathematical and physical framework of anomalies that define these thresholds and how they relate to each other including their relation to sociodynamics which is a threshold that Deacon does not consider. Therefore, this framework is justified by the fact that there is no overarching theory of the necessity of the emergence of these thresholds which is ontological and a priori, and Special Systems Theory supplies this overarching framework as a meta-theory within which we can place the theories related to specific phenomena at each threshold.