My abandonment of all interest in acquiring a PhD in physics heralded the end of my infatuation with science, and the beginning of my love for it. We are infatuated with things to the degree to which we feel they can satisfy our needs or fulfill our desires, while love embodies our attraction to that which can facilitate our increasingly selfless aspiration to inspire equanimity in other conscious beings.
My defatuation with science came with an appreciation of what it is uniquely qualified to do. Consequently, I no longer expected science to answer existential questions beyond its metrically circumscribed explanatory scope; yet my intuition assured me that the foundational fruits of the scientific method would be crucial to uncovering A Concise Theory of Truly Everything. Accordingly, science undeniably had a role in my rational quest, but not as the tip of the spear. This conclusion allowed me to love science for what it can do, while not being disappointed in it for what it cannot do.
Recall how even after my Catholicism fell victim to its intrinsic irrationality, I continued to attend mass. This was because I still appreciated the value of the growth toward equanimity that religion seeks to facilitate. Similarly, I came to love science because I appreciated the utility of its objectivity despite its existentially limited explanatory power. While both religion and science had already guided me along the path to rational existential answers—and have continued to do so to the present—I was still seeking a wisdom discipline that could lead me to the logical completion of my quest.
The remaining disciplines that claimed to be able to generate answers to our fundamental existential questions were philosophy and spirituality. The apparently subjective nature of spirituality inclined me toward a closer examination of philosophy.
At first glance, philosophy looked as though it should have been the obvious choice from the beginning. Its name literally means “the love of wisdom”. The branch of philosophy known as metaphysics specifically targets my Seven Theory of Truly Everything Questions. Additionally, a college philosophy class I had taken earlier introduced me to symbolic logic, which taught me an objective methodology for analyzing arguments.
However, this initial promise evaporated as I explored philosophy’s historical evolution. Immanuel Kant—one of the most influential philosophers of the European Modern Age—essentially declared in his Critique of Pure Reason that any open-ended search for fundamental existential answers was logically unsound. In the early 20th century, the logical positivism of the members of the prominent Vienna Circle asserted that any study metaphysics would ultimately prove pointless.
Metaphysics eventually managed to recover its rational legitimacy from these self-limiting conjectures, although it remains closer to the margins of philosophy than it was before Kant. Additionally, during this internal turmoil, science had eclipsed philosophy—its existential parent—as the acknowledged leader of humanity’s search for rational answers.
Since I had already disqualified science from the leadership role in my personal quest, philosophy’s acceptance of its existential demotion provided me with a unique opportunity. Its fall from grace left me free to apply philosophical logic—the crucial element underlying all scientific objectivity—to rational (as opposed to mystical) metaphysics, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophical theory of mind, to form the basis of my outsider search for fundamental existential answers; while being reasonably certain there would be few, if any, insiders ahead of me on the path to them.
The resultant lack of urgency meant I could take my time, following tangents as they came to my attention, creatively accumulating diverse insights, logically integrating them into a wisdom configuration that spanned the other existential disciplines; all while simultaneously earning a comfortable living from an analytical day job that provided a reliable paycheck.
Imagine what an unlicensed genius could accomplish, roaming loose in the world, dedicated to solving our greatest existential mysteries, largely undistracted by material, physiological, or psychological concerns; and eventually gaining access to much of the world’s wisdom, via the internet and the research-facilitating login credentials provided by the prestigious University of Chicago—which has employed me as an Information Technology analyst for much of the past two decades.
Over fifty years after it began, this existential program culminated in A Concise Theory of Truly Everything, a ridiculously ambitious deliverable that even managed to integrate spirituality into its explanatory scope; and that I am finally ready to share with the world.