Marcelo Gleiser Has a Point

This post is based on my comment at Backreaction, under Marcelo Gleiser's guest post explaining it may be a mistake to pursue a final theory of "the" universe (or at least, to think it must be simple/beautiful etc.)  I think Marcelo has a good point.  Here I delve into the relevant and deep philosophical problems about "why is there something instead of nothing" and "why is it like this and not otherwise."  (We should add: is "something" even clearly defined - a point well made by the modal realists.)

We don't have any a priori notion of why "reality" should be like this or otherwise. For deep logical reason I've noted before, I don't see how we can. There is nothing in logical analysis that can "bless" some mathematical constructs with a "right to life" over others - ie, to be incarnate in the special manner we feel that we are. To be, as Madonna put it, "living in a material world." (I like to say, it's like number 23 specially existing also as brass numerals "just because", despite being just another number ...)

Many thinkers cogently argue we can't even make that distinction. I think that collides with our basic feeling of being alive etc. but it is near impregnable as a strict logical critique of material realism being coherently distinct from abstractly descriptive and totally unselective modal realism.

Hence some believe in MUH: that all structures in the Platonic mindscape exist (logically wide-open, a far bigger set than even the wildest string-theory landscape etc.) If so there is little point in looking for a fundamental theory that makes sense or is beautiful etc, because we are just in a possible world that allows us to exist.

However, that presents deep Bayesian expectation problems. If that were true, our greatest expectation would be living in a universe just orderly enough to get us in this condition and to this point, and no more so (because there are so many more ways to do that than to be very neatly consistent, with identical electrons and laws that don't change over time etc. in various odd ways.)

So no one knows what's going on or why it should be or be like this. I think there's some "management" in the sense some ultimate reality has some intrinsic goals or even purposes like beauty and life-friendliness, but it would be wrong to impose that as a working assumption.  BTW that would not have to be like a person, FWIW.  So: find a TOE that works if you want, but be aware of the logical problem of justifying it existentially.