What any total theory owes
The bar every total theory faces
Any theory that claims to describe everything, its own theorists included, faces demands that can be stated without reference to any particular candidate. It has to be coherent: consistent, its constructions well-defined, its primitives declared rather than smuggled, its rules applied uniformly, its explanations grounded, its own theorizing seated inside what it describes. One coherence condition carries most of the weight: a theory attributing only abstract structure to the world says almost nothing, because any collection of the right size can be arranged to instantiate the structure it specifies — the century-old Newman problem — so something must anchor that structure and the theory’s central terms to reality. And it has to be complete: it cannot go silent on how determinate facts arise, on whether some processes have an inside — something it is like to be them — or on where its own theorists sit, and still count as a theory of everything.
The completeness demands are not a wishlist. They are forced, mostly by one requirement — that the theory seat its own theorist inside the world it describes. Unpack what it takes for a theorist to exist and the domains fall out as consequences: a theorist persists and changes, is made of something rich enough to carry memory, registers determinate facts against a field of alternatives, has or on principle lacks an inside, and acts. The net is derived on its own terms, before any candidate is named, and it specifies a target without claiming anything has hit it or that only one thing could.
The pattern
Run the current families of total theory through that net and a pattern appears: most illuminate one region of reality and go dark on another. Two do not, and they are the comparison that matters.
| The world it describes | The theorist it must seat | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| World | Arrow | Seated | Determinacy | Inside | Agency | |
| Outside-only | ||||||
| Standard Model + GR | clears | partial | silent | silent | silent | silent |
| Quantum gravity | clears | partial | silent | silent | silent | silent |
| Coherent, misses the inside | ||||||
| Everettian QM | partial | partial | clears | partial | silent | partial |
| Humean mosaic | clears | partial | partial | clears | silent | partial |
| Form-only | ||||||
| Bare structuralism | partial | silent | partial | silent | silent | silent |
| Inside-only | ||||||
| IIT | silent | silent | partial | silent | clears | partial |
| Both poles, little settled | ||||||
| Russellian monism | clears | partial | partial | silent | clears | partial |
| Whitehead process philosophy | partial | partial | partial | partial | clears | partial |
clears partial or contested silent. Left of the divider, whether the theory covers the world it describes; right, whether it seats its own theorist. Graded from each account's strongest defended version, and diagnostic rather than a ranking. Six coherence-and-anchoring columns are omitted. Full grading in the papers below.
Physics-first accounts cover the world and its content and go dark on the theorist, on how determinate facts arise, and on the inside. A mind-first account, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is the mirror image: it speaks to the inside and leaves the physics dark. A form-first account holds that structure is fundamental and cannot anchor it. Each lights a region; each leaves regions dark — and stapling the two halves together does not work in general, because a physics-first base and a mind-first base typically share no common ground to join along. Two rows come through with almost nothing dark — Whitehead’s process philosophy, and Russellian monism except on determinacy — and what they have in common is that neither built a formal object to settle what it covers.
The framework is not scored here, and the omission is deliberate. The table establishes that the target exists and is unoccupied. Where Projective Process Monism sits against it is a claim that has to be earned by the construction rather than assigned in a row of the same table that defines the standard.
The shape of an answer
What kind of theory could carry the physics and still say something principled about experience? The hard problem’s usual moral is that nothing would even count as an answer. That moral is too strong: what an answer would have to look like can be derived before any candidate is named. A theory that answers every demand from primitives its base already needs — no axiom bolted on to assert the link — must carry both an intrinsic and an extrinsic aspect in its fundamental ingredients, with the outward side carried by genuine relations; must apply its own dynamics to the theorist doing the theorizing; must fix its reference by a natural relation internal to the base; and must rest on a well-defined formal object. The shape converges on Russellian monism, reached from the demands of totality rather than the mind–body problem, and hands it burdens its defenders never took up. Two systems reached that region and left the same bill unpaid — Whitehead’s process ontology and Spinoza’s one substance — and neither built the formal object. The search space for a total theory is narrower than the discourse assumes.
The two debts the shape incurs
A theory of the forced shape does not get its hardest commitments for free. Carrying both aspects in the basic ingredients, on the many-bearers horn Whitehead occupied, creates two debts. One has a paper arguing it is payable. The other is named here and left open.
The identification debt argued
The forced shape says the world's basic ingredients carry an inside and an outside at once — which means the structure of experience and the structure of the physical world must be one structure. Positions in this family have historically just asserted that identity. The anchoring argument makes the case, starting from the anchoring demand in the bar above: a theory that ascribes only abstract structure to the world says almost nothing until something ties that structure to reality. Philosophy's standard ways of supplying the tie each pay a known price. Experience is the one candidate nobody has to postulate: it is the single piece of the world each of us occupies rather than describes. It then makes the candidate concrete, and the specificity is the advance: the orientations an embodied perspective acts within form real projective 3-space, whose fundamental group is the two-valuedness the belt trick shows mechanically and a neutron interferometer registers as a phase reversal in matter. Taken as one structure, experience becomes the anchor the world's description needs — offered as the best explanation on the table, each posit priced openly. Withhold the identification and the two structures still match; what you give up is the claim that they are one. The argument in full →
What would break it: a clear, global feature of the structure of experience with no physical counterpart where the identity requires one.
The combination debt open
If experience is carried in small units — a little of it wherever the basic ingredients are — then a person should be billions of separate flickers of experience. Each of us is one point of view instead. Every theory built this way, from Whitehead's onward, has owed an account of how small bearers of experience combine into a single subject, and the standard verdict is that no account exists. This framework owes that account too, and does not yet have one it is prepared to stand behind. A working draft treats combination as a question about dynamics — the line it pursues is that wiring parts together does nothing on its own, and that binding takes one part treating another's stored records as evidence about the world — but the technical development is not far enough along to present a result, and nothing elsewhere on this site rests on it.
Where it stands: an open problem with a line of attack, not a debt discharged. The draft is on the papers page, marked as such.
Where this goes
The shape has a target and the target is empty. Everything that follows on this site is an attempt to occupy it, and the first move is the identification debt above — which is where the geometry enters.
Read that argument next: anchoring structure in experience. The papers behind this page, with the standing of each stated, are on the papers page.