A note from the sea ...

Our signals cannot decode themselves, and the result of linguistic decoding is not just a new signal, re-representing, re-encoding, some content or consequence of the original.

A 'theory of everything' would, somehow, have to decode itself. It would have to contain a theory of its own meaning. Perhaps a theory like this goes beyond what physics might aspire to, but I am not sure about this. Already we approach certain problems with attempts that few can understand...

(What good is it to me if the truth can only be expressed in Martian? Or perhaps what I write here is equally opaque ...)

When we contradict ourselves, we destroy meaning - but we do not guarantee meaningfulness just by avoiding contradiction. We cannot guarantee meaningfulness at all. We imagine that we 'talk' by exchanging these tokens, and find that even identifying and circumscribing the 'tokens' turns out to be a murky business. We think we can, with the tokens, write down 'rules' about how the tokens should be used. We have imagined that these rules can form an exhaustive account, or structure, or, perhaps machine ... but they cannot. As we tidy each room and photograph it, the lights go out - insight evaporates, rather than deepening.

We try new tokens: 'meaningfulness', 'intelligibility', 'philosophy' ... the pile gets higher, but we see no more from its summit than our own ability to build it, from when its content is derived.