Ogi Ogas has made a bold claim on his Substack today, Feb 28, 2025: he will reveal a grand unifying theory for the nature of reality, on Monday:
The core accounting of how and why the universe exists, how and why we are here. How it all works, in plainspoken words anyone can follow and understand.The explanation of the great mystery is a form of Grand Unification, that supreme theory or perspective that scientists have been tirelessly and fruitlessly hunting for, transcendent knowledge that explains all that is and was and will be.
https://ogiogas.substack.com/p/how-can-nothing-change-into-something
I've been reading this man's writing, and my assessment is that this is real. I think what he will write about is going to be genuinely novel & paradigm shifting once it gets reviewed & spreads. I'd like to register my prediction publicly of this as having been one of the earliest people to spot it.
This market will resolve to YES if ALL the following researchers read it & publicly admit it blew their mind / that the announcement post was NOT hype. If (any of them) say it is interesting or novel but not a good contender for "grand theory" it will resolve to NO.
Researchers who have committed to reading it & giving an objective opinion:
Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, President & Director of Research at Qualia Research institute, https://qri.org/ - (https://x.com/algekalipso/status/1895588938217373916)
Ben S, Materials scientist, top 40 all-time in profit on Manifold, (https://manifold.markets/bens)
Park Doing, Science & Technology Studies, PhD Cornell, retired 2022 https://ethics.engineering.cornell.edu/archives/retired-staff/
For a quick intro to Ogi's work, I think his "how conciousness is made" (https://ogiogas.substack.com/p/how-consciousness-is-made-part-i) is a simple/accessible explanation but aligns with everyone who is at the frontier of consciousness research (in my opinion)
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ540 | |
| 2 | Ṁ414 | |
| 3 | Ṁ180 | |
| 4 | Ṁ167 | |
| 5 | Ṁ78 |
Resolving the market as NO given the resolution criteria giving all of the selected judges VETO, and Ben S's review was a NO.
The results are really interesting to me, which I wish I had a better way to aggregate/visualize, specifically because they varied between (1) this is totally wrong to (2) this is correct but he's not the first to describe this / he doesn't describe it well.
Most notable for me was emmet shear articulating this:
> Like I said, I don’t think he’s wrong really, I just find the tone offputting and don’t think it contributes much net new thought.
https://x.com/eshear/status/1897119869759570333
> The tone is extremely offputting to me, written as if the physicists inventing these things were not struggling deeply with the same questions or that he’s the first to notice.
He’s right that integrating mind and matter, intention and mechanic, function and form, is the quest.
> But he seems to have less substance than any of the physicists who have written on it like Boltzmann, or Bohm. Or biologists like Noble. Or a figure like Wilber, for that matter.
https://x.com/eshear/status/1896767436311154781
I think Ogi's language obscures the simple but important idea he's describing. I think the stuff about breaking the laws of thermodynamics threw off the discussion. I think the most important point is this idea that the dynamics of mind have a dual causality with physical reality. They aren't free of physical causality, but they aren't completely determined by it either. This I think is something that converges with Michael Levin and Douglas Hofstader's bodies of work. Someone pointed me to this as an example of Levin proposing the same thing that I believe Ogi is trying to propose (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v3)
My ulterior motive with this prediction market was to test a theory i've had for a while that I can use these markets to bring attention to things, in a way that rewards the creator if the stuff is good, and punishes them if the stuff is bad. Like it's a way of simulating something like, I pay for marketing, and if you look at the thing and decide "actually that was good" you pay me back (or pay it forward). I think I got a lot of value out of this discussion. Thank you all for participating 🙏
@bens no, but my prediction is Andres's review would have been similar to eshear's ("directionally correct, but not novel/Ogi isn't the first to describe this") and I think Park's will be closer to yours. I got a review privately from a physics friend at UCSB that converged with yours, and after a lot of back and forth this is now my current stance that i put in the other comment:
I think Ogi's language obscures the simple but important idea he's describing. I think the stuff about breaking the laws of thermodynamics threw off the discussion. I think the most important point is this idea that the dynamics of mind have a dual causality with physical reality. They aren't free of physical causality, but they aren't completely determined by it either. This I think is something that converges with Michael Levin and Douglas Hofstader's bodies of work.
(I'm planning to resolve the market to NO since @bens has veto power according to the resolution criteria. I haven't yet heard back from all my reviewers yet, but I want to do a review post where I aggregate these reviews, and include what people say are better people to pay attention to.
does closing the market send a notification to everyone? if so I want to have that post ready maybe in a few days for closure? or i can close it now and update later? cc @MingCat )
@Defender Yes closing a market notifies everyone who traded on it - you can also do a message with @ traders to send it to everyone who traded on it. So you could resolve now and send a message with @ traders when it's ready, depending on what you want!
@Defender the review is in (below) - unfortunately I'm not a big fan
I think if you're hungering for substantially more plausible and well fleshed-out, but still out-there theories that deal with the thermodynamics of time, I might suggest:
1) Lee Cronin's Assembly Theory: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
2) Bostrom's Anthropic Bias: https://anthropic-principle.com/anthropic-bias/
3) Price and Wharton's concept of Retrocausality: https://aeon.co/essays/our-simple-magic-free-recipe-for-quantum-entanglement
I found these all to be quite interesting, and I think that while none of them are truly "grand unified theories" in the sense that they unify all of the tensions in modern physics, they do all make a good faith effort to head at least somewhat in that direction (and that would probably be sufficient to resolve this Manifold market as YES, tbh).
@bens this is perfect, thank you!! I'm going to have to resolve the market to NO because you have veto power in the resolution criteria, but I think I have responses to this / I think there's more predictive power here (but I'll need to make/find specific falsifiable assertions that can be tested). I'm going to aggregate your review along the others that I trust / who I think get it
(what I really want is a kind of prediction test of Ogi's model. Like, if you understand his model, what would he say about situation XYZ/how does it handle this case, and if my answer matches Ogi's then that proves I understand his model. And I want that as a kind of prerequisite OR meta data when reading the reviews. Because I think there are rebuttals that are "this is the wrong paradigm" (which i think yours is) and there are rebuttals that are "this is the correct paradigm but Ogi's wrong/too vague etc". And in cases where people say there is a better paradigm, I want to note that to spread attention/awareness that)
@bens thank you so much Ben, I really appreciate your time & willingness to engage with this and contribute this
Okay, here's my review, going point by point through each of the sections of the article.
1) Ogas says these articles will explain "what reality is made of" and "why does the universe exist", along with "what is consciousness" and "what is time". Those are pretty ambitious goals, so I'm hoping to see things like:
-a theory that provides a unification of gravity with the other fundamental forces
-a theory that can explain the cosmic microwave background radiation, the apparent big bang, the formation of galaxies and stars, dark matter, etc
-something that explains the thermodynamic arrow of time
-something overcoming the hard problem of consciousness
Ogas then seems to imply that "activity" is at the center of all of these things, and then defines "activity" as "change".
2) Then, Ogas refers to Maxwell's Demon. I actually took statistical mechanics as recently as grad school, and I'm very unpersuaded by any of his reasoning here. He seems to think that it IS ACTUALLY possible to create Maxwell's Demon. This is false, and violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Ogas writes that were it not for quantum mechanics (in a purely classical system), it should be possible to build Maxwell's Demon. This is false. Carnot cycles provide a pretty elegant demonstration of why this is not the case. But also, statistical mechanics can demonstrate the 2nd law of thermodynamics from first principles without the need for quantum mechanics.
3) Ogas seems to be arguing here that the arrow of time is caused by the existence of minds because minds require purpose. He writes:
"Minds require that time goes in one direction and one direction only. FORWARD. TOWARD MY GREAT PURPOSE! Because purpose can only be directed toward a CHANGE in the FUTURE."
I don't really follow this reasoning. Why couldn't minds instead require that time moves the other direction, towards purposes in the past? Why couldn't some minds direct time in one direction, with other minds directing time in the other direction? None of this explains our perception of time, additionally, because it's already an open question as to why we perceive time as moving forwards. This strikes me as tautological.
Moreover, Ogas writes:
"Physics cares not for time."
This strikes me as false as well. We have entropy, first of all, to contend with, that only increases over time. But also, the observable universe seems to be operating in the direction of time, with the formation of galaxies, stars, and whatnot progressing differently in one direction than in the other. This is not explained by Ogas.
4) He writes:
"There is no path through the equations of physics that will lead you from quarks to barbershop quartets."
This strikes me as false. There is a pretty clear path. It's well described by physics how quarks form into atoms, atoms into molecules and biopolymers, those into the building blocks of life, life evolving into humans, and social organization, etc, etc. There's no gap there that I feel that new physics is necessary to describe! There are perhaps bumpy parts along that path that need better fleshing out, but I certainly don't feel that anything Ogas has written here is providing an alternative pathway from quarks to quartets that is more intuitive than the story I could tell with modern physics.
Ogas argues that
"Time is the only physical variable that matter and Mind share in common. And yet, they do not share Time in common, for physics can move through time in any direction while purpose can only go forward in time."
We've already sort of disputed this earlier. I still think it's false. But moreover, there are quite plainly other physical variables that mind and matter share in common. Even if you believe in some level of mind-body duality, it's quite well-established that chemicals, electrical signals, and blunt trauma to the brain can affect your mind. So surely there must be other variables shared by mind and matter.
5) He doesn't really say much new here, but concludes:
"Why do we all of us, god and mortal alike, remember the Big Bang and look forward to the heat death of the universe?"
I think this is pretty falsifiable. I personally, would much rather turn around and voyage back to the big bang and see where it all started than go to the heat death of the universe. But also... I don't think this requires humans. At no point has Ogas demonstrated or made any argument explaining why, without purpose, rocks would still follow the thermodynamic arrow of time forward. If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it...
6) Purpose is choice? This section is mostly prose.
7) Nothing new here, but Ogas tries to sell us on the follow-up blog post:
"And purpose creates rich structures in time, largely unknown to most scientists. In the next article, we view what purpose has wrought upon the Commonality. We will examine the specific physical structures and flow generated by purposeful activity, including freewill and a recursive hierarchy of love."
Rich structures in time unknown to most scientists? The recursive hierarchy of love? Color me skeptical.
Conclusion: Not a genuinely novel grand unifying theory
Epistemic status: Quite confident
Reasons: None of Ogas's theories here are testable, nor are they particularly falsifiable, although they're almost so inconsistent as to be self-falsifying. He makes some pretty substantial errors in his interpretation of Maxwell's Demon. There is nothing I couldn't explain or understand before that Ogas's words here have now helped me explain or understand about the universe. I am left with the same questions about the nature of time and consciousness as before I read the piece, and Ogas hasn't even mentioned very important parts of physics that must be unified (gravity? dark matter? the Hubble tension? fine-tuned properties of our universe?)
@JussiVilleHeiskanen i would love Sabine's take! I think if the initial thing is easily dismissed then we'll have our answer. But if it causes enough ambivalence/if some early skeptics change their mind I think we can make a public pitch. My goal is to minimize noise by having these early reviewers either debunk or endorse it
@bens yes I'm trying to work out whether it should be (1) specific person that people trust who will read it & have an opinion or (2) just run a general survey / google form. Right now everyone who has read this blog post is clearly saying "no this is clearly BS", so if the people surveyed change their mind, i'd like that to be the resolution criteria? (I can run the survey, but do people trust me? does it make more sense for it to like, get posted on a physics stackexchange or something and be resolved there?)
@bens I've added new resolution criteria, what do you think? I got Andres (president & director of Qualia Research Institute) to commit to reading it & giving us his unbiased opinion, he wrote some words on his thoughts about Ogi here: https://x.com/algekalipso/status/1895586181339058312
I want the criteria to be erring on the side of "NO". If Andres (or other researchers we can find) say "this is potentially interesting" it's not enough. It needs to blow their mind / they have to publicly admit the original post was not overhyped for it to resolve to "YES")
@Defender no offense to the Qualia Research Institute and Andres, but that organization is not credible in my eyes at all. I've looked at their work before and I think its critics would describe it as "complete pseudoscience gibberish", and perhaps, most generously, "fringe, outsider science".
@bens that's fair, I feel like your input (or whoever you trust) would be the most meaningful to me. Would you like to be on the resolution criteria, or can you think of someone whose judgement you'd trust (and who wouldn't mind committing to reading this blogpost?) and we can say it'd only resolve if BOTH people concede, with their subjective judgement?
@Bayesian @bens alright Ben S is now in the resolution criteria! I've updated it to say only if "ALL" pass the high bar of "mindblowing" or something to that effect will the market pass. This is obviously a high bar & Ben has veto power, tilting the odds to NO (as it should i think for such a bold claim)
I'm on team YES but what I'm really hoping to happen is that Ogi will have enough novel material that, even if it doesn't blow people's minds, the responses of "here's why this can't work" or something will be illuminating, especially when you see several smart people all critiquing the same thing.