“If the universe instantly succumbed to any human explanation whatsoever … we’d be living in a world where stone age cosmology was literally true. Or … it would be like the old satires of the afterlife – a separate heaven for every conflicting faith – even before we died. But the world just isn’t like that. However much people disagree, we still find ourselves together, arguing about the nature of reality. We don’t float off into individual universes where our own private explanations are the ultimate truth.”

“Well, no.” I had a vivid image of the Mystical Renaissance theater troupe following Carl Jung – dressed in a Pied Piper costume – down a psychedelic wormhole into another cosmos entirely, where no rationalists could follow.

I said, “Doesn’t that suggest to you that the universe might not be participatory, after all? That the laws just might be fixed principles, independent of the people who understand them?”

“No.” Conroy smiled gently, as if this suggestion struck her as quaintly naïve. “Everything in relativity and quantum mechanics cries out against any absolute backdrop: absolute time, absolute history … absolute laws. But I think it does suggest that the whole idea of participation needs to be formulated rigorously in the mathematics of information theory, and different possibilities analyzed with great care.”

It was hard to argue with that. “To what end, though? If you’re not competing for the discovery of a successful TOE…?”

“The point is to understand the means by which TOE science can give rise to an active TOE. How knowledge of the equations can fix the reality they describe firmly in place – so firmly that we can’t even hope to see behind them, to glimpse the process which holds them there.”

I laughed. “If you admit we can’t hope to do that, you’ve just crossed right over into metaphysics.”

Conroy was unfazed. “Certainly. But we believe it can still be done in the spirit of science: applying logic, using appropriate mathematical tools. That’s what Anthrocosmology is: the old information-theoretic approach, revived as something external to physics. It may not be needed to discover the TOE itself – but I believe it can make sense of the fact that there is a TOE at all.”

I leaned forward – I think I was smiling, almost unwillingly – fascinated in spite of my skepticism. As cult pseudoscience went, at least this was high class bullshit.

“ How, exactly? Which of these possibilities you’ve ‘analyzed with great care’ can give a theory any kind of power which wasn’t already there in nature?”