Just a contribution….

There is technically no way to strictly ‘falsify’ a TOE assumption. It is like saying the explanation of the universe is that everything is constituted from X-beans that can’t be observed and then saying what the rules of the X-beans are. Now to the positivists this causes them to lose interest immediately. If you can’t bite or scratch it its not real. But in science we have a lot of supposed realities that are not measurable. Force is not directly measurable. It is inferred from behavior of objects. So, the test of a world view does not include falsifiability, instead it is parsimony, which is like ‘explanatory elegance’. What minimal set of assumptions explain all phenomena considered? Today’s physics is perhaps the least parsimonious view we have ever had in the sciences. That is why it involves so much math. The reason is that it is based on mechanistic assumptions. When you start with mechanisms as the foundation, than anything whole will require an infinite number of them to get a full description. Like a Taylor series expansion. But there is a more parsimonious expression that will get the same series of fractional mechanisms. The goal of theory should be to find that parsimonious view. There are five other criteria too – generality, unity, formality, consistency, and utility; but parsimony is the justification for a realist program.

Now regarding ideas about theory and our disappointment with it, there are a lot of opinions these days that any realist interpretation, or intuitive or natural understanding of the otherwise heuristic equations is a wast of time. I don’t share that view for the following reason. Only the attempt to find a natural model will enforce parsimony. Otherwise, every view is as good as its use.

So, I think there is no problem suggesting ‘real’ interpretation as long as we understand that it is our best and current guess as to what may be in nature, necessarily stated in some dualistic thought because thought is dualistic. But we can also have a concept of non-duality, it is just that we won’t be able to describe it as such, it will appear as a non-dual limit of some dualism.

My point is that the exercise is worth doing – always has been in science. The only problem with mechanism is that we got stuck with it and refused to advance to more parsimonious views that would include it and new phenomena.

Cheers,
John