The modern scientific world view was built on the incommensurability between cognition (mind) and physics (matter) and later life and physics (the autonomy of biology). Fuelled by Boltzmann's view of the second law of thermodynamics as a ‘law of disorder’, the idea of ‘two opposing rivers’, the river of physics ‘flowing down’ to disorder and the river of life and mind ‘flowing up’ to higher states of order became a cornerstone of contemporary thinking. The deleterious result of this paradigmatic separation of physics, life and mind has been to considerably incapacitate each by bracketing many of the deepest problems of science, including the very nature of life itself and its cognitive capabilities, outside the theoretical reach of contemporary science. An expanded view of physics, notably the addition of the fourth law of thermodynamics (LMEP), or the law of maximum entropy production, coupled with first law time-translation symmetry, and the self-referencing circularity of the relational ontology of autocatakinetic systems, provides the basis for a grand unified theory unifying physics, life, information and cognition (mind). This dissolves the dysfunctional myth of the two rivers, and solves the previously insoluble problems at the foundations of modern science associated with it.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thermodynamics 2.0: Bridging the natural and social sciences (Part 1)’.