I agree with the idea, more or less stated in another comment, that being smart and having a high IQ are not necessarily equivalent properties. But this makes judging intelligence all the more difficult. To be judged extraordinarily intelligent, one must communicate extraordinary thoughts to those doing the judging. But this raises a vexing issue: as any really intelligent person knows, communication is always a two-way street. This is not only because communication consists of at least two people exchanging information, but because each must understand what the other is saying. Unfortunately, extraordinary thoughts are often extraordinarily hard for most people to understand.

As relatively few people properly understand the CTMU, it is occasionally subject to erroneous opinionation. For example, it is not self-contradictory as claimed in this Q&A, but uniquely consistent … provably so, in fact. And at this point, perhaps the main reason - aside from bias and obstinacy - that its critics don’t better understand it is that the modern system of intellectual communication and commerce dominated by Academia, Inc. has been completely walled off from those who lack the academic stamp of approval (to which, if the truth be told, any reasonable concept of intellectual excellence is increasingly irrelevant). It’s a circular enterprise, a corrupt intellectual trade union that would make the Mafia blush. I can’t even post a paper to arXiv - one needs an institutional affiliation for that! (So much for the alleged neutrality and infallibility of “peer review”.)

Just to dispel any remaining confusion, the CTMU is absolutely serious. Furthermore, it is incontrovertible. What do I mean by that? I mean that if anyone were to gather the “best” philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, and physicists from the “best” universities in the world, they couldn’t put a dent in it even if those criticizing it here were helping them. They could, and would, be squashed like bugs, as publicly as one might like. If no one else were able or disposed to perform this service, I could easily handle it myself. The most with which they could get away would be an admission that the theory is unclear to them, or that they don’t find it “mathematical enough”. But in fact, the CTMU is a theory of metaphysics that is based entirely on mathematics, albeit of kinds that are not taught to most students in these fields.

Although some have maintained that the CTMU is “information-free” despite the mathematics that it obviously contains, the real truth is that they are personally incapable of registering the level of information that the CTMU conveys. For this, I can take no more than partial responsibility.

Is atheism more logical than religion? If God does not exist, theism doesn’t “lose,” but if God in fact exists, atheists will suffer.

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 21, 2017

No atheist is in a position to employ logic as a test of his belief system. Ontologically, his belief trumps logic itself; logic can have no absolute dominion over a universe which “just is” or which “randomly popped out of the void”. In fact, the general idea is that logic itself might as well have popped out of the void, ostensibly as a “quantum fluctuation” or the like, which of course fails to support the putative dependence of perceptual (scientific) reality on logic at all - one might as well try to establish a correspondence between the observable world and one’s favorite passage in a Harry Potter novel, which would perhaps be a fitting response to all of that cute-and-witty atheistic commentary to the effect that one might as well ascribe creation to a unicorn, tooth fairy, or cephalopodian “spaghetti monster” as to God.

There’s a flip side to this: many so-called theists seem to believe that logic is a necessary property of scripture, completely encoded in their semantically self-sufficient holy texts. This is not the case; though scripture does not encode a system of logic sufficient to determine a unique logical interpretation, it requires logical interpretation just as much as any other written work, and in fact far more urgently. Aside from doctrinal coercion, the reason that this necessity is so often missed is that standard logic provides no clue how it is to be met. It turns out that a sophisticated extension of standard logic is required for this purpose. Without it, theists are no better able to prove the logical integrity of their position than atheists who believe that reality requires no ontological explanation at all.

Within the proper extended logico-mathematical framework, the issue of logical consistency can be decided in favor of theism, and monotheism in particular. The vexing part is that many atheists and self-styled theists alike have walled off their minds to such an extent that they welcome a true logical determination with all the enthusiasm of vampires for sunlight and garlic. This must change, and it will.

Can Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) prove God's existence by logic?

Chris Langan
Updated May 6, 2017

The answer is yes, and it is completely unequivocal. This is obviously not the forum in which to argue about it, as out of the 10 answers which have thus far been posted, at least 8 are saying no for entirely the wrong reasons.

If you want a meaningful debate about this, my advice would be to find a widely recognized authority on the subject and get him to express an opinion on the matter under his real name in the full light of day, with his reputation on the line just as mine is. That way, he or she has something to lose as well as something to gain, and I have something to gain as well as something to lose (that’s how fair debates are conducted).

Examples: Richie Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, or someone else of that ilk. (Your problem, of course, will be that these people have been ducking me for years, and don’t want me to publicly mop the floor with them. Which I can certainly do.)

Is Chris Langan's Mega Foundation still active?

Chris Langan
Answered May 7, 2017

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we have a large construction project in progress that is designed to facilitate and enhance our operations.

Unfortunately, the construction has been delayed by various errors and oversights on the parts of some of the contractors involved. We won’t be able to make use of our new facilities until the problems are corrected, the construction project has been brought to a more advanced stage of completion, and we’ve brought in one or more volunteers to help with IT and physical maintenance.

Meanwhile, basic operations are continuous and ongoing, and we’ve tentatively scheduled a gathering for this autumn.

[By the way, the entire Mega Foundation website was placed on a secure platform two years ago in the expectation that the construction project would be complete and we could move forward again. The changes were quite extensive, but largely invisible to those visiting the site. As for the visible content of the site, it will change only if and when there is a need to change it. Additional content may of course be expected at some point.]

What does Chris Langan's typical day look like?

Chris Langan
Updated May 8, 2017

Thanks for asking, but I’m afraid this may be a little boring. I live on a ranch in an isolated rural location, so there’s very little in the way of nightlife and commercial entertainment. While it’s very pretty and private, the virtual absence of a local service economy means that we’re almost entirely on our own - for most of what needs to be done, there’s no nearby tradesman able to do it competently and affordably. Self-sufficiency is an indispensable virtue.

On a typical day, I wake up and make coffee for me and my wife. We may talk for a while about what needs to be done. I sit down at my desk and work on intellectual matters, transcribing the answers to any questions that had been on my mind before I retired (I usually wake up with the answers). I check my email and catch up on any accumulated business that may have hit my inbox - I run a nonprofit foundation, and I’m sometimes included in email distributions for physicists, mathematicians, and cognitive scientists with whose technical problems I sometimes try to help.

After a while, I exit the house - a 1500 ft^2 farmhouse built at the end of the 19th century, which I’ve largely rebuilt over the last 12 years or so - and tend to any urgent ranch business that may have emerged during the night, doing a few chores. (There are almost no professional ranch hands any more; even in agricultural areas such as this one, everyone wants to be a wealthy big shot like the gasbags and stuffed shirts on TV, or why work at all?) I return to the house, browse a couple of news sites to get some headlines - we have no live television connection here, just a television connected to a computer and a DVD player - and see to more business or do some more thinking and writing.

As midday approaches, my wife describes to me what she’s contemplating for lunch; I tell her how good it sounds, or request a slight modification. We eat lunch. I return to my desk and do a bit more work … how much depends on the lunch (too many carbs, and I might feel the urge to take a brief nap). I exit the house for another round of chores - feeding the animals, fortunately not an everyday necessity, consists of moving up to 20,000 pounds of hay into various pastures using either of two old but powerful JD diesel tractors. I come back inside and do some more thinking and writing. Dinner involves a slightly more elaborate repetition of the lunch routine. While the sun is still up, I go out and button everything down that needs to be secured before nightfall. I return to my desk and write until it’s time to go to sleep. I might watch a movie with my wife. Reload and repeat.

Interspersed among regular activities are limited breaks consisting of recreational pastimes like reading, writing music, or pumping a little iron. Telephone usage is relatively infrequent; there’s no real cell phone service in this remote location. When necessary, I make a trip to town (the two nearest towns are 8 and 10 miles away, but they lack real grocery stores, and the next-nearest towns are nearly 40 miles distant). If something requires me to catch a plane, I must leave 4-5 hours in advance because the nearest large airport is 120 miles away, and parking is often in limited supply. A recent unexpected trip to NYC for a television interview, for example, consumed two full days with almost no down time. It’s hard to get away for much longer than that due to the nature of the operation.

Of course, there's plenty of ad hoc variation. Ranches typically have many mouths to feed, and sometimes emergencies arise. The most recent emergency, for example, was an amorous 2000 pound black Angus outside the fence … one of my bulls, who had broken through the fence in order to court lonely cows across the road. Other kinds of emergency: an animal falls ill or gives birth; a stallion breaches the mares’ pasture “without permission”; a lightning storm passes through and sends a limb or an entire tree where it shouldn’t have gone, and so on. (It might even come to my attention that some logic-challenged troll has launched a polemical online attack on me or the CTMU, in which case I may attempt a little damage control … or maybe not.)

This is all very flexible and approximate, but I'm sure you get the picture.

What do scientists think of Chris Langan's CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered May 11, 2017

There are two kinds of science: empirical, and logico-mathematical or linguistic (logic and mathematics are just special kinds of language). They are inseparable in the sense that while mathematics exists in the minds of observable (physical) entities including mathematicians, the theoretical aspect of empirical science is dependent on logic and mathematics along with other ingredients of language.

In order to deal with the mutual dependency relationship between mathematical and observational reality, we require a level of science which spans both. This is the sense in which the CTMU is “scientific”; it is science of a higher and more powerful kind than empirical or mathematical science alone. In the vast majority of cases, neither mathematical nor empirical scientists are properly trained for this level of scientific discourse.

Model theory is a branch of logic having to do with the interpretation of empirical phenomena in theories and the mathematical structures of which they consist. Technically, the CTMU is a special kind of model theory designed to support the description of reality on the ontological level of discourse … the level on which reality fundamentally “exists”. On this level of science, the CTMU is absolutely impervious to attack. Just as logic itself contains no assumptions, neither does the CTMU. No one has ever gotten to first base against it, and no one ever will.

While many scientists have been misled into believing that their academic training should allow them to understand and even pass judgment on a high-level scientific theory like the CTMU, nothing could be farther from the truth. Nevertheless, some of the more incautious among them - especially those who fear its apparent theological implications - have expressed extremely negative opinions of it and its author (me). It is important to remember that none of these people has ever succeeded in putting a dent in it, and that every one of them could be easily crushed by anyone with sufficient understanding.

Readers are advised to bear this in mind as they read some of the other answers in this thread.

How does Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) prove the existence of a god?

Chris Langan
Answered May 11, 2017

The CTMU proves the existence of God by (1) explicating the deep structure of reality, and (2) showing that this structure possesses attributes conventionally ascribed to God.

No qualified and well-reputed physicist, philosopher, mathematician, linguist, theologian, or other professional has ever demonstrated that the CTMU contains a single error, or that it is not what I’ve just said it is, or that it fails to do what I’ve just said it does. In all likelihood, at least part of the reason for this is that no qualified, well-reputed professional academic in any relevant field is intellectually capable of doing so and making it stick, at least under his or her real name in the full light of day.

After nearly 30 years since the first papers were published on this subject, sincere and well-motivated readers may consider the CTMU and its implications to be written in stone. Further clarifications will be forthcoming.

(Papers on the CTMU have, by the way, been published in peer-reviewed journals. It is hard to say why any CTMU critic would deny this. But two fairly obvious reasons are that the critic recognizes only a select subset of journals in specific fields - in a word, “academic snobbery” - or that the critic is simply trying to conceal his or her inability to understand the content, in which case he or she should not be making negative comments about it on social media sites.)

How many kinds of after-life existences are there? Or do we simply merge with God and have our soul/personality dissipate into one consciousness?

Chris Langan
Answered May 15, 2017

On the most basic level, just two: one’s soul, or connection to God, is intact (good news), or it is corrupt and the connection is severed (bad news).

Without a soul that is at least partially intact, embedment in God cannot be maintained, and one is cut off from the source of existence. In this case, “the afterlife” consists of the disintegration, reduction, and recycling of personal identity, which is desperately resisted and thus a source of unimaginable despair (some call it “hell”). On the other hand, if the soul remains intact, the identity can persist in any of a number of specific ways depending on its strength and configuration.

Due to the possibility of a negative “life-after-death” outcome, this may not be the most popular answer you receive for this question. However, it is the real answer with a real basis in metaphysical logic.

Is Chris Langan's CTMU being resisted by people lacking virtue?

Chris Langan
Answered May 20, 2017

Over the years, most of the resistance to the CTMU has been found to emanate from people who:

1. Dislike it because they associate it with God, the very idea of Whom they hate;

2. Misunderstand it because they are ignorant or otherwise mentally limited;

3. Oppose it because they envy or resent its author, whom they regard with jealousy or hostility;

4. Hold it in contempt because it was not authored by a professional academic, whereas they indulge academic snobbery;

5. Reject it because they feel that it threatens them and their opinions and preconceptions;

6. Trivialize it because they are lazy, and it looks too much like work.

In other words, they lack some combination of spiritual awareness, reverence, gratitude, knowledge, intelligence, generosity, benevolence, open-mindedness, humility, courage, self-confidence, initiative, and the desire to learn. And because virtually all of them falsely blame their negativity toward the CTMU on the CTMU itself, they also lack honesty.

So regrettably, it would appear that the answer is yes.

Can anyone give a quick summary of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Jun 3, 2017

It couldn’t possibly be simpler. The CTMU is a theory that is not just a theory, but also its own universe AND its own model therein. In other words, it is trialic. Triality is an implication of a mathematical property called closure, which is analogous to cosmic self-containment. Any so-called “Theory of Everything” (ToE) must exhibit this property. Among all of the ToE candidates out there, only the CTMU actually does so. There is only one way to construct a theory of this kind: as a supertautology. A supertautology is simply the model-theoretic analogue of a propositional tautology, i.e., a tautology with ontological force. The entirety of modern empirical and mathematical science can be seamlessly embedded in this structure as a kind of limit.

Because of what it does, the CTMU may well be the single most important work of philosophy, theology, science, and mathematics ever conceived. Inasmuch as we will ever be privileged to truly know reality, we must know it as specified by this theory. When it comes to epistemology, the CTMU has no meaningful competition. In over thirty years, no one - regardless of claimed academic credentials and affiliations - has been able to put a dent of any kind in it, and due to its supertautological formulation, no one ever will.

This gives rise to a very important question: How is it possible for something like the CTMU to be discovered by a person who is subsequently introduced on every major television network in North America (and many abroad) as the “smartest man in America / the world”, and still draw no attention from Academia? The answer is simple but profoundly disturbing: Academia, and the wider economy which unwisely relies on it, also exhibits self-containment and the associated mathematical closure property. Its constant accumulation of power and influence has now given it a virtual monopoly on scientific communication, intellectual commerce, and even the right to obtain a decent job on the basis of personal merit and intelligence.

Because Academia is closed, outsiders - people who have not paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for its increasingly watered-down credentials - have no access to it, its personnel, or its journals. This allows it to exclude anything for which its own members cannot take exclusive credit (in any other context, this would amount to a “conspiracy to commit theft of intellectual property”). In my own case, there was never any choice about whether or not to obtain academic credentials, as not only did I lack the money to obtain them, but by some combination of error and contrivance which it is either unable or unwilling to explain, Academia repeatedly blocked me from doing so.

Anyone who has visited “10 different websites” pertaining to the CTMU and still “can’t make heads or tails” of it is not trying hard enough to understand it. In the last several decades, I have heard similar complaints too many times to count. For what it’s worth, essentially the same “unintelligibility” complaints were often heard about relativity theory and quantum mechanics (both of which are naturally embedded in the CTMU); it took many decades for this to change. But in the end, they prevailed. This is not only because they are good theories, but because they were introduced by professional academics, and were therefore taken seriously in Academia. Otherwise, they would have had no chance whatsoever.

Instead of railing against the CTMU and its author, those who find this state of affairs untenable should demand a reasonable accounting of the global academic bureaucracy, which has fattened beyond measure on the claim that it dutifully seeks, preserves, and disseminates valuable knowledge regardless of its nature or its source. In light of my own very telling experiences, this claim is not merely unjustifiable, but false on its face.

Thanks for your interest in the CTMU!

Does Chris Langan read the CTMU FB Discussion page?

Chris Langan
Updated Jun 3, 2017

I’ve visited the page only a couple of times. But then again, I just managed to get subscribed. (Please bear in mind that if I were to answer every question that anyone feels like asking me, I’d get very little done on the CTMU or the ranch. The US economy is degenerate, and good help is getting very hard to find these days. You can’t even find a high school kid willing to mow the lawn - apparently, most of them are either lazy or get too much allowance. Or maybe it’s that they’re “above all that”, being precious snowflakes who prefer to reserve their time for the properly vetted PC/ SJW campaigns of their choosing.)

UPDATE (June 03, 2017): A very queer situation has arisen at Facebook, apparently due to policies instituted by its proprietor Mark Zuckerberg. Although I’m given to understand that Facebook has several accounts for “Christopher Langan” and even “Christopher Michael Langan”, the real “Christopher Michael Langan”, namely yours truly, was recently delisted from Facebook on the absurd premise, advanced by an obvious troll, that I was “using a false identity” (the name under which I’ve gone since I was 6 years old) to contribute to the Facebook CTMU Group. In short, all the fake and/or lesser-known “Christopher Langans” are still on Facebook; only the real one, from whom people really want to hear, has been rejected.

Naturally, I appealed this decision, sending in two (2) forms of identification listed in the Facebook document “What types of ID does Facebook accept?” Breaking its own rules, Facebook declined to restore my account! I hate to have to say it, but it seems that Facebook rules are strictly for those with whom Mark Zuckerberg, a notorious atheist, happens to agree. Unfortunately, Christopher Michael Langan does not appear to be a person with whom Mr. Zuckerberg agrees.

As long-time CTMU fans are well aware, the CTMU and I have been subject to vicious attack by atheistic trolls for the last three decades. This is just the most recent proof that there is something concerted, coherent, and to put it bluntly, nasty and counterproductive going on with the “New Atheism” (i.e., the Old Atheism dressed up in the emperor’s new clothing) … which is why, for example, there is no CTMU article on Wikipedia to this very day.

It’s been dirty pool all the way with CTMU/Langan critics in the social media. It’s the only kind of pool these people seem to know.

What does Chris Langan think of quantum theory, and how does it relate to his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Jun 11, 2017

Quantum theory is a quantum-probabilistic approximation of an overall theory of causation, the CTMU.

Is atheism a belief or a conclusion?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 18, 2017

Atheism is definitely a belief.

The word atheism can be broken down into lexical constituents in two ways: (1)athe(o)+ism (belief in the nonexistence of God) and (2) a+theism (nonbelief in the existence of God). An atheist must conform to both definitions (1 implies 2), not just definition 2.

Why? If one chooses definition 2 alone, this implies that one is not described by definition 1, which makes one an agnostic as conventionally defined in juxtaposition to theism and atheism. That is, lacking knowledge supporting either the existence or the nonexistence of God, one believes in neither.

Many atheists, some calling themselves “agnostic atheists”, have taken to claiming that they are covered by definition 2 alone. Why? Because it seems to excuse them from any burden of proof. However, this renders their position theologically indefinite and therefore irrelevant. They merely lack belief in God without having any good reason for not believing in God, and thus have no definite theological position. (If one has a good reason for not believing in the existence of God, then one conforms to definition 1 after all.) Only if one subscribes to both definitions 1 and 2 is one a real atheist.

Any atheist who responds by saying that his “good reason” for not believing in God is that “there is no evidence for the existence of God” merely incurs another burden of proof, this one epistemological: he needs to prove (or at least confirm) that there is no evidence for the existence of God. But as no atheist is in a position to attest to anything but his own subjective knowledge state regarding such matters, this is out of the question.

So the bottom line is that if you want to call yourself an atheist, then you must believe in the nonexistence of God, period … and once again, you have a burden of proof to that effect. Otherwise, you’re just a garden variety agnostic, and in that case, you shouldn’t be butting into theological discussions as though you have anything definite to say. Nor should you be claiming the rational high ground without rational justification of your own.

As for atheism being a “conclusion”, that depends on how it is inferred and from what premises. Unfortunately, the best theoretical framework in which to derive such a conclusion is “methodological naturalism”, which is simply the assumption or belief that only the content of the natural (empirical) sciences is real. In other words, the conclusion is derived from a mere belief, and we have arrived back at the start of the discussion.

How does Rational Wiki compare to Less Wrong?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 18, 2017

“Less Wrong” appears to be a Q&A site, perhaps a bit like Quora itself. As can be expected of such sites, it is slanted and not without its share of uninformed and/or objectionable opinion, but occasionally affords a modicum of useful information.

In contrast, “Rational Wiki” is a website which is designed to look like Wikipedia, but which is actually more like a pseudointellectual tourist trap whose inhabitants are fiercely dedicated to the mockery and defamation of people and ideas to which its proprietor objects. (As nearly as anyone can determine, this is an obscure Canadian resident and “secular humanist” calling himself “Trent Toulouse”.) It exhibits a strong and persistent bias against conservatives, roundly insulting and belittling non-leftists at every available opportunity. It is also noted for its boundless contempt for religion and metaphysics, dismissing anything its contributors find difficult to understand as “nonsense” or “woo”. Unlike Wikipedia, the site appears to have no clean-up crew(s) responsible for toning down the vitriol of its editorializers.

As I know from long personal experience, Mr. Toulouse and his his gaggle of mostly pseudonymous partisans go after people and ideas they dislike quite aggressively. They’ve been going after me for years, always ranking high on the Google pages returned on my name. They’ve even taken to posting pictures of me with silly captions, doing their very best to make sure that none of their readers takes anything I say the least bit seriously. Such monkeyshines are unconstrained and apparently receive in-house encouragement.

Unfortunately, although these juvenile tactics fool no one with any intelligence, the misinformation shows no sign of abating, and its purveyors show no sign of even trying to comprehend the ideas they criticize. In the case of my own work, this means that they exhibit no understanding of metaphysical philosophy or the logic on which it properly comes to rest.

Browsers beware. With sites like this all over the place, a search engine can be a very dangerous thing. ;)

Is mathematics unreasonably effective in the natural sciences?

Chris Langan
Answered Dec 24, 2017

Reality consists of patterned substance, i.e., substance which displays patterns through which it is recognized. “Pattern” is thus analogous to the syntax in terms of which a language is recognized by its users. Mathematics is a human formalization of the highest (most ubiquitous) level of this syntax, and thus describes reality and our recognition of it in a very general way.

As it presently exists, this formalization is not perfect; despite what one sometimes hears from self-congratulatory professional academics, the patterns which have thus far been formalized by human mathematicians are only imperfectly understood by them. However, mathematics can nonetheless be functionally defined as “the patterns through which we recognize our reality”, thus circumventing the intellectual shortcomings of human mathematicians. This generic functional definition can then be trimmed using any special-purpose restrictions we might wish to apply in particular contexts.

When mathematics is defined in this way, its effectiveness in the natural sciences is no mystery at all; it is effective in the natural sciences precisely because it describes the syntax through which natural scientists identify reality. This relationship between reality and those who observe, study, and theorize about it is called a “supertautology”, the structure of which requires that reality be modeled as a special kind of “language”. This has all been formalized in a true “theory of everything” called the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). The CTMU can be described as a metatheory of science, or if one prefers, as “(meta)mathematical metaphysics”.

The CTMU has been the best-kept secret in the history of science and philosophy for the last thirty years or so. This is because it amounts to metaphysics, which many so-called experts absurdly regard as impossible despite their manifest inability to argue coherently against it. Thus, even though the CTMU was authored by a man widely described as the smartest in the world (Christopher Langan), it has been roundly ignored in what can only be described as a collective fit of academic spite and incomprehension.

Could Chris Langan's CTMU just be one big ploy to demonstrate the gullibility of academics?

Chris Langan
Answered Dec 28, 2017

Hmmm … I wonder. After all, we have the Sokal debacle to consider. But if so, then to judge from the number of academics who have expressed interest over the years, one would think that academia had “passed the test”. On the other hand, one might also think that some courageous academic big shot who actually knows what he’s doing in the field would have stepped forward to either hit the CTMU with a knockout punch, or take a hard shot on the chin and get put on his smug, self-satisfied ass by it. (My money’s on the CTMU. ;)

To all those with IQ scores above 150, what is your take on the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 6, 2018

I’m fairly well-known for having an IQ well above 150, and I also have the advantage of being the author of the CTMU. Not only is the CTMU the only theory of reality with complete logical integrity, but any other theory of reality which cannot be wholly interpreted in the CTMU - i.e., mapped into it on all orders with complete preservation of structure - is erroneous.

No one has ever succeeded in both exhibiting any understanding of what the CTMU actually says, and finding an error in it. This is because the CTMU has been structured in such a way that no errors are logically possible. (Bear in mind that the CTMU does not rely on empirical methodology, from which nothing can be definitively established beyond the level of direct perception, but instead utilizes a new kind of metalogical inference to justify itself.

Who is more valuable to humanity, Chris Langan, who claims proof of god, or Elon Musk, businessman, who tries to secure power by presenting a good image and expanding his portfolio?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 6, 2018

Let’s have a rational look at this question, shall we?

Just so no one gets confused, let’s make it as simple as possible. Take a socio-economic system X, and two people A and B within it. Suppose that A is a corporate CEO who has never actually invented or discovered anything (but managed to attract a lot of favorable attention from venture capitalists and investment bankers), and that B is a person who has weathered a lot of adversity in order to bring humankind a new worldview (no one who actually understands anything about the CTMU denies that it is both original and insightful, and in any case, I could easily crush anyone who denies it were I so disposed).

As we all know, value and scarcity are very closely related. The scarcer something is, the more valuable it is. CEO’s are a dime a dozen, and so are salesmen who can attract a lot of favorable attention from venture capitalists and investment bankers. In fact, they’ve become annoyingly common, and even worse, we seem to have more of them every day. Clearly, such people are only as valuable as they are irreplaceable. But if techie billionaires / corporate CEO’s were ever irreplaceable, this is no longer the case. Any one of them can be replaced by any other; they all cherry-pick whatever experts they might need from Academia, Inc., and delegate all of the real intellectual responsibility to their employees. And as if that weren’t enough, their positive value exists only with respect to the system X in which their social utility is defined; if X happens to be displacing a better system, then their true value is negative.

It follows that their comparative human worth is strictly limited, and the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that there aren’t a million others out there who could step into their shoes and rake in the loot just as well as they do.

Who was/is smarter, John Von Neumann or Chris Langan?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 6, 2018

I’ve always admired John von Neumann and greatly respected his intelligence. But still, a couple of things need to be said here.

Obviously, answering this kind of question requires a suitable measure of intelligence. Failing to specify such a measure, and for that matter a suitable definition of “intelligence”, amounts to throwing open the door to any measure or definition at all, including measures and definitions which eventually turn out to be unseemly mixtures of bias and opinion.

Secondly, while I agree that John von Neumann was a very interesting person, his life was largely determined by the fact that he was a relatively coddled child prodigy who was fast-tracked every inch of the way through it. My life has been lived much “closer to the bone”, so to speak. (Yes, von Neumann was a genius, but there are many geniuses out there who didn’t get all of his opportunities.)

Thirdly, in order to make an authoritative comparison between two people, one must know an appreciable amount about both of them. But while many people know a great deal about John von Neumann, relatively few know anything at all about me, and even fewer know anything about my work (a topic of great confusion among so-called “experts” in science and philosophy).

It has been stated that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Can Christopher Langan explain his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) simply?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 7, 2018

Obviously, “simple” is a relative term. Something which may be unfathomably complex to a monkey - integral calculus, for example - might be very easy for a more intelligent creature, e.g. a moderately intelligent human being, to grasp. This general situation applies throughout the entire range of variation of intelligence and complexity. In short, the meaning of “simple” depends on intelligence and intelligence differentials.

Just as obviously to anyone who is both intelligent and well-motivated enough to have familiarized himself / herself with my published work before criticizing it, I have given what I consider very simple, very straightforward explanations of the CTMU. Unfortunately, certain people persist in claiming that they are too complex to be understood … and just to make sure that no one misses their displeasure, these people run around posting their disappointment to various social media, sometimes seeming to cross the boundary which separates honest, constructive criticism from trolling.

My honest impression is that either my simplifications have remained too complex for certain people to understand given their best efforts to do so, OR certain people didn’t really make their best effort to make sense of them. For example, perhaps certain people rejected my explanations because accepting them would have forced them to let go of something dear to them, e.g., atheism. (I need scarcely mention that it would be inappropriate for me to apologize to such people, as in this case, the fault lies entirely with them.)

This being understood, the CTMU represents a major paradigm shift. The thing about paradigms is that they have a great deal of inertia, comprising underlying models in which people implicitly interpret what they read and hear. Thus, paradigm shifts are obstructed by the conceptual inertia of existing paradigms. In academia, the prevailing paradigm is “naturalism”, which in various contexts is synonymous with physicalism, materialism, and even secularism. I think the problem here may be that some people are so cognitively invested in this paradigm that they unwittingly attempt to interpret proposed alternatives in the very cognitive framework which those alternatives are designed to replace, thus sabotaging their own comprehension.

I hope this helps, if only a little. Rest assured that I intend to keep trying - even when a person who is drowning goes into an irrational panic and ignores the life preserver he/she is thrown, the rescuer still has the option of jumping into the water, physically subduing him, and making him wear it. (It’s either that, or the victim might actually drown. ;)

When will a relatively known academic openly and publicly criticize specific contents of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), putting his reputation at risk because the CTMU is absolutely true?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 11, 2018

It could happen any day, although I wouldn’t give you a fig for the academic’s chances of making his or her “specific criticisms” stick. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the CTMU is logically unassailable, and this is not subject to spontaneous change.

Incidentally, the last paper published on the CTMU (“An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics”) has reportedly been downloaded many thousands of times, perhaps even setting some kind of record for the academic journal in which it appeared.

Is Chris Langan a racist by implication or otherwise of his support for eugenics?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 11, 2018

This question seems to come down to “Does support for eugenics (under its original and valid definition) imply racism?”

The answer is very clear: NO. Eugenics, defined as the maintenance or improvement of human genetic quality and integrity, can be pursued without respect to race, or even simultaneously within each existing racial group.

However, there seem to be some unspoken assumptions here … for example, that Christopher Langan is a “eugenicist” under some unspecified definition of the term. Where the definition is allowed to vary, the accuracy of this assumption would depend on the particular definition that is chosen.

For example, where eugenics is defined as reasonable attention to genetic hygiene in order to prevent genomic degradation and reverse evolution attending the artificial suspension of environmental constraints and limitations - i.e., the suspension of “natural selection” using medical and other kinds of technology - the assumption would be accurate. (Show me someone who does not share this opinion, and I’ll show you someone who is profoundly irrational on the species level of human identity.)

But where eugenics describes the current effort of the parasitic oligarchy to monopolize adaptive traits by “dumbing down”, suicidally indoctrinating, and genetically homogenizing various sectors of the human population without respect to fitness (as defined with respect to a sustainable refinement of modern civilization), the assumption would be false. In particular, I am against the use of weaponized mass immigration to commit demographic genocide against the indigenous populations of all and only Western (White majority) nations, as well as the rapid ongoing destruction of Western culture, family values, educational integrity, population genetics, and patterns of reproduction in the name of multiculturalism, diversity, and social justice.

[There is an answer below which accuses me of wanting to “sterilize people with low IQs, average IQs, *and* moderately high IQs”, and even to drag young girls away from their parents in order to perform “invasive surgical procedures” on them. Nowhere have I ever advocated anything of the kind. The answer in question is factually incorrect, misleading, and defamatory.]

Why does Chris Langan use the term “super-tautology”?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 12, 2018

Isn’t is obvious? “Supertautology” is a new and very important mathematical concept to which everyone had best get accustomed if one wants to understand the first thing about the true nature of reality. To reject supertautology is to reject the reality that we inhabit.

Why do people have such a hard time understanding the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe by Chris Langan?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 12, 2018

Different people no doubt have different reasons for their confusion regarding the CTMU. Some lack the background to understand it, and are unwilling to put forth the time and effort needed to remedy this situation; others feel threatened by the prospect that the CTMU will displace some cherished belief such as atheism or materialism.

But perhaps the most general reason is that the CTMU represents a new paradigm for the human conception of reality, and new paradigms cannot be fully understood in terms of the old paradigms which they replace. It follows that paradigm shifts are resisted by people who, unwittingly or by preference, cling to old paradigms.

What is God according to Chris Langan? What does he think about the established religions such as Christianity or Islam?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 12, 2018

God, best understood as Ultimate Reality, has (supertautological) structure which implies certain properties which are consistent with the definitions of God that occur in major world religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Simultaneously modeling the main scriptural components of these religions in this structure makes them theologically and ontologically consistent.

Theological and ontological consistency is limited to just those religions which can be modeled in this way.

What is the definition of “infocognition” by Chris Langan?

Chris Langan
Updated Jan 13, 2018

Infocognition is a convergent generalization of information and cognition based on the fact that cognition is a process which, by definition, informs (generates information for) the cognitive processor.

That is, when you (let’s call you “X”) cognitively apprehend Y, you are informed of Y by the act of cognition. Conversely, when anything X is informed of (or affected by) something Y which causes a state transition in X, this amounts to what can be described as a generalized cognition event, namely the (re)cognition of Y by X.

Thus, by the universality of information, it is possible to generalize cognition in such a way that the coupling is universal.

Is 2018 the year Chris Langan‘s CTMU will start to take off, leaving its notorious critics behind and bringing happiness to good people?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 14, 2018

I’d love to answer in the affirmative, but it’s not up to me alone.

Will there be a discussion between old Stephen Hawking and Chris Langan anytime soon?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 14, 2018

ABC News reportedly tried to set up a meeting between me and Hawking in the late 1990’s. (They asked me and I agreed.) Unfortunately, it turned out that Hawking was surrounded by academic flunkies who carefully screened all of his invitations, and they (apparently) screened me out.

Oh, well. C’est la vie.

What religions are not compatible with Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 25, 2018

All logically consistent religions are compatible with the CTMU in the sense that they can be interpreted (or modeled) within it. This follows from the fact that the CTMU is a metaphysical extension of logic in which logic can metalogically refer to itself.

Will Elon Musk study the CTMU and thus turn into a productive member of society?

Chris Langan
Updated Jan 27, 2018

I have no idea whether Elon Musk is even aware of the CTMU. However, the fact that he is reputed to be a convicted atheist suggests that the CTMU is not on his list of preferred reading material.

I have never said, and would not say, that Elon Musk is not “a productive member of society”. I would merely point out that the uniqueness and long-term value of his contributions has not yet been determined.

There is another answer on this page which, itself and in its comments section, contains several factually incorrect and/or pejorative statements or insinuations regarding me and the CTMU. As its comments are now disabled - which raises the question of how any comments got there in the first place - and lest the author’s personal opinion be mistaken by the unwary for the official stance of Quora, I’ll take this opportunity to include a few corrections.

If there is a CTMU/Langan “advertising ploy in action”, I have nothing to do with it. I’ve posted only one question on Quora, and it was merely a duplicate of a previous question which had been erased by the OP along with my answer (this could ostensibly be verified by the Quora IT department, although I have no idea how one would make that happen). I have never instructed anyone, either publicly or privately, to post any questions whatsoever about me or my work on this site or any other.

I have never said that “If Elon Musk doesn’t believe in this [CTMU] theory then he isn’t a productive member of society, and … is going to hell.”

I have never said that “every single other person [out of “billions of people”] who doesn’t believe in this theory” is unproductive and therefore going to hell. I have no idea where this strange notion originated.

It is erroneous of the author to assume that “if she continue[s] to see such questions, [she] will know [her] theory is correct— that this is nothing more than a cloaked advertising campaign going on.” Such questions could just as well be generated by honest interest in the CTMU. (After all, several academic papers have been published on it.)

It is not necessarily true that “Something that is truth and sincere is not promoted Anonymously.” In fact, the truth value of a theory or assertion is independent of who promotes it or how.

It is not true that “[The CTMU] never went anywhere for no one really took it seriously.” My CTMU papers have been downloaded hundreds of thousands if not millions of times, and attracted many sincere followers.

The author links to an extremely contemptuous and pejorative screed by another Quora participant claiming to be a “physicist” or a student of physics. This screed was duly collapsed long ago by Quora Moderation. She has attempted to “uncollapse it” by linking to it in a comment, prompting others to read it. This clearly opposes the attempt of Quora Moderation to quarantine it.

[Addendum: The person responsible for generating all of the above errors has apparently modified her original answer to assert that Quora never collapsed the misleading and aggressively disparaging answer of the so-called “physicist” she cites. Yet I still find it to have been collapsed, as I have found it since around the time the alleged “physicist” lost an argument with me in its comments section and had all of my comments (and possibly also my own answer to the question) collapsed or totally removed. So either the “physicist’s” answer was collapsed as I’ve stated, or Quora is collapsing different answers for different people.]

That should do it for now. I hope I’ve dispelled or at least reduced any confusion that may have existed with regard to the above issues.

Within the context of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), could we technically be in a computer simulation of sorts, with ‘God’ being the programmer?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 31, 2018

Yes. According to the CTMU, reality can be understood as a “self-simulation”, at least in the sense that what we see outside of ourselves - the physical universe - conceals the process which actually produces it, and cannot account for the entirety of what producing it actually requires.

However, the simulation is not merely computational in the mechanical sense, but (in CTMU terminology) “protocomputational” or “precomputational”. That is, it utilizes a kind of “metaprocessing” called telic recursion, which generates entire timelines instead of individual events.

God is indeed the Programmer-in-Chief, but does His “programming” largely through secondary sensor-controllers, including human beings, which locally inhabit the simulation. As for God Himself, He distributes over the entire simulation and is therefore omnipresent.

The entire simulation can be reduced to a master “programming language” sometimes referred to as Logos, which is trialic, serving as its own universe and model. On a more technical level, it is known as the CTMU.

Can SCSPL from Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) explain or map psychosis/schizophrenia and other mental health phenomena?

Chris Langan
Answered Jan 31, 2018

Of course it can. The CTMU isn’t called the “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe” for nothing.

The discipline of psychology began with metaphysics. Initially, before it was overpowered by physicalism and behaviorism, psychology permitted the consideration of mind without insisting that it be supervened entirely on matter. In contrast to the “naturalism” in terms of which modern psychology is understood, its older and more primitive theory even included mention of supernatural entities like angels and demons, and sometimes weird diagnoses and treatments to go along with them.

But then came the Age of Reason, and eventually, a complete reversal. Instead of remaining a spiritual being, man came to be interpreted in a mechanistic model of self according to which a human being is nothing but a machine … a classical-mechanical automaton driven by self-interest and governed by impersonal laws of nature and rules of behaviorism, subject to conditioning on the basis of individual utility as defined on the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and biological standards of “fitness” including survival and reproduction. As for mind, it was pretty much reduced to brain.

But another reversal is now at hand, and everything is poised to come full circle. Physicalism has gone bankrupt, standing in embarrassed silence before the great metaphysical conundrums of science and philosophy - conundrums at which its orthodox practitioners foolishly insisted on tilting like champions - as a tired old hobo with holes in its shoes and its pockets turned inside-out. Just as physics must now yield once again to metaphysics, as it has done so many times before, so must the physicalistic abortion that currently passes for psychology.

The rehabilitation of psychology will be complete only when its partial physical interpretation has been extended to include the metaphysical ingredients of reality on which a meaningful definition of mind clearly depends … in short, when it remembers its spiritual origins and takes its place as one of many integrated disciplines within the CTMU “master-language”, SCSPL.

What is the world’s current, in use, equivalent to Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 1, 2018

The CTMU is unique, and has the conceptual structure to prove it. In fact, it can be described as an ontological characterization of self-uniqueness, and as such, it occupies a higher level of discourse than any other human conceptual framework.

However, with certain exceptions which vary from example to example, the best mainstream approximations of the CTMU might include (1) certain strains of advanced mainstream mathematics, particularly at the foundational level; (2) certain novel scientific constructs like the Holographic Universe; (3) certain works of mainstream philosophy like A.N. Whitehead’s “panentheism”; and (4) the world’s great religions, each of which instantiates certain aspects of it.

Bear in mind that none of these examples “duplicates” the CTMU to any large extent, and that all include statements that must be modified or eliminated for complete CTMU consistency (if only as doctrinal baggage). The CTMU accepts none of them a priori, and brings to bear certain insights that all of them lack.

Why does Chris Langan get so much praise on Quora?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 3, 2018

Oh, please. The undeniable fact is that I attract far more trolling than praise on Quora. There are “Top Writers” here who have trolled me viciously in spiteful, misleading, profanity-laced tirades, received literally thousands of upvotes for doing so, and resisted all attempts to remove their defamation despite repeated complaints. Meanwhile, I get at most a few dozen upvotes for unique, informative, demonstrably correct answers that they couldn’t have duplicated if they were given several centuries in which to do so, and have been subjected to the removal of dozens of my own well-reasoned comments defending myself and my work from troll attacks. If I were looking for “praise”, this would be one of the last places in the world I’d come for it.

Is it possible to mathematically represent conceptual abstraction of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe? If so what is the proof?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 5, 2018

Yes. In fact, it is possible to mathematically represent any coherent conceptual abstraction. All one needs to do is define one or more symbols to represent it and/or its components, and then specify a mathematical structure to which the symbols conform, usually something “algebraic”. A language is an algebraic structure, and the CTMU is the start symbol of the grammar through which its detailed structure emerges. Now here’s the cherry on the sundae: because the language in question is supertautological, its grammar is self-verifying, thus obviating the need for additional proof … which, however, is by no means precluded. (See how easy that was?)

What is metaphysics according to Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 9, 2018

According to the CTMU, metaphysics is a unique explanatory metalanguage of physics with certain mathematical properties that have been explored in various papers and essays which are readily available online.

What does concept of "syndiffeonesis" mean in Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 9, 2018

Syndiffeonesis translates to “difference in sameness”. It defines the generic relational structure of reality in terms of syntactic distribution and coherence: given any relationship of any arity and order, its synetic (invariant syntactic) level must distribute over its diffeonic (variable) level, which consists of things to be discerned or distinguished, thereby providing them with a unified basis of cognitive and/or perceptual coherence. Basically, it says that common (uniformly distributed) syntax is required in order for any number of things to be recognized, no matter how generically, as different or distinct, or to identify any one thing as different from its complement.

Can critics of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) offer specific criticism that identifies which specific aspects of the CTMU are false?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 10, 2018

CTMU critics occupy two general categories: those who at least partially understand the CTMU, and those who do not.

Those who understand the first thing about the CTMU realize that by virtue of its structure, its content is invulnerable to attack; their critiques thus tend to focus on presentation and emphasis.

On the other hand, this invulnerability to substantive criticism naturally limits those who do not understand the CTMU to various indirect and illogical forms of argumentation including straw man arguments, ad hominem polemics, stylistic critiques, and irrational outbursts sometimes including insult, profanity, and outright libel (this can be verified right here on Quora, where one malicious but nonetheless popular anti-CTMU screed stridently declares it to be the manure of two different species of large farm animal).

As for the hypothetical possibility of “specifically identifying false aspects” of the CTMU, it would be irrational to assign it a probability greater than zero.

Why does Chris Langan state in the CTMU that the randomness of DNA mutations in Darwinian evolution is indeterminant and thus "magic" when there are clear deterministic explanations of how this randomness arises?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 10, 2018

Because “random determinacy” is an oxymoron. Even statistical determinacy and mathematical chaos merely consist of microscopic events which themselves have no ultimate explanation, and therefore do not qualify as fully determinate. Full determination requires not just the full expression of a standard causal function including all parameters and inputs, but ordinal completion (“first causation” or causal closure). [In fact, it requires even more than that, but this should be enough to chew for now.]

What does Telic Recursion mean in Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 10, 2018

In the CTMU, telic recursion is “metacausation”. That is, it is a level of the causal evolution of reality which distributes over standard causation and is orthogonal to it in the sense that it generates entire timelines (cause-effect event sequences, networks of quantum entanglement) as opposed to mere single events.

What do “syntax” and “state” mean in Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 14, 2018

In the CTMU, these terms refer to properties and valuations thereof.

[Please note: The level of detail in my answers regarding the CTMU, which was authored by me around three decades ago, is being limited by the apparent efforts of another Quora participant to appropriate them. In particular, Quora seems to have become a major outlet for a self-described 22 year-old philosophy undergraduate who is trying to put together a graduate thesis, and is apparently bent on doing it by feigning originality for certain aspects of my work. Although he already claims to have a “more elegant, precise and complete” “theory of metaphysics” which he tries to pass off as “naturalistic” (a contradiction in terms), I have seen no evidence whatsoever of scientific, mathematical, or philosophical competence in anything he has written. This person’s constant efforts to misinform people about the CTMU are harmful to the veracity of Quora. Thanks for your attention.]

What is UBT (unbound telesis) in the CTMU? How can it be observed?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 14, 2018

In the CTMU, UBT (unbound telesis) is the inevitable result of unbinding (reversing the binding of) telesis.

How close is Chris Langan to solving the P versus NP problem?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 14, 2018

The matter has been satisfactorily resolved for my own purposes (which, incidentally, are the only purposes about which I care in this context).

There are two different solutions, one of which applies in a certain framework defined as “metacausal”, “precomputational” or “protocomputational”, and the other of which applies in a causal or computational limit thereof. This amounts to a relativization of the solution. Although I can’t say for sure, I suspect that in the view of the “Millennium Prize” Committee, this falls short of an actual Y|N solution, leaving me nothing whatsoever to gain by submission.

(We also have the serious problem of bias on the Millennium Prize Committee, expressed by Andrew Wiles as their complete certainty that no non-academic is capable of solving any of the problems. This, of course, guarantees that the submissions of nonacademics will in effect be circular-filed, leaving them no rational choice but to disregard such prizes, and where necessary, the professional academics who award them to each other.)

Can Chris Langan explain his CTMU M=R principle? Why is it necessarily true?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 15, 2018

Can Chris Langan explain his CTMU M=R principle?

Very easily. As explained from the time it was first mentioned, the expression “M=R” expresses the duality (not dualism) of internal and external state.

Why is it necessarily true?

It is necessary as a requirement of intelligibility, without which there is no discernible reality to be scientifically explained.

Some people don’t like this principle, claiming that it’s not a “real mathematical equation”. But it certainly is. The problem is that the contentious little geniuses who reject it understand neither the full range of modern mathematical usage of the “=” sign, nor the perils of showing one’s ignorance by criticizing what one fails to understand.

What exactly is Chris Langan trying to convey in the CTMU, (in layman’s terms), and what is his goal/expectation in doing so?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 18, 2018

What exactly is Chris Langan trying to convey in the CTMU (in laymens terms)?

I’m trying to convey the deepest and most general formal characterization of the structure of reality. Specifically, I’m trying to convey the fact that reality as a whole takes the form of a certain uniquely structured and profoundly self-contained language.

What is his goal/expectation in doing so?

My goal is to help mankind avoid the nasty but at least partially avoidable pain and misery that it recurrently brings upon itself due to its substantial ignorance of the structure and meaning of the reality that it inhabits.

Can someone elaborate on how the MU principle relates to the ''problem'' of Unity and Multiplicity in the CTMU? How does MU defines the relationship between the two?

Chris Langan
Answered February 18, 2018

In the CTMU, the Principle of Multiplex Unity - which can be simplistically expressed, in the language of John Archibald Wheeler, as “one universe out of many” - explains how reality coheres despite consisting of many parts which appear to be separate and largely independent of each other. In the 2002 paper The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory, it is a well-defined mathematical concept explicitly related to dual forms of inclusion. It is strongly related to the CTMU concepts syndiffeonesis and supertautology.

Without the MU Principle, there would be no way to coherently interconnect our many “subjective universes” - or if one prefers, the set of scientific observers and frames of reference - in one common reality.

When will Chris Langan release a purely mathematical version of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 19, 2018

There is no “purely mathematical version” of anything with real-world meaning.

“Pure”, uninterpreted, unapplied mathematics is devoid of external correspondence; no theory which consists exclusively of “pure mathematics” has real-world relevance. At the very least, definitions must be given which apply to the real world as well as to the mathematical structures themselves, along with an overall real-world correspondence (model).

As for the question “When will Chris Langan release a mathematical version of the CTMU?” (note the elimination of “purely”), I’ve already done this on several past occasions. Further mathematical descriptions are in the works, but must await proper venues for publication.

How does a global society behave that finally comes to accept that Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) is true?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 19, 2018

This question can be rephrased as follows:

How does a society behave that accepts truth on the physical and metaphysical levels?

It behaves more sustainably and with greater resilience than a society anchored to a flawed, inexorably sinking worldview. It offers real meaning to its members, and is not disrupted by frequent descents into irrationality. And by encouraging intellectual competence and creativity, it has the potential to maintain a high general standard of living.

Why do comments which disagree with Chris Langan/CTMU keep disappearing from Quora?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 20, 2018

Owing to the double whammy of being known for high intelligence and metaphysical (anti-physicalist) reasoning, I’m often stalked by pests. Or perhaps it’s simply because I’m a little better-known out here in the real world than most Quora participants, and thus seem an attractive target for those who would take a shortcut to notoriety by forcing me to recognize their existence in order to siphon off a little public recognition.

Unfortunately, this army of pests includes several Quorans who have displayed a marked tendency to “specialize in my case”. Not only have some of them posted misleading, prejudicial, impertinent, and sometimes downright toxic answers for questions about me and/or my work, especially the CTMU, but where permitted to do so, they’ve been observed to clog up the comments sections of my own answers with ad hominem nonsense which violates Quora’s “be nice, be respectful” policy. In short, they are neither nice nor respectful.

Sometimes - but only in the worst cases - I delete their comments, thus saving Quora Moderation the necessity of removing them. I suggest that if one doesn’t want one’s comments removed, one be nice and respectful. (A bit of veracity wouldn’t hurt either.)

[Note: I should also mention that I don’t have time to play games here on Quora, especially games which have no entertainment value for me. Accordingly, I’ve deleted an exchange in the comments between “two” characters using what appear to be pictures of the same individual on “their” accounts, one of them vaguely resembling Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the other merely foppish. No more of this nonsense, please.]

What is wrong with Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Updated Feb 24, 2018

Absolutely nothing … nothing at all.

In order to make sense of this question, it must be modified to read:

“What has gone wrong with the communication of the CTMU?”

This form of the question is very easy to answer. Every communication process involves a sender, a receiver, and a channel, and all three must be functioning properly for the message to be properly communicated. Unfortunately, only one of these three components has been functioning properly with respect to the CTMU communication process: the sender.

As for the other two components, the channel is not functioning properly because it is under the monopolistic control of Academia, Inc., which denies full access to anyone lacking its certification, and most of those at the receiving end of the transmission are too disinterested and/or intellectually impaired to comprehend the message even when they manage to hear it.

Should any professional academic with a reputation to protect want to take issue with this, he or she is welcome to try. I’ll be frank: there is no professional academic on this planet who is even remotely knowledgeable enough to attack the CTMU in the full light of day and avoid being crushed by me.

(This offer applies only to known figures who are both reputable and well-qualified in fields related to the CTMU. For others, the penalty for specious argumentation is insufficient to “keep them honest”, so to speak. They stand to gain too much more than they risk by engaging with known figures, and are too likely to engage in specious argumentation and dirty polemics.)

[Note 1: Another answer for this question, evidently with comments disabled, criticizes the CTMU on the alleged grounds that “a panentheistic god is outside of time and space, somewhat like the Abrahamic God, thus beyond reality and not merely generated by reality.” This is mistaken. A panentheistic God, being metaphysical, properly includes physical reality and is thus omnipresent therein. The CTMU is precisely what it takes to fully realize this criterion.]

[Note 2: Yet another answer is followed by comments from one “David Moore” (again with replies disabled), who criticizes the CTMU on the alleged grounds that “educe” means “infer”, and that the CTMU therefore runs afoul of Godel’s theorems. In fact, the first definition of “educe” is “to bring out or develop”, which is consistent with undecidability. Mr. Moore also states that “tautologies imply nothing except themselves…”. However, while this is superficially true for propositional tautologies, tautology is in fact a much more general concept, and the CTMU applies it in a whole new way.]

What is Chris Langan up to these days?

Chris Langan
Updated Feb 24, 2018

Thank you for asking!

I’m running my 140 acre ranch. I’m seeing to Mega Foundation business. I’m working on the next round of CTMU material. And I’ve even found the time to answer a few questions here on Quora!

But speaking of which, I’ve also been forced to take up a new hobby: riding herd on a couple of tireless, utterly implacable, and often vicious little trolls who follow me around here like flapping, squeaking vampire bats with claws full of hungry, writhing leeches.

(One absurdly claims to have authored a “naturalistic” theory of “metaphysics” - roughly speaking, this is like going off one’s meds, sticking one’s snout high in the air, sliding one’s hand under the lapel of one’s smelly, brown-stained hospital gown, and imperiously proclaiming oneself to be Napoleon Bonaparte - while the other merely considers himself to be a victim of my alleged unceasing racial and cultural discrimination, crying out plaintively for justice.)

I keep hoping that I can dispense with the hobby.

Is Chris Langan trolling the world with the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 26, 2018

Original question: “Is Chris Langan trolling the world with the CTMU?”

Answer: Either that, or someone stupid and despicable is trolling Chris Langan with Quora. In my opinion, it’s definitely the latter.

How does Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) resolve the conflict between predestination and free will?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 26, 2018

By simultaneously and consistently interpreting both of the concepts “free will” and “predestination” in the structure of the CTMU. (In any other conceptual setting, these concepts are too ill-defined to conflict as usually assumed; when properly defined and interpreted in the CTMU, they do not conflict.)

What created God according to Chris Langan?

Chris Langan
Answered Feb 28, 2018

God is eternal. He exists without respect to any external clock; clocks exist within God, not outside of him (basically, that’s why time is relative in General Relativity; this relates to something called “background freedom”, specifically from any external standard or metric). On His most general level of Being, God simply exists. All change in or evolution of the structure of God, known in the CTMU as “Self-configuration” (often through secondary telors), is strictly internal to God Himself.

Which is correct: DataLogical Metaphysical Theory or Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 1, 2018

The CTMU is a theory of mathematical metaphysics with a unique logical structure which ensures its correctness. It has had this structure ever since it was conceived decades ago, before the promoters of “DataLogical Metaphysical Theory” were born.

The CTMU is tight and technically precise. It has been published in several academic journals. It has been mentioned on several major news networks and is known to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people throughout the world. It has profound applications from science and mathematics to philosophy and theology. Its unique mathematical structure is duplicated by no other theory in existence, including “DataLogical Metaphysical Theory” (the promoters of which are evidently incapable of understanding it, given their confused, irrelevant, incessant CTMU critiques here on Quora). Its only problem, in fact, is being a magnet for ignorant and obsessive trolls, who are seemingly drawn to it as flies to honey.

As for “DMTheory”, this is from my answer to a previous similar question here on Quora (of which there have been several):

“‘DMTheory’, as it is somewhat comically named (note the unwitting double-entendre), is a jumbled hodgepodge of disconnected pieces - some from the CTMU itself - which has been slapped together by some number of absurdly ambitious college undergraduates with nothing better to do, and presented here on Quora as though there were something to it. My best guess is that these kids are shooting for the position of ‘world’s foremost naturalistic metaphysicians’ (an oxymoron), buoyed to fame and fortune by their virulent opposition to the CTMU. One almost admires their cheek. But while it never looks good to take candy from babies, their bubble begs to be popped … if only to spare Quora readers from being inundated with philosophical misinformation.

“The problem with ‘DMTheory’ is very easy to state. Naturalism says that everything arises from natural objects, properties, and causes - i.e., from nature, which in the broadest sense is the physical or material world or universe (Wikipedia) - with no metaphysical, supernatural, or spiritual explanation required. This means unequivocally that ‘naturalistic metaphysics’ comes down to ‘physicalistic or materialistic metaphysics’, which is an oxymoron plain and simple. This oxymoron is the very starting point of ‘DMTheory’, which purportedly combines physical data with ‘logic’ while excluding any ontological support for the latter due to its non-physicality. This means that ‘DMTheory’ is pure nonsense, and that discussing it is a complete waste of everybody’s time.”

Why is there a spate of Anonymous questions about the fringe CTMU conjecture?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 1, 2018

As the sole author of the CTMU, I can only say that if this were true, I don’t know why it would be. However, I can state with absolute certainty that whether or not the CTMU is “fringe”, it is not a mere “conjecture”. It’s a supertautology, and one cannot worm one’s way out of it. It’s the everlasting adamantine logical core of mathematical metaphysics, and if one doesn’t like it, one really needs to go out and find oneself another field, the actual state of which is more to one’s liking (not that one can extricate oneself from its domain in any event).

[Note: This may be a troll question. In any case, my answer was requested by someone who uses the approving phrase “a fair analysis” to describe another (defamatory, collapsed) answer which alleges that I’m “irresponsible … [with] a complete lack of moral conscience … a pseudointellectual … and sorry excuse for a genius”. One can’t explicitly endorse this kind of defamatory ad hominem tripe and not be considered as much a troll as the one who wrote it.]

What does Christopher Langan think about Christian morality?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 11, 2018

I embrace it. However, it must be noted that as most people understand it, “Christian morality” is in some ways a rather ill-defined concept. While I agree with morality based on the underlying logic of the Golden Rule and the rest of the New Testament, many sectarian versions of so-called “Christian morality” are based on nonlogical interpretations of Christian scripture associated with various bodies of doctrine authored long after the New Testament was written. Just as Christian scripture is independent of sectarian doctrine, so is the morality which can be directly derived from it on a purely logical basis.

How would someone explain the CTMU (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe) to a child?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 15, 2018

“When we talk to each other like we are right now, we’re using something called a language. A language is something we use to communicate, just like you and I are doing when we talk to each other. It has symbols just like the letters on your alphabet blocks, words like cat, dog, and skittles, and sentences like ‘See Spot run!’, all of which help us tell each other what we mean.

“Well, every part of the world talks to itself and to other parts, and the CTMU is the language that it uses! Right now, I’m using the language called ‘English’ (French, German, Russian, Chinese,…) to talk to you and tell you what I mean. You can understand me because you understand English (etc.) the same way I do. When the world (cosmos, universe,…) talks to itself, it uses the CTMU!

“Remember, we say that a language is ‘mathematical’ because it’s a bit like the counting numbers you use when you count to ten. Not only can you use those numbers to count; you can also use them to add, subtract, multiply, and divide (those are called ‘operations’). You can even tell when one number is bigger or smaller than another (those are called ‘relations’)!

“Mathematical languages like the CTMU also have mathematical relations and operations just like the counting numbers. So we can always be exact, and the other person - if he or she is paying proper attention - can always understand what we mean. When the universe talks to itself using the CTMU, it always knows what it means as well!”

(Notice the part about “paying attention”. Nature always pays attention to itself. Only the strange and unnatural phenomena calling themselves “philosophical naturalists” seem completely unable to do so with any success. ;)

Does the CTMU actually predict anything? If so, what? If not, doesn’t that disqualify it as not being theorem, (due to the fact that it couldn’t be falsifiable)?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 20, 2018

Of course the CTMU makes predictions, e.g., the accelerating expansion of the cosmos, the invariance of the speed of light, biological evolution, and so on.

The problem is, so do a number of reverse-engineered theories which, instead of coming at these issues from first principles, proceed from a set of convenient empirically induced assumptions designed to support the “deduction” of such observable facts, often interspersed with similarly back-engineered quantitative equations so that they can pass as “mathematics”. These speculative ad hoc theories get more airtime than those of independent researchers because their authors are members of Academia, Inc., a sprawling, monoplistic, incredibly profitable intellectual trade organization which promotes its own members ahead of anyone else regardless of minor concerns like truth, honesty, and intelligence.

It seems that once someone pays hundreds of thousand dollars into this glorified trade union and undergoes a bit of circular “peer review” by (quelle surprise) other academics, one is as good as gold, gaining automatic respectability for one’s supposed “qualifications” to pontificate on one’s favorite topics even at the expense of better minds and ideas.

Chris Langan (author of CTMU) claims that he's logically proved atheists go to hell. To clarify, do atheists stay in hell for eternity, or only until they stop rejecting the possibility of God?

Chris Langan
Updated Mar 24, 2018

I don’t recall publishing a proof that atheists go to hell (whether I can is another matter). If you can direct me to the exact statement to which you refer, perhaps I could comment at slightly greater length.

Meanwhile, remember that hell is necessary for not only the efforts of the Christian Church to curb attrition, but the welfare of society and mankind. For example, once an ambitious sociopath becomes a serial killer, mass murderer, hanging judge, bloodthirsty warlord, tyrannical emperor, evil dictator, crazed oligarch, rapacious international banker, or atheist-materialist techie billionaire who, by stealth or manipulation, can abuse other people with legal impunity (as nearly all successful sociopaths eventually do), society and mankind need a higher form of deterrence to protect them, and this is the very important function of hell.

As for whether hell is “real”, that’s a matter of valid metaphysical reasoning. This reasoning has much to do with a concept historically referred to as teleology, a self-reinforcing conatus by and for which the universe must include all necessary deterrents and safeguards, and the mathematical structure of metaphysical reality at large. Also important are the concepts of God, free will, and the human soul, on all of which I’ve previously commented on this site.

(Yes, hell is in some sense “real”. But of course, this says nothing about the exact form that it will take for a given unregenerate miscreant. ;)

[Addendum: To those who insist on making an issue of my logic, please at least make an effort to understand it. First, hell is not a linear extension of the axes of spacetime, but is contained in an orthogonal expansion of spacetime; thus, objections based on the fact that “the dead no longer exist in space and time” are invalid. Secondly, one is not sent to hell for honest doubt or agnosticism, but for active denial or antitheism, i.e., blasphemy (among other things). This really doesn't require any proof, as it is a matter of common sense - one cannot survive in a metaphysical medium that one actively rejects and has encouraged others to actively reject. Instead, one is sent “in the opposite direction”, so to speak … to a complementary degenerative medium where identity is destroyed rather than sustained, refined, or transformed.

Many atheists seem to think that upon death, their minds will dissolve painlessly or perhaps even ecstatically into blackness or white light as though they were arhats or bodhisattvas, or perhaps just Kiefer Sutherland in “Lost Boys”. But sadly for those of this optimistic persuasion, existence and identity aren’t quite as easy to surrender as they might imagine. In fact, the utter dissolution of identity can be a process that is full of unimaginable pain and despair and which seems to last forever (or “for eternity", as religious people like to say.)

From here out it gets a bit more technical, but this should at least help put you on the right track regarding something that could - i.e., will definitely - end up being very important to you. A word to the wise.]

Is CTMU an introduction to metaphysics?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 28, 2018

No, the CTMU is not formulated on a mere “introductory” level. It is metaphysics at its most advanced, with a powerful and unique design that only trolls and metaphysical ignoramuses are foolish enough to contradict. It has been repeatedly published in reputable academic journals, and has withstood every informed critique ever leveled against it. Its structure is that of a metaphysical formulation of truth and logic themselves; hence, it is not open to doubt and will never be superseded by a “better” theory.

What if the CTMU were correct?

Chris Langan
Answered Mar 29, 2018

This question is equivalent to “What if logic were correct on the metaphysical (metalogical, metamathematical) level of reality and all levels beneath?”

The answer is very simple: Logic / the CTMU must be correct on all levels of reality, for if it were not, then reality would be unintelligible, in which case there would be no science, philosophy, mathematics, or reality as we know it.

So really, all that one need do is decide how much one likes science, philosophy, mathematics, and reality itself, and then answer accordingly. ;-)

What mathematics is needed to understand Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe?

Chris Langan
Answered Apr 5, 2018

A legitimate question, but first I think we’d better get something straight: there exists no coherent argument to the effect that new theories always require only existing mathematics. Some theories require that one learn new mathematics which are needed for their concise expression. This includes the CTMU, in the source material of which various new mathematical concepts have been introduced.

As for the existing fields of mathematics with which one should have a bit of familiarity before expecting to get the gist of the CTMU, one should definitely understand a little predicate and propositional logic along with rudimentary model theory and a bit of set theory. One should also know a bit about algebra and language theory. A tad of computation theory wouldn’t hurt, and neither would a little calculus. (Later on, you’ll need much more than that, but first things first.)

Caution: despite their explicit or implicit claims to the contrary, at least a couple of those who have attempted to answer this question obviously lack even the limited mathematical knowledge I’ve just mentioned. In particular, answers that come down to “None, because the CTMU doesn’t have any real mathematical structure!” are absurd and misleading, and should be disregarded.

Why do people assume that the CTMU contains assumptions when, in fact, it doesn’t?

Chris Langan
Updated Apr 25, 2018

People erroneously assume that the CTMU contains assumptions because assumption is their intellectual default condition. They fall back on assumption because they are intellectually incapable of discerning the necessities on which human knowledge is actually based.

Knowledge entails certainty by definition, and certainty entails logic. Logic is based not on assumption, but on tautology (tautological forms and inferences). Without fully understanding the structural and dynamical properties and manifestations of tautology, they simply assume that nothing of scientific interest can ever be logically deduced from well-verified initial data.

This assumption is very common but ultimately mistaken. The irony is that because so many people stumble into it - including many highly trained people who are supposed to know better - those who rightly question it are the ones usually accused of “making assumptions”.

Eventually, one learns to see this situation as rather comical, like a passel of clowns frantically unicycling around the center ring, bumping into each other and toppling over and generally creating mayhem under the Big Top while cacophonously squeezing the air out of their red rubber noses. ;)

Are there any theoretical universal models that are not causal by nature? For instance, if this was a simulation as suggested, then how might the rules be different?

Chris Langan
Answered Apr 25, 2018

Yes. The definitive theory is called the CTMU, short for Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. Publications date from the late 1980’s through the present, most recently in the peer-reviewed academic journal Cosmos and History. Technically, it is a theory of mathematical metaphysics.

Basically, the CTMU says that reality is an ontologically closed “self-simulation” in the precise sense that it contains empirically undecidable “programming” as well as “displayed” observational content, and that its logico-mathematical structure is that of a self-structuring, self-axiomatizing “SCSPL”, short for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. This language has a unique form called a supertautology, according to which its evolution is metacausal rather than strictly causal.

In addition, the CTMU embodies a logical form of self-similarity analogous to the so-called “holographic principle” as later developed in connection with string theory. Accordingly, it is trialic, effecting a distributive coincidence of theory, universe, and model in a coherent “metaformal system”.

Last but not least, the CTMU was authored by a man reputed, at least in some circles, to be the most intelligent in the world.

Sam Harris says the sense of self is an illusion, that we’re just our brains, the ego doesn’t exist. Does the CTMU agree with this claim?

Chris Langan
Answered Apr 28, 2018

No, the CTMU does not support the claims that “the sense of self is an illusion, that we’re just our brains, [and] the ego doesn’t exist.”

From a CTMU perspective, these claims are ridiculous, and in my opinion, Mr. Harris wouldn’t have a chance of prevailing against me in an argument about it. (As this is one of those threads that was already packed with misinformation by the time I got here, I’ll just leave it at that for now. Suffice it to say that of the answers below, only one - by Joe Moyenne - contains so much as a single accurate statement about my work.)

Are there meta-simultaneous universes within reality, according to the CTMU theory of Chris Langan? How are they related to our world?

Chris Langan
Answered May 12, 2018

In the CTMU, alternate universes exist in syntax as semantic potential. (This does not equate to the full concrete existence ascribed to them by other theories; it is not automatically guaranteed that a given potential reality is anywhere realized.)

What do physicists think of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Updated May 17, 2018

You know, I hate to answer a question with a question, but why would any intelligent person ask garden-variety physicists what they think about a “theory of everything” (TOE) like the CTMU, or even the general concept thereof? The theoretical language of physics is demonstrably incapable of expressing a TOE; at best, it might clean up to form a proper sublanguage of a TOE. The typical academic physicist doesn’t even begin to know what he’d need to know in order to pass judgment on such a theory. He’s simply not trained for it.

If there’s any doubt about this, just look at the derisive, self-important way some of the (self-described) physicists in this thread have responded to this question. They accuse me of using language they don’t understand; yet everyone who has ever browsed a modern physics journal knows very well that when it comes to dressing up reams of trivial, impenetrable, and largely meaningless theoretical speculation with a bit of mathematical symbolism and packing it into professional publish-or-perish journals with mutual references tying it all together in a massively unproductive circle-jerk, no one beats a run-of-the-mill academic physicist. They’re in a class of their own! Most of these people aren’t Newton, or Einstein, or Bohr, or Heisenberg, or Schrodinger; to the contrary, many of them are relative mediocrities who, if they’ve ever managed to get a teaching position, are desperately afraid of being pushed off the academic lily pad by a bigger, smarter frog.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many physicists for whom I have respect, and I don’t blame contemporary physicists in general for being defensive of their investment in academic credentials and their “great achievement” in joining the ranks of professional physicists. They put in a lot of time and money, so it’s understandable that they’re always looking for approval and reinforcement. But please, don’t encourage the tendency of some of them to wax irrational about work they can’t understand and have no interest in understanding.

If you’d like to rephrase your question in a more meaningful way (to the average physicist), I suggest that you query physicists on their quest for a unified field theory. This is not, of course, a TOE; only an ignoramus would assume that it was. But it’s something that the average self-described physicist / collegiate indoctrination victim knows a bit more about.

Thanks.

[WARNING from the author of the CTMU: There are numerous answers in this thread that are factually incorrect to an extent that would embarrass any reasonably intelligent high school student. For example, one of them mentions Tarski’s undefinability theorem. In fact, Tarski’s undefinability theorem itself purports to be true for ALL formal systems, and thus to be absolute truth (true irrespective of context and/or content). Thus, if the theorem invalidates the (vastly more sophisticated) CTMU as “absolute truth” despite the fact that the CTMU is not a standard formal system, then it invalidates itself in the bargain, which means that when all is said and done, it can invalidate nothing at all. Please disregard such answers, as they are evidently designed to mislead the reader. Thanks for your attention.

Why don't people understand the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered May 20, 2018

Some people have difficulty understanding the CTMU because they spend no significant amount of time trying to absorb the maximally simplified language in terms of which the theory has been described. While it contains neologisms (as does almost any new and original theory), standard terminology is nowhere redefined in it, so those confused by it cannot point to linguistic usage as a reason to dismiss it.

As the CTMU has been designed as a comprehensive theoretical framework for reality at large, it cannot be reduced or condensed in any way that would diminish its intended scope. By the same token, introducing such a theory requires that one explain why the overall worldview it replaces is deficient, which unfortunately can easily be mistaken for the claim that “all that has gone before it is wrong” (deficient need not mean “wrong”; it can also mean “incomplete”).

In fact, the CTMU has been designed so that all valid scientific theories can be modeled within it.

Is the current Wikipedia summary of the CTMU (available on the page for the author) a good summary of the theory?

Chris Langan
Answered May 20, 2018

Not really. The absence of a dedicated CTMU article on Wikipedia is a travesty that was engineered by some very aggressive yet very deceptive people circa 2006, and is quite possibly the worst show in Wikipedia history.

My involvement began when I was informed by a concerned party - whom I had never met - that two articles on Wikipedia were embroiled in controversy. One was a biography article about me; one was an article on my theory of mathematical metaphysics, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU).

Apparently, some number of Wikipedia editors, administrators, and arbitrators had decided among themselves that neither I nor the CTMU - both of which had received considerable international publicity from, for example, ABC, NBC, and Popular Science (among other highly reputable sources) - were sufficiently notable for Wikipedia's elevated standards. In particular, they falsely but adamantly maintained that both articles had been created by me (they had not), were being jealously controlled by me despite alleged conflicts of interest (they were not), and that the CTMU was baseless and did not belong on Wikipedia (it is factual and logically verifiable, and even if it were not, it was still sufficiently notable to merit description). Both articles were nominated for deletion. (Another article on the Mega Foundation, a nonprofit 501.c.3 corporation in continuous operation since 1999, was created and deleted during this period.)

In the course of the ensuing proceedings, which can only be described as a witch hunt culminating in a kangaroo court, the CTMU was repeatedly misclassified as "Intelligent Design" when in fact, it predates and is independent of ID theory, and was snidely compared to nonsense like the "Time Cube" and other theoretical oddities often used as targets for the spitballs of those who fancy themselves “defenders of science”. I finally traced the initial push to remove these articles to a website called “the brights.net”, a pseudoskeptical anti-ID website run in keeping with the atheist-materialist convictions of such opinionated people as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and James Randi. Unfortunately, this initiative - the true nature of which its promoters made every attempt to conceal - was immediately latched onto by a number of prominent Wikipedians, some of whom apparently still lurk behind the curtains to this very day.

Ultimately, the biography article was kept, but the CTMU article was deleted and the "earth was salted" against its recreation (a phrase I seem to recall being used by one or more of those clamoring for deletion). The experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that personally, I wouldn't care whether a CTMU article ever appears on Wikipedia were it not for others constantly using the platform to take credit for CTMU ideas without proper attribution. If experience be our guide, such an article would only be ruthlessly attacked and used as a platform for defamation and misattribution by certain nefarious parties still concealed in the Wikipedia woodwork. On the other hand, we might hope that Wikipedia is no longer such a nest of spiders, and that it is no longer controlled by sneaky little arachnids secretly communicating and coordinating with each other and using their mutual connections and experience in navigating the bureaucratic web to suppress those with whom they disagree.

In fairness to Wikipedia, which I and many others sometimes find very useful, a "peoples' encyclopedia" is by nature a very hard thing to run. Such a project naturally tends to be dominated by aggressive and opinionated people who operate largely behind the scenes, resulting in a "hive" whose inner mechanics are largely hidden as its drones and workers succumb to various forms of censorship and peer pressure and eventually veer away from sound encyclopedic principles of fairness, veracity, and scholarship.

Had I not ultimately appealed directly to the Head of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales (who evidently interceded even though I never received an official reply from him), there might be no mention of either me or the CTMU on Wikipedia to this day. In effect, we’d have been obliterated from the Internet "hive mind" by people whose motives may simply have been misguided, but whose tactics were inarguably as black and dirty as sin.

What is logical theology? How does it relate to Chris Langan and the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered May 23, 2018

Logical theology consists of the theological (God-related) implications of the CTMU, a metaphysical formulation of logic.

Others have used this term to describe strains of theology that conform to their ideas of logic. However, (1) “ideas of logic” often deviate from any well-defined logico-mathematical structure known to logicians and mathematicians; (2) it is hard to derive theological implications from standard logic; and (3) problems arise when trying to employ standard logic on the metaphysical level of discourse required by theology.

Properly applied to theology, the CTMU solves problems 1–3.

How can you explain CTMU to a layman?

Chris Langan
Answered May 28, 2018

Reality necessarily communicates (exchanges information) with itself; it sends information on states, events, and processes from place to place within itself by various means of transmission and induction. By definition, the medium of communication is language; that is, language can be generically defined as "the medium of information and communication". It follows that reality has linguistic structure.

Unfortunately for science, most scientific languages are structurally inadequate to perform linguistic functions like communication on reality's behalf.(1) However, the definition of language can be furnished with extra structure that overcomes these inadequacies. The language defined to overcome these inadequacies, thus enabling the self-communication of reality, is called the CTMU. (Note that this definition is functional, logico-mathematical, and independent of empirical induction and special terminology.)

Because the existence and validity of the CTMU (as just defined) are logical, ontological, and epistemological necessities, there is no escape from its implications. Laymen - and for that matter, amateur and professional scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians - have no chance of legitimately prevailing in arguments against it, and should avoid baseless complaints about its allegedly “unscientific” or “conjectural” nature.

[(1): For example, ordinary scientific languages are not self-contained; they have extrinsic requirements such as external processors, e.g., human minds or computers, to execute their operations. This prevents them from modeling their content, reality at large, well enough to generate and carry the information that reality needs in order to function. The CTMU, on the other hand, is ontologically self-contained with respect to all required objects, structures, and operations.]

What is Chris Langan's view on identity politics?

Chris Langan
Updated May 29, 2018

My view on identity politics is that it can be justified only if everyone of any ethnicity is entitled to participate, in which case it is necessary for all (because failing to assert it, as when White people of European ancestry fail to assert it lest they be branded as “racists”, means leaving oneself and one’s group defenseless against competition for resources and opportunity). Alternatively, lest any group be denied its identity while others assert their own, group identity must be equitably denied to everyone.

Human identity is stratified, and thus has both individual and group levels. Accordingly, we can (and sometimes must) reason in terms of group identity. But when group self-identification is officially granted to some groups yet denied to others against which they compete, this can only result in imbalance and injustice. For example, when some overpopulating groups which have overtaxed their own resources by reproductive incontinence and homegrown oligarchy are allowed to migrate into the sovereign territories of worldwide ethnic minorities - e.g., people of European descent - and enjoy special “oppressed” status whereby they reap special benefits such as free food, free housing, free education, free healthcare, affirmative action, reproductive subsidies, and special treatment under the law, and are even credited with moral superiority due to their alleged “oppression”, this can result in the destruction of the national, cultural, and ethnic identity of the hosts, leading ultimately to their extinction. Incoming groups which assert their own collective identities while denying their hosts any reciprocal right of political group cohesion thus amount to noxious, invasive, and ultimately lethal socioeconomic parasites. Obviously, any governmental authority which enforces or encourages such asymmetry - e.g., the European Union - is illegitimate.

Bear in mind that once we cease to treat individuals as individuals per se, thus allowing members of their respective groups to assert their ethnic, cultural, or religious (etc.) identities against their “oppressors”, their group properties and statistics are automatically opened to scrutiny and comparative analysis. For example, if after several generations of special treatment in the educational sphere (compulsory school integration, special programs, modifications of educational procedure, racially defined college admission preferences, etc.), a particular “oppressed” group fails as a whole to outgrow these measures, its members are no longer entitled to exemption from objective characterization in terms of associated group statistics; if one wants to enjoy the social benefits attending ethically loaded group-defined properties like “belonging to an oppressed group”, one must submit to rational policies formed on the basis of not just individual assessment, but empirically confirmed group-defined properties such as “belonging to a group exhibiting a relatively low mean IQ and a tendency to violently disrupt the educational environment”. Continuing to pursue racially parameterized measures of human worth and achievement can only lead to personal injustice, social degradation, and biological degeneration (because such measures inevitably supplant any rational form of social, economic, and reproductive selection).

In short, identity politics should either be shut down immediately, or the majority populations of Europe and North America should be encouraged to assert their own ethnic and cultural identities and group interests with full force. Any governmental, academic, religious, or media authority which tries to prevent it is clearly unworthy of respect and obedience.

[Note: This answer has been “collapsed” on the supposed grounds that it “needs attribution”. However, it absolutely does not need attribution, because it consists of my opinion on identity politics expressed entirely in my own original words as formed on the basis of my own original reasoning. The “collapse” has been appealed, so again we have a test of Quora and its moderation staff. If you have found this answer in a state of “collapse”, it follows that Quora has once again failed the test.]

What does Chris Langan think about Jordan B. Peterson?

Chris Langan
Answered Jun 11, 2018

I think that in some ways, Jordan’s heart is in the right place - he displayed courage in taking his stance on the issue of compulsory speech (at least with respect to gender pronouns, if not necessarily all aspects of PC doctrine).

However, it occurs to me that although Jordan is clearly intelligent and well-spoken, his personal history as a lifelong professional academic is bound to have limited his experience outside the Ivory Tower while exposing him to intensive indoctrination, and this may have limited his ideological flexibility and real-world awareness. For example, he seems to labor under the delusion that we inhabit a real meritocracy in which strong, upstanding “alpha males” are rewarded for merit and always get the girl. (That’s just not how it works out here in the real world.)

It also strikes me that Jordan may be overextending himself by staking claims on difficult intellectual territory, including theology, religion, morality, and other metaphysically loaded fields. As a North American clinical psychologist with much to say about intelligence and intelligence testing, he has in all likelihood encountered my name. Yet, like academics everywhere, he shows no sign of knowing that I and the CTMU exist, and thus seems to think that his rather pedestrian views on certain metaphysical issues are state-of-the-art.

This being understood, I wish Jordan well. I’d merely suggest that if he really wants to be on the bleeding edge, he’ll need to widen his acknowledgement of expertise and authority beyond the opaque, sweating walls of the academic hothouse. As always, out here in reality-land is where it’s really happening.

Will the CTMU of Chris Langan become the most important theory of humankind?

Chris Langan
Answered Jun 23, 2018

There are many important theories which deservedly occupy places in the sun. But as time inevitably passes and minds evolve, the weather changes. At this point, the once-productive “naturalistic” worldview on which most of our dominant theories are based has gone no-frills, stone-cold, pockets-turned-inside-out, can’t-squeeze-blood-from-a-turnip bankrupt.

In short, the formerly successful theories that scientists and philosophers are still trying to use in order to answer their most profound questions have proven to be abject failures for that purpose. (They’re still quite useful for some problems, mind you, but not for the biggest ones.) We’re not just talking “the jury isn’t in yet;” we’re talking “not even within broadcast range of anything approaching a real answer.” It has been that way for quite a while now, and only the infants among us are still denying it.

When such a situation arises - as it has arisen at several past junctures in human intellectual history - the only possible remedy is a paradigm shift. The CTMU is indeed a paradigm shift, and it does indeed resolve many of the issues plaguing the dominant worldview. We may thus infer that the CTMU is unsurpassed in its importance to the continued progress and future history of science and philosophy.

Of course, the problem with any paradigm shift is that almost everyone invested in the current paradigm idiotically tries to cram the new one into it, and when it proves a bad fit, they squawk like singed boobies. Attempting to shoehorn a new paradigm into the old one it is designed to replace is generally an exercise in futility, potentially leading to a Galileo-versus-the-Church situation.

Just be patient. Even infants must one day become adults.

The CTMU says tautologies are self-justifying. How can this be true?

Chris Langan
Answered Jun 29, 2018

A statement can be proven true or false - in fact, it can be identified - only by using 2-valued propositional logic. Therefore, 2-valued propositional logic is verified by the identifiability or provability of anything at all.

A specific propositional tautology amounts to an axiom of 2-valued logic; thus, it is implicated in its own identification. As it can be identified only if it is true, we know that it must be true by the mere fact that we can identify it.

The CTMU develops this idea in order to elevate the field of mathematical logic to the metaphysical level of discourse, the better to answer profound questions that empirical scientists insist on asking, but lack the tools to answer.

And now a brief word regarding the anti-CTMU trolls which proliferate like a toxic fungus here at Quora. There is no one on Quora who is remotely smart enough, or good enough at math, logic, philosophy, physics, chemistry, biology, or anything else, to get over on the CTMU. In fact, the mere effort to get over on the CTMU, and for that matter on me, is incontrovertible, rock-hard proof that the person trying to do it is a logical ignoramus, a nincompoop, and a buffoon. The nastier he or she is about it, the more he or she is attempting to mislead the readership of Quora, and the more he or she deserves censure as an absolute gibbering idiot.

Let’s be clear about this. There are people on Quora who claim to have advanced degrees in this or that from big-name universities; some are even lauded as “Quora Top Writers”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. So far, so good. But after tooting their own horns like the steam-powered pufferbellies of yore, some of them have revealed themselves as mean-spirited imbeciles by flying into protracted fits of projectile diarrhea of the mouth, calling the theory “bullshit”, “horse shit”, “crap”, and “nonsense”. Alleged upvotes notwithstanding, the readers of Quora would be vastly better off without a single one of them.

I’m tired of having to make a hobby out of digging everyone else out from under the piles of manure spewed by these people. It would be wonderful if they could simply run off and find another topic about which to blow smoke up everyone else’s rectum while knowing not a damned thing about it.

Thanks for your attention.

What is Chris Langan's analysis of the scientific method?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 8, 2018

The Scientific Method, which is central to the traditional methodology of the empirical sciences, is a dualistic metalanguage which purports to govern the bidirectional mapping between theory and observation. It is dualistic in the sense that theory is made entirely dependent on empirical observation, with absolutely no dependency in the opposite direction aside from the choice of which experiments to run and which observations to make.

The Scientific Method can be helpful in shaping constructive feedback between theory and experimentation, but obviously breaks down at the level of scientific inquiry on which observed reality cannot be properly described by dualism (because absolute dualism precludes observation itself).

Reality is ultimately monic, as otherwise it would be disconnected and therefore two or more realities instead of one. Because these separate realities would be incommunicado (being cut off from each other by absolute dualism), they could not interact at all, and the inhabitants of one could not recognize another.

Addendum (originally in response to a troll who evidently had my response to his own comment deleted, and whose comment was therefore deleted in turn):

If theorization and observation were not coupled in a very specific way by the Scientific Method, one could simply dispense with it. In that case, no one would ever have made a big deal out of it. Instead, students would simply be told “Get to making observations and theorizing about them!”

But it’s not as simple as that. The observations have to be selected in such a way that the associated observation statements confirm or falsify the theory - this often involves the careful design and execution of experiments - and the theory has to be developed in a way that explains existing observations and/or predicts others.

This coordination of theorization and observation is what the Scientific Method is all about. This is how it “mediates” between them.

Why do people still have atheistic leanings when the CTMU clearly proves that atheism is a priori false?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 9, 2018

This recently posted question presently has 54 answers including this one, and another 38 which have been collapsed. I’ve gone through a few of these answers, and in addition to detecting quite a bit of nastiness, I’ve found that almost none of the authors displays the slightest knowledge of the theory they purport to be criticizing. Zero … zilch … nada.

Not much can be said on behalf of people who operate this way. One can’t paint a smiley face on it. It’s not as though these people are motivated by a love of truth and the advancement of knowledge; people who conform to that description at least acknowledge the content of that which they criticize.

The only explanation that seems reasonable at this point is that Quora is a dark carnival teeming with virulent atheistic-materialistic troll-clowns, and having driven off other potential targets with the insults and defamation for which they are famous, they are increasingly desperate for something, anything, to attack en masse. Hence, they’ve latched onto the CTMU like leeches, catapulting it to the status of premier troll-magnet at an already degenerate trollfest.

As I’ve pointed out before, I’ve never posted a question here (except to replace one that was erased after I’d already answered it), and I’ve never asked anyone else to post a question here. I’ve tried my best to provide sincere and informative answers for the questions I’ve encountered, that’s all. But the troll attacks had begun before I even arrived (some even involved “Quora Top Writers”), they’ve only gotten worse as time has passed, and I’m starting to feel like the only surviving human in Zombie City. It’s depressing.

Just in case any innocent, well-meaning naif happens to bump into this feeding frenzy and mistakes it for a source of information, I’m advising you to avert your eyes. Most of it amounts to pseudointellectual hate-porn, and no decent person wants to dirty his or her eyes with it.

Thanks for your attention.

ADDENDUM: There’s something called an “Answer Wiki” at the top of this page. It is not accepting my edits, which is pretty much par for the course on this site, which is largely what makes this site a joke for purposes of getting anything properly established. My attempted addition read as follows:

“Disputed by the author of the CTMU. The undeniable fact is that those who express strong dislike of the theory typically fail to understand a single word of it - or at least so it appears from their failure to address its actual content - and the incomprehension often appears feigned rather than honest. Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely to change. Thanks for your attention.”

As I say, this place seems to be nothing but an atheist-materialist trollfest. What a shame.

Are there serious metaphysical consequences for unreasonably defaming the CTMU on Quora?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 10, 2018

For those who have already severed their souls, amputating themselves from the identity of reality through blasphemy and moral atrophy, there are no further “metaphysical consequences”. Barring an utterly heroic attempt at spiritual reconnection - the worse you are, the more heroic and costly the effort must be - the matter is completely settled, and divine “vindictiveness” has nothing to do with it.

I understand that the typical atheist, being a master thespian when it comes to empty bravado, will giggle like a tickled baby at the very thought. Oh, the sheer entertainment of it all!

But you know what they say: there are no atheists on deathbeds, at least who still have a choice about it.

So I’m afraid that it’s laugh now, cry later … or perhaps that should be, wail and gnash your teeth later.

(Now, how will that be for entertainment? ;)

Is the CTMU peer-reviewed and published in the academic journal of cosmos and history?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 10, 2018

Yes. A theory need not be confirmed by experimental replication in order to be “peer reviewed”. In particular, papers on philosophy, language theory, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines can be peer reviewed as easily as papers in the empirical sciences.

The papers in question were published in the Proceedings of the semiannual conferences of the Foundations of Mind Group, which contains not only philosophers, but cognitive scientists, physicists, psychologists, and other well-reputed professionals. The papers are discussed among the members and carefully read by professional academics prior to publication.

Ever since the first CTMU paper was published, atheistic cranks and gadflies have been carping about the “lack of peer review” that it allegedly receives, trashing the reputations of entire journals and their publishers if necessary. What they mean, of course, is that they disagree with concepts such as God, religion, and Intelligent Design which have occasionally been mentioned in CTMU papers, and that the CTMU was not “peer reviewed” by them or any of their torch-bearing atheistic fellow travelers.

The reason for that, of course, is that torch-bearing atheists and their fellow travelers recognize merit in nothing that they did not produce or would not have produced themselves, and aggressively censor that with which they disagree. It’s just more of the same old transparent dishonesty and stupidity we’ve come to expect from these miscreants, and it stinks now just as much as it ever did.

Enough. There is no substitute for dealing with content. If you’re not motivated or intelligent enough to deal with CTMU content, or if you hate the CTMU or something mentioned in connection with it, then just leave it alone. No one is making you read it or shoot off your mouth about it.

Note: This question has evidently been posted by a couple of people with nearly blank profiles. I don’t know them. So do us all a favor and refrain from accusing me of posting the question. I don’t post questions here at Quora; I only answer them. Don’t like my answers? Then concentrate on other answers for other kinds of question.

Is predicate logic dualistic as stated in the latest CTMU paper published in the academic, philosophical journal Cosmos and History?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 10, 2018

That’s what it says in the papers, right?

Predicate logic is dualistic because it considers attributes separately from the objects or arguments to which they are attached by (universal or existential) quantification.

Equivalently, predicate logic is a formal system which includes a formal language (including its formal grammar) and a deductive apparatus consisting of axioms and rules of inference. The external universe is excluded from the system, isolating the language from the rest of reality.

How does CTMU prove that God exists?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 11, 2018

The CTMU proves that God exists by providing a valid framework for the overall structure of reality, and showing that this structure exhibits properties traditionally attributed to God.

Note: I see that someone is requesting a definition of God. In the CTMU, God is defined as Ultimate Reality, with a recursive base consisting of perceptual reality (the physical world) plus its regularities (patterns). “Ultimate” means, roughly, “idempotent with respect to containment and explanation”. This has been the CTMU definition of God for decades.

(Those with questions about the theory might try reading up a little, especially if you’re capable of handling appreciable abstraction - abstraction is the name of the game when it comes to metaphysical reasoning. It may be hard to believe, but some people really can’t handle much of it at all. This evidently includes many people who use Quora, even some who claim to respect “science”.)

A key principle of the CTMU is that reality is self-contained. Can you really debunk this position and formulate the alternative?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 11, 2018

The self-containment of reality cannot be debunked. It’s a logical necessity.

Even a drunken monkey could see it: if there were anything outside reality on which reality were in any way dependent (for origination, causation, support, maintenance, or anything else), then the entire dependency relationship would be real and therefore inside reality. Therefore, reality is self-contained with respect to physical and metaphysical functions like origination, causation, support, maintenance, etc. (QED).

This is what logicians call a proof by contradiction, and it invalidates the premise of external relevance. (Sorry, but there’s simply nothing else to give way here.) It also means that the level of reality we’re talking about is the deepest level possible … the CTMU level. That’s because “reality is self-contained” doubles as a definition of reality which makes it idempotent under inclusion (or if one likes, “self-inclusive”, with all the bells and whistles required to make it work). The CTMU develops the implications of this and certain other facts from first principles.

One really needs to understand how logic works on the metaphysical level of discourse to reason properly about metaphysical questions like the origin of reality, “dark energy”, and so on. On the other hand, if you’re trying to explain things on a more superficial level, then your explanation is incomplete, and once again, you don’t get to take credit for anything I’ve already figured out.

I thoroughly understood the tautological implications of self-containment thirty years ago, which is about how long the CTMU has been around. I hope no one thinks he’s going to get over on me now.

How does Chris Langan respond to psychologists’ claims that high-range IQ tests are bogus?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 11, 2018

“Bogus” isn’t quite the right word. High-range intelligence tests are not “IQ tests” in the usual sense, as they are not typically administered under the same conditions. However, they obviously require intelligence. So when backed up by sufficiently high scores on one or more IQ tests, they can help in the estimation of IQ. (Of course, this is what I’ve been saying for years, and anyone who does one’s homework would already have known it.)

Now enough of this biased questioning, if you wouldn’t mind. I can’t be spending all day removing the misinformation and disinformation spewed by trolls in response to leading questions. Such questions amount to “feeding the trolls” if not whipping them into a feeding frenzy, and I’ve endured enough fallout to know that it’s a deliberate waste of my time.

Do Christians like the CTMU, the proof of God?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 12, 2018

That all depends on whether or not they’re real Christians as opposed to fake “I believe everything my duly ordained priest / pastor says and nothing else” Christians.

People who believe in Christian Scripture must believe in the CTMU, as scripture must be interpreted in logic in order to be apprehended, and the CTMU is merely logic formulated on the required level of discourse.

On the other hand, fake Christians cannot apprehend scripture except by filtering it through layers of doctrine authored by fallible human beings pretending to have divined its proper interpretation. This means that they cannot directly apprehend scripture at all, hence cannot meet the most fundamental requirement of true Christianity.

There’s a big difference between real and fake Christians. Christ himself would have told you to choose logic over doctrine, as it is immediate to God. In fact, God and Christ are scripturally identified with logic in the form of “Logos” or Absolute Truth [John 1:1].

(We’ll keep it short due to the troll problem here at Quora - questions and answers have a strange way of simply disappearing, and I have only so much time to spend, and potentially to waste, on such a volatile medium.)

How did your life change after learning that the CTMU proves God and the afterlife?

Chris Langan
Updated Jul 13, 2018

To judge from these answers, the lives of some people are greatly enhanced by learning of the CTMU. How? It gives them an excuse to go a’trolling on Quora! Who needs Christmas when you wake up and find something like that in your feed?

I have a suggestion. Instead of carping and bellyaching and insulting a theory you know absolutely nothing about - and the vast majority of those who have posted answers here obviously know nothing whatsoever about the CTMU - why not do something constructive with your life? Why not find out where “the [pick your number] Glorious Horsemen of the New Atheism” (or whatever they’re called these days) are hosting their next troll festival, and start making your way to the big event?

On the other hand, if you’re mad at whoever is posting what you consider to be “SPAM questions” about the CTMU, why not practice your self-restraint and refrain from using it as a pretext to indulge in trolling? I didn’t post this question and I didn’t ask anyone else to post this question, so why insult me? Why mislead everyone about a body of work you couldn’t understand if your life depended on it?

Listen to me, folks. I hate to break this to you, but it’s one or more of your own who keep posting leading questions about the CTMU, they’re doing it in order to get you to troll me, and you’re gobbling up the bait every time. It’s a tactic that any reasonably smart 5-year-old could see right through!

Why not be smart about this, and just ignore the bait? Leave the answering to those who actually know how to do it informatively.

Thanks.

What does the CTMU contribute to cosmology?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 14, 2018

Cosmology, along with ontology and epistemology, began as a branch of metaphysics. Because the deepest issues in cosmology - the origin of the cosmos, accelerating cosmic expansion, the nature of causation, and so on - require a well-structured metaphysical metalanguage of physics for their proper formulation and solution, metaphysics is still where cosmology belongs.

This, of course, does not preclude the relevance of physical research to cosmology. Physics is more than welcome in cosmology, and has carved itself a very respectable niche in the field. Problems arise only when physics tries to steal the entire show, something which it is unequipped to do as a matter of logico-mathematical fact. The structure of physics simply doesn’t allow it.

There is exactly one properly formulated theory of metaphysics: the CTMU. It follows that the CTMU must be credited with putting cosmology back where it belongs, and thereby making it possible to express and solve cosmological problems which do not admit of physical expression and solution.

Does the CTMU show that some religious ideas can be critically examined with metaphysical logic?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 14, 2018

Yes, it does. That’s because it is a metaphysical metalanguage with unique logical support for the expression of religious and spiritual concepts such as God, the human soul, the nature of good and evil, alternate realms of spiritual existence, and the relationship between life and death.

Lesser languages - e.g., physicalism, metaphysical naturalism, and comparable pseudo-philosophical conceptual frameworks - lack such support. This is why people who insist that reality is all and only “physical” often reject spiritual and religious concepts across the board.

Where the limits of one’s language are also the limits of one’s powers of comprehension, spiritual and religious concepts are utterly inconceivable to those from whose cognitive languages metaphysics has been excluded.

Are you tired of CTMU critics?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 16, 2018

Yes indeed. And would you like to know what really aggravates me about some of them? As fortune would have it, we have some fair examples right here.

Let’s have a look at some quotes.

Quote: “I am even more tired of the self-serving sequence of questions on CTMU…”

This implies that I - the sole author of the CTMU, and the only one who could “self-servingly” promote it - have been posting questions on the CTMU, or having others post them.

If this accusation were explicit, it would be a bald-faced lie. If you don’t believe it, the burden is on you to prove your insinuations. (You can start with Quora Moderation, which could no doubt confirm that I don’t post questions here, anonymously or otherwise.)

Quote: “…whose claim to fame is that it has survived some thirty odd years of not having un-falsifiable assumptions falsified.”

There are no assumptions in the CTMU, unless one calls logic and physical reality “assumptions”. (That’s evidently why this author fails to name any.)

Quote: “It is not the topic matter of CTMU to which I object. It is not the fact that assumptions are made.”

Again, unless one calls logic and physical reality “assumptions”, the CTMU doesn’t have any. That’s why none have been named.

Quote: “What I object to is the self-aggrandising presentation of the theory as the definitive answer to these questions.”

Where exactly was the term “definitive” encountered? Yes, I’ve used it, but usually in reference to the operation of definition and/or the self-definitive capacity of a certain language, not to academic preeminence or popularity.

Perhaps “definitive” is being taken as a synonym for “correct”. Yes, the CTMU is correct. (The nice thing about being correct is not only that veracity precludes falsification, but that it makes no difference who denies it.)

Quote: “I object to the semi-literate references to other domains of knowledge, such as math, physics and logic, and then declaring that this theory is in anysense an improvement on them.”

The CTMU applies and/or refers to certain kinds of logic, mathematics, and physics. These applications and references are in no way “semiliterate”. Not to wear it out, but the right word is “correct”.

Again, I’m requesting a bit of overdue restraint from the peanut gallery. If you’re an armchair philosopher, that’s great - more power to you. But when it comes to trash-talking the CTMU, you’d be well-advised to stay in your armchair.

Both Matthew Laine and Chris Langan have IQs in excess of 200. Should they do a debate on the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 19, 2018

You know, I hate to toot my own horn, but questions like this are troll-magnets, and this one has already attracted a few trolls. So let’s put it this way:

I’ve been in the public eye for decades; I’ve been on many major news networks; I’ve turned down interviews with some of the biggest names in show biz, including Letterman and O’Brien; the mainstream media has issued many well-researched reports about my intelligence; and I have an absolutely original and airtight theory of reality on which I’ve published several peer-reviewed papers and which has attracted thousands of followers around the world. (“No brag, just fact,” as Walter Brennan used to say.)

So here’s the real question: Who is Matthew Laine, why is he bothering me, and why would he think I’d be impressed by the snide answer that he posted here?

Obviously, there are no satisfactory answers to these questions. “Matthew Laine” obviously has nothing whatsoever to bring to the table.

Hence, no debate, ever, period.

Why did Chris Langan (with a purported IQ of 200) overestimate the skills and abilities of gorillas and at the same time underestimate a whole population of Homo Sapiens?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 19, 2018

First, this concerns something I never posted to Quora, but which was put here without permission by someone else. Don’t steal my writing, take it out of context, and use it as a pretext to engage in defamation.

Secondly, I was making a point about animal intelligence and the conservation of endangered species, and only secondarily about immigration policy. (Gorillas are endangered by inter-species predation and environmental destruction; Somalians are endangered primarily by other Somalians, which is largely why they engage in mass migration as “refugees”.)

Thirdly, I made it clear that Somalians are human and have statistically depressed but still human intelligence. However, there can be little doubt that Koko the gorilla was as smart or smarter in some ways than many Somalians, especially some of the violent, illiterate career criminals that Somalia harbors and exports by the millions. (If you don’t believe it, then prove it erroneous.)

Fourthly, if one does not want to import gorillas and give them the streets because “they are intensely strong, intensely territorial animals who fight [to] establish and maintain a hierarchy”, then obviously, similar criteria should be considered with regard to human social and immigration policy.

Last but not least, modern Western political systems are dominated by “identity politics”. Who would claim that gorillas lack a group identity, that they are unintelligent, or that they do not deserve full consideration as inhabitants of Planet Earth?

Thanks for your attention.

Why does Chris Langan feel the need to reply to people who oppose his "theory" if he is so resolute in it being true?

Chris Langan
Updated July 20, 2018

Because no one likes one’s theory being lied about, and others being misled about it.

Addendum (from the Comments):

Logic can be productively defined as the syntax of identification. Any organism that adapts and survives has automatic access to it, right down to a virus. That’s because the requirement of identification is not merely cognitive; it’s a function of reality itself, over which it distributes on all scales.

When reality is cognitively modeled in a brain - or more generally, in a mind - the wires can get crossed and illogic can enter the subjective domain. But although one would never know it to look at human conventions, politics, and bureaucracies, nothing that violates logic can be properly modeled in objective reality. That’s because “logical” is essentially synonymous with “amenable to proper modeling in objective reality”. The mathematical system called “logic” has merely been structured around this requirement.

The CTMU is the metaphysical theory which explains how logic is distributed over reality. If you’re a philosopher, mathematician, or scientist, and/or you respect these disciplines, you’d be well advised to stop denying it, or to simply accept the factuality of the CTMU and move on. It’s a lock, and no one, but no one, is remotely intelligent enough to do a thing about it.

I don’t care how many troll droppings you may have stumbled over here on Quora; you can take CTMU logic straight to the bank and never lose your footing.

How can I explain the CTMU, the proof of God and the afterlife with metaphysical logic, to an atheist?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 21, 2018

Science and human experience depend on the intelligibility of what science studies, and what people experience. This means that the integrity of science depends on an explanation for the intelligibility of physical reality.

The CTMU is a high-level formulation of logic designed to provide such an explanation. It answers questions like the following: What is it that makes reality identifiable? What features does reality possess that make science and human experience possible - what forms do they assume in the overall structure of the cosmos? How do these features manifest on all scales?

The nonoccurence of irresolvable paradox in physical reality is a scientific fact. No scientist has ever managed to observe an irresolvable paradox; somehow, reality maintains its consistency under all circumstances. When a scientist sees what looks like an inconsistency in the structure of reality, the usual paradox-avoidance strategy is simply to make the paradox vanish by adjusting an existing theory, or finding a new one. But why should this work?

The undeniable fact is that science has no answers for questions like these, and mainstream philosophy has been of no help. Science lacks any cognitive framework in which the actual relationship between theory and content, knowledge and reality, epistemology and ontology, can be expressed, and its standard methodology does not permit this deficiency to be meaningfully addressed. In order to remedy this situation, it must be shown how and why reality is able to maintain its self-consistency and ontological integrity. This is what the CTMU does, and more.

I’ve scanned some of the answers below. Most are full of ignorance and derision, contain almost zero information on the CTMU, and are profoundly misleading. Readers are hereby advised to be on guard against the efforts of Quora’s ever-expanding troll population to mislead the unwary about a theory that its members, for all intents and purposes, are intellectually incapable of understanding. That a few of these people seem to know a smattering of scientific and/or philosophical terminology is beside the point, as they evidently have no idea how to properly apply it.

[The other parts of this question, which is actually several questions in one, are addressed in other answers I’ve posted on this site. A bit less misinformation out of you trolls, please.]

Is Chris Langan probably the greatest philosopher and mathematician of all time?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 26, 2018

Let’s just put it like this: if my work were understood in academia, which jealously controls the distribution of credit for advanced intellectual productions and has at its disposal a vast army of enforcers including proud certificants, adoring groupies, and Internet trolls who all suffer from something like the Stockholm syndrome and therefore treat it as their Mother Church, some people would probably be making some very positive statements along those lines.

However, in addition to having parted ways with academia, I suffer from two related problems: (1) many people evidently cannot understand what I write about the CTMU, and (2) instead of blaming any part of this on themselves, they blame it entirely on me. These problems can be expressed a bit more formally as, respectively, the Hollingworth “30 point rule” and the Dunning-Kruger effect. The former says that even people who are measurably smarter than average will find it hard or impossible to share their deeper thoughts with those whose IQ’s are more than about two standard deviations lower, and the latter says that less intelligent people tend to overrate their own intelligence relative to that of more intelligent people.

Both of these problems have been vastly amplified by decades of intensive social engineering designed to shift the intellectual bell curve objectively downward while shifting the subjective intellectual self-regard of the majority upward. The main tool of the social engineers is the indoctrination engine of Academia, Inc., an engine so efficient that it is in fact self-indoctrinating; its members actually believe the orthodoxies and political doctrine they dispense. Academia constitutes a pyramidal growth economy which has now passed the saturation point, but quite possibly has entered its decline too late to do society any good.

Obviously, as academia has contrived to establish a near-monopoly on advance certification for any form of employment more desirable than ditch-digger and toilet-cleaner, academic rejection costs people like me dearly. However, although I was initially willing to take some of the responsibility for my style of expression and lack of formal education, I have since learned in a variety of ways that this was never actually justified. That is, I’ve been forced to conclude that the nonrecognition of me and my work is academia’s fault, academia’s responsibility, and academia’s future problem. (We could add “atheistic trolls” to the mix, but this should be enough on which to chew for now.)

I hope this helps clear things up a little.

Why is logic a branch of philosophy?

Chris Langan
Answered Jul 28, 2018

Logic consists of the rules for attributing properties to objects (predicate logic), and for determining whether the resulting attributions are true or false (propositional or sentential logic). Thus, it is integral to ontology, which concerns attributions of existence, and epistemology, which concerns the ability to know attributions as true or false.

Ontology and epistemology are coinciding aspects of metaphysics, which is central to philosophy insofar as it spans all that exists, or - placing the emphasis on epistemology rather than ontology - of all that can be known.

Hence, logic has everything to do with philosophy on the deepest possible level, and vice versa.

Why do so many people believe Chris Langan is super-intelligent when it is obvious to any actually intelligent person that he is putting up a facade?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 7, 2018

[“Why do so many people believe Chris Langan is super-intelligent when it is obvious to any actually intelligent person that he is putting up a facade?”]

I hate to disappoint any Quora trolls who may be on the lurk, but I don’t rely on facades. I simply have no need of them. I can squash the vast majority of my intellectual opponents like insects, and the “tall tales” of my intelligence have been born out several times over on standard tests, experimental tests, and the body of work that carries my name.

On the other hand, the person who posted this question is evidently very much into facades. First, we have the fact that no name has been given; the poster is anonymous (the facade is so weak that one can’t even put a name to it). Secondly, there’s the pretense that whereas I (Chris Langan) am merely feigning intelligence, the poster of this question is an “actually intelligent person” who is peering scornfully down at me from the heights of Olympus.

Now, anyone who buys that kind of facade is really feigning intelligence! But not very convincingly, I’m afraid.

What do philosophers think of Chris Langan’s CTMU?

Chris Langan
Updated Aug 9, 2018

That all depends on the philosopher.

Most modern philosophers, particularly those of the academic variety, have been abjectly cowed by the relative success of the hard sciences, which - although they have not imparted the deep understanding of the overall structure of reality that they once seemed to promise - have nevertheless resulted in quite a lot of impressive and often very profitable gadgetry. Accordingly, ever cognizant of what is good for their academic careers, they subscribe to (metaphysical or methodological) naturalism.

Naturalism, which amounts to physicalism or physical monism, is the dominant worldview among academicians, especially those in the hard sciences. Because the hard sciences are where the corporate profiteers of Academia, Inc. butter their bread, academic philosophers stick to it like glue, at least where the rubber meets the road. That is, they confine their philosophical meanderings within the boundaries of physicalism, merely fleshing out its details while studiously ignoring any academic outsider who might have a better way.

Obviously, physicalism - which is strongly associated with various so-called “naturalistic” ideologies like atheism, secularism, and communism - is not valid from a CTMU standpoint, and the CTMU is therefore summarily rejected by the proponents of these belief systems.

In contrast, some philosophers have managed to retain three things once considered essential to success in philosophy: an open mind, high intelligence, and an understanding of the technical aspects of metaphysical philosophy as it relates to conventional scientific theories as object-languages. Within this group, those familiar with the CTMU are almost universally in favor of it.

One can only wish that there were more of them around. ;)

[ADDENDUM: One of the answers in this thread, written by someone absurdly claiming to have a degree in “philosophy”, is highly erroneous. Unfortunately, when I posted a warning about this in its comments section, it was immediately deleted and comments were closed. Accordingly, I’m repeating the warning here.

“WARNING: I’m the author of the CTMU, and this answer contains nothing that can be recognized as having anything to do with it. In addition to ironic insults involving “word salad” and “masturbation”, it consists of a quote of which the critic professes complete incomprehension; a handful of terms taken out of context and mistakenly interpreted as as synonyms of “circular or self-referential”; and erroneous descriptions of the CTMU as “perception and thought is reality” and “the claims of the theory are proven by the claims of the theory.” As these errors are misleading at best and malicious at worst, readers are hereby advised to ignore this answer in its entirety. Thank you for your attention.”

Answers like the one which occasioned this warning do not come from philosophers, but from trolls, and any upvotes or endorsements that they receive are from other trolls. Remember, not everyone who represents himself as a “philosopher” has the intellectual wherewithal and understanding to engage in philosophy, and many of those who do not are given to venting their resentment of those who do in unkind and misleading ways. Forewarned is forearmed.]

Do you agree with Chris Langan that all things share a common reality and are to that extent similar, and that the mere fact that two things can be discussed through the same syntax (e.g., the English language) shows their difference isn't absolute?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 10, 2018

Yes, I’m Chris Langan, and I usually agree with myself. To that extent, this answer belabors the obvious. But if I may, let me explain something brand spanking new to those of you who have already answered this question in such a way as to betray severe confusion about really hard concepts like reality, structure, and language.

That thing you’ve been typing on, and at whose screen you’ve been staring until your beady little eyes cross, is called a computer, and computation theory is the branch of science which studies what it does (“compute”). You even do a little computation of your own, mentally speaking, and according to many big experts who claim to know what they’re talking about, your body does likewise, physically speaking. So let’s begin with a little elementary computation theory, shall we?

If you were the kind of abstract automaton called an acceptor - which, by the way, represents all kinds of actual concrete automata built on its template, and even biological systems including you - you would (do, in fact) have something called accepting syntax. Conformance to this syntax - and by the way, “conforming to” means “sharing structure with” - is the criterion which allows you to accept some things as input while rejecting others.

For those of you capable of understanding it, this establishes that you “share structure” with everything that you can accept as input, i.e., recognize or perceive. What structure do I mean? Why , accepting syntax, of course - that part of your programming and/or basic architecture that controls what you accept as “real” and what you cannot. (Yes, yes, I know - you’re a big shot who can decide all by yourself what you do or do not “accept as real”. But there are others to consider, and the replicability criterion of scientific observation implies that we all have a standard accepting syntax controlling our perception. In fact, even when you just imagine something, it is recognizable to you only because it superficially conforms to this syntax! But I digress.)

Now, are we all following along here? At this point, we should all understand that we have an accepting syntax, and that things we perceive must conform to it and in fact share structure with it.

Just to make sure that we all understand this, let’s have a little pop quiz.

Doesn’t this mean that whenever you see two things you regard as “different”, both of them conform to (share structure with) accepting syntax, and therefore have something in common, namely, the generic structure of the aforementioned accepting syntax?
But doesn’t this imply that all that you see, feel, touch, smell, and/or taste has a nonempty structural intersect?
But doesn’t this mean that everything you can perceive is the same in this respect?
And doesn’t that mean that it’s not totally different from anything else you can see, feel, touch, smell, and/or taste ?

ANSWER KEY: Yes, it does.

Any questions? (If so, that’s too bad, because at this point, still having questions would mean that you’ve got so many loose screws that if you stop clutching your head in consternation, it just might roll off your shoulders and bounce away like a tennis ball.)

We all know that abstraction can be hard … for some, very, very hard. But let’s get real here - if you’re the kind of person who has trouble with this level of abstraction, then why are you trying to critique a theory that requires the highest level of abstraction possible?

I mean, shouldn’t you be playing with matches in a haymow or something?

What is CTMU? Is it worth my time to understand it?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 10, 2018

One cannot understand the reality that one inhabits without the CTMU. Therefore, if one wishes to understand reality, oneself, and one’s embedment in reality, one should at least try to come to grips with it.

Perhaps this will be easier to understand if we put it another way. One should try to understand the CTMU for the same reason that one should study logic, only more so. The CTMU can be characterized as logic formulated on a very high level of discourse, and specifically as the level of metalogic which identifies logic itself as a central ingredient of intelligible reality.

On the other hand, if one is a Quora troll - especially the kind which always leads off by identifying itself as an atheist or a skeptic - then one needn’t bother, as in this case, one lacks the intellectual acuity to make any headway.

What do other profoundly gifted individuals think of Christopher Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 14, 2018

To my knowledge, no profoundly gifted individual has ever found fault with the CTMU. No real, verified one, that is.

As for the nasty answers posted here, I’m afraid they’re more likely to have come from resentful mediocrities than “profoundly gifted individuals”. I’ve been dealing with the profoundly gifted for decades, and none of these people sounds anything like them.

Do you accept that any god could not be omnipotent due to the logical paradoxes this creates?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 15, 2018

In order to infer divine non-omnipotence from, for example, the paradoxical assertion that an omnipotent God could create a rock too heavy for God to lift, one must be able to show that God Himself is not responsible for the operative constraints on His power, as these take precedence over God’s self-imposed “inability” to lift the rock.

In other words, if God has tied His own hands by establishing prior constraints or commitments that prevent Him from lifting a given rock (or doing anything else), then the real measure of His power is the establishment of these prior constraints, and the real measure of His will is His own refusal to break them.

Human examples are easy to find. E.g., it would be misleading and ridiculous to accuse a smoker who successfully forbids himself to smoke one more cigarette of “lacking willpower”. In fact, willpower is exactly what such a person demonstrates.

As long as God Himself is responsible for any limitations on His own power, including even the structure of logic, this remains entirely consistent with divine omnipotence.

Do you agree with Chris Langan that Cartesian mind-body dualism fails because both mind and body, in any such theoretical separation, are still being discussed through one syntax (i.e. English), thus showing that the two are in the same reality?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 16, 2018

WARNING: This question is badly garbled. Specifically, the restriction of cognitive syntax to one particular natural language has nothing to do with the CTMU or anything else I’ve ever said or written.

In fact, there is no way to cogently disagree with the CTMU. In particular, the simultaneous recognition of mind and body implies that they share common structure, and this precludes absolute dualism. There is not a logician or philosopher on Earth who can coherently argue otherwise.

Now to the issue of why the wording of this question is so badly skewed. Questions like this are the work of trolls; that much is clear. The real issue is whether the readership of Quora is sufficiently stupid and malevolent to regularly turn such trolling into a pretext for badmouthing people and issues about which most of its members know precisely nothing, or merely into an opportunity to slip in a snide jab or two in order to boost personal self-esteem at the expense of truth.

Some of the answers here aren’t that bad. But still, Quora has been failing this test, and those who have contributed pejorative answers here are among the reasons. There is nothing positive that can be said about such people; they are gulls and suckers, and they are evidently too dull and witless to stop themselves from being played like yoyos.

My advice to the gullible: don’t make a fool of yourself. Even when a troll pushes your buttons because they stick up a mile, exercise a little self-control and refrain from slavishly indulging your impulse to spew resentment and illogic. Quora is not supposed to be anyone’s personal hatefest.

Thanks for your attention.

What assumed knowledge does one need in order to understand Chris Langan’s CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 16, 2018

The CTMU involves no assumptions whatsoever. It requires just two things that each of us is given from birth: The world, and one’s ability to perceive and conceive it.

How much prerequisite physics knowledge is required to understand the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 16, 2018

An initial grasp of the theory requires only the most basic knowledge of mainstream physics. This includes a bit of classical mechanics, a little Special and General Relativity, a smattering of (standard) quantum mechanics, some introductory cosmology, and so on.

Do you agree with Chris Langan that reality contains all that is real and only that which is real, and that if there was anything real enough to in any way influence reality, it would have to be inside reality?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 16, 2018

I’m afraid that there’s no way to disagree. This has been correctly identified as a tautology, albeit misidentified as a mere propositional tautology which cannot be refined to obtain useful information.

I’m not quite sure where those who deny this assertion learned what they persist in calling “logic”, but one thing is for sure: they need to get their money back. ;)

Why does Chris Langan disregard anyone who disagrees with him as intellectually inferior instead of addressing their argument and deconstructing it? Why is he always so skeptical of people being trolls, or have I misinterpreted their Quora activity?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 17, 2018

Quora is not a debate club. I’m not paid to be here by Quora, and I don’t have time to roll around on the floor wrestling with Quora trolls all day. (A Quora troll never admits it is wrong, cannot be educated, and only becomes more obnoxious when directly addressed by its target du jour.)

That being understood, I do not typically disregard coherent, meaningful arguments by informed, well-qualified, and well-vetted people who object to something in the CTMU. It’s just that I never see any.

Rather than engage in debate with Quora trolls - an activity from which I have nothing whatsoever to gain - I’ve made a good deal of CTMU material freely available on the web.

Interested readers are invited to take full advantage of it.

Why do people claim that the conclusions of the CTMU are "unjustified assertions" when they are all results of rigorous deductions (including logical induction)?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 21, 2018

There are several possible reasons. E.g., they don’t like theories said to be related to God; they don’t like people who are said to be smarter than they are; they don’t like theories related to God and written by people who are smarter than they are, and so on.

But perhaps the most important reason is that of those who claim to understand logic, few actually do. They merely pretend to understand logic, and in order to console themselves for their ignorance of logic, use their misunderstandings of logic to attack theories about which they have yet other misunderstandings.

In short, it’s all one big misunderstanding. ;)

Can the CTMU prove God with roughly 80 symbols?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 21, 2018

Of course, and easily. However, the definitions of those symbols might exceed that number, and even the term “symbol” might not be defined in quite the usual way.

Why does Chris Langan receive so much unreasonable hostility from otherwise reasonable people just for saying what he thinks like everyone else does? Is it that people are threatened by his high IQ, causing them to feel a need to assert themselves?

Chris Langan
Answered Aug 28, 2018

Permission to speak frankly? It’s because, when one is just a cheesy, resentful, pseudonymous little Internet troll with a hard-on for God, the CTMU, and anyone reputed to be more intelligent than oneself, one has nothing of value to lose by shooting off one’s vile, foaming mouth like a messy, smelly vinegar-and-baking soda Vesuvius whenever one gets the chance.

What does the CTMU contribute to the field of computer science, especially artificial intelligence?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 5, 2018

Regarding computer science, CTMU originally stood for “Computation Theoretic Model of the Universe” before it was extended to encompass the entirety of cognition. It is by far the most advanced theory of reality as a self-simulation; other so-called “simulation theories” are beneath comparison.

Regarding AI, the CTMU is not about “artificial” intelligence. It is about real intelligence, including synthetic intelligence. Anything less is just the race to make money by selling rope to the would-be hangmen of mankind in the form of mechanical golems that can be used to subvert, suppress, and manipulate human cognition, communication, and action.

Has it ever happened that an ordinary person found the solution to an unsolved mathematics problem?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 6, 2018

Mathematically uneducated people have often found the solutions for previously unsolved logical and mathematical problems and puzzles. For example, the legendary Games columnist Martin Gardner credited many amateurs for the solutions of difficult math and logic puzzles published in Scientific American.

Although Academia, Inc. would like the public to believe otherwise - it is, after all, in business for profit - intelligence and ingenuity are innate human characteristics that cannot be bought and paid for at a university. A case can be made that some amount of academic training is all but necessary for the solution of certain very difficult mathematical problems, especially ones which cannot be understood (let alone solved) by the typical layman. But in the large, professional academics - who notoriously tend to fixate on just the problems salient within their personal specialties - do not have a monopoly on the selection or solution of “good” or interesting mathematical problems.

Historically, the intellectual penetration to formulate and solve really interesting problems of great import to the future intellectual and practical development of mankind came almost exclusively from formally untrained people, including those who laid the groundwork for modern disciplines which now reek of academic snobbery. Such people worked from first principles, an ability that professional academics, many of whom are weighted down with leaden orthodoxy, have forgotten how to use, recognize, and properly value.

Is the CTMU the first simulation theory?

Chris Langan
Updated Sep 14, 2018

Yes, the CTMU is the first detailed theory of reality as a self-simulation, having been used to resolve Newcomb’s Paradox in 1989. (Note that reality must be a “self-simulation” insofar as that which does the simulating must itself be real.)

This in itself was a milestone; it seems to have been the first time that a major philosophical problem was solved in the context of a computationally simulated reality. While it had previously been suggested that our world is somehow embedded in a wider insensible reality - e.g., Plato’s Allegory of the Cave - this was the first time that an existing philosophical problem was solved in an explicitly computational setting.

Note that the CTMU has a unique theoretic structure that is absolutely necessary for this purpose, and that its functionality exceeds that of ordinary computers (it was, and is, described as “protocomputational”). No other so-called “simulation theory” shares this property, ostensibly because the authors of such theories fail to understand the deep structure of reality and the limitations of standard automata.

Why is there no Wikipedia page about the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 20, 2018

First, let me say that I think Wikipedia is a great idea, and I sometimes get some real use out of it. It has many fine and dedicated editors. But it also has its problems.

In particular, Wikipedia is notorious for its freewheeling bands of obsessive and seemingly jobless “vigilante trolls” who, after getting a bee in their bonnets about something they find annoying or offensive, stop at nothing to get it deleted. They usually begin by tampering with its article, pumping it full of defamation and misinformation; then, should someone else try to repair the damage, by complaining to administrators and nominating the article for deletion; and finally, when their case is heard, by engaging in nonstop lying and cheating while threatening any and all opponents with dire consequences until they get their way.

Then, after the article has been thoroughly nuked, they keep buzzing around the crater like flies around an outhouse to make sure it never comes back.

Some of these trolls are mere editors; some are administrators; in the past, some were arbitrators. They are overwhelmingly of a “secular” (atheist-materialist) persuasion; thus, if any of them encounters anything on the web which seems to suggest that a potential target mentions God, or spirituality (“woo”), or was written by a theist (particularly a Christian, AKA an “Intelligent Design Creationist”), that’s usually the end of it. Whether or not what they’ve read about their target or victim is correct - and in the case of the CTMU, it was absolutely false - they immediately freak out en masse and throw a collective fit until the object of their displeasure has been red-inked, ripped out, and consigned to oblivion. They don’t even bother to read the source material. The whole routine is approximately as sane and rational as a medieval witch hunt.

Unfortunately, I’m not exaggerating. The CTMU and I were attacked as being “non-notable” even after having been on every major news network in North America and Europe, with considerable mass media exposure in South America and Asia as well, and were insulted and harangued by self-styled Wikipedia “mathematicians” and “physicists” whose actual command of these disciplines couldn’t have exceeded that of an average high schooler. It eventually emerged that the whole Wikipedia anti-CTMU movement had migrated from the website of “the Brights”, a shrine to the dubious brand of “rationalism” promoted by various celebrity atheists who run around deploring “the supernatural” and claiming to love “science”, but who often seem unable to distinguish worthwhile science, mathematics, and philosophy from soggy corn flakes.

Perhaps the CTMU article will come back some day. It certainly should, because the CTMU has nothing to do with “intelligent design”, it has thousands of followers, it is backed up by several peer-reviewed publications, it has urgent social, scientific, and philosophical applications, and it is based on exciting new mathematics. The deletion of its article may have been Wikipedia’s darkest day, and it should definitely be put right. But one thing is for sure: I’m not wasting any of my own time to make it happen.

Why don't physicists accept the CTMU? The CTMU is a far superior theory of reality than any physics theory.

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 20, 2018

What on Earth would give anyone the idea that “physicists don’t accept the CTMU”? This assumption is simply false.

Admittedly, many physicists haven’t heard of the CTMU, largely because it’s outside their specialties. (Physics has been pretty well carved up over the years.) But in just the last week, I’ve corresponded with three major physicists, one a Nobel Prize winner. Yet another famous physicist, John Wheeler, inventor of the phrase “black hole”, actually liked it - he told me so around twenty years ago.

You know, this rabid anti-CTMU trolling has to stop, if only because it’s making this whole website look ten kinds of ridiculous. There’s not a “physicist” on this site - or a physics troll, for that matter, which is what some Quora “physics experts” seem to be - whom I couldn’t pretty much mangle, intellectually speaking, if he/she tried to debunk or discredit it.

A little less of this nonsense, if you wouldn’t mind.

Is the Kalergi plan a conspiracy theory?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 21, 2018

Of course it is, on two counts.

First, the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan is a conspiracy involving the European ruling class and the international bankers on whom its members have always relied for money to fund their wars, colonial adventures, and so on.

Secondly, the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan is a conspiracy theory because it has rightly been called a “conspiracy” by others. In other words, it is the object of a theory externally formed about a conspiracy.

A little background. War loans are a very profitable business for international bankers, who get to fund, and collect, from both sides of every conflict. The winner pays willingly because it extorts reparations from the loser, and the loser pays because those reparations have been doubled in order to ensure it (and because losers can also be dunned directly by their “loan officers”).

And of course, wars and colonial adventures can also be very good for heads of state, high-ranking military officers, and those who profit from the manufacture of weaponry and munitions (eventually dubbed “the Military-Industrial Complex” by US President and former General Dwight D. Eisenhower). And let’s not forget multinational corporations supplying the military and engaging in international trade.

It follows that these groups have a motive for conspiracy, namely, prospective gains of money and power. It also follows that they have means and opportunity, which follows immediately from already having most of the wealth and power. It even follows that they must lie about their actual motives, lest the populace rise up against them and take their money and power away from them. Their collusion and secrecy, often rationalized in terms of “national security”, establishes that they are implicated in a conspiracy for which they possess means, motive, and opportunity.

As explained by Coudenhove-Kalergi himself in Praktischer Idealismus (1925), and even considerably earlier in the associated movement, the idea was to

(1) Blame the indigenous people of Europe for European war and colonization (“Indigenous Europeans are congenitally greedy, quarrelsome, and violent!”) despite the fact that unlike European royalty and the bankers who funded their various wars, the vast majority of Europeans had never seen a bit of the money or territory gained in such adventures at the cost of their lives, limbs, and happiness in their otherwise peaceful and productive societies, using this false pretext to justify the elimination of European cultural and ethnic (genetic) identity by means of politics and mass immigration and its unavoidable consequences including transformative effects on European population genetics;

(2) Intermix and communize the resulting deracinated population, depriving them of their ethnic and cultural identities in order to thoroughly domesticate them and prepare them for global governance under the enlightened leadership of the bankers and despots who had actually been guilty of starting, funding, and profiting from all of the wars and colonial misadventures for which the innocent masses of Europe had been falsely blamed;

(3) Justify permanent control of the resulting divided-and-conquered population, a so-called “Eurasian-Negroid Race of the Future”, by a “Master Race” consisting of, you guessed it, a combination of European royalty and international bankers and their friends and progeny (which, owing to its supposed moral and intellectual superiority, would not be subject to genetic dilution).

This is all in print, in the abovementioned book and elsewhere. There’s simply no denying it, at least if one has any respect for the truth. The movement was handsomely funded by famous international bankers including Warburg and Rothschild and eagerly embraced by European royalty … i.e., by the other (non-banking) constituents of the “Master Race”, which today controls the EU economy and EU immigration policy.

Notice that this policy is exactly, precisely what Coudenhove-Kalergi prescribed in Praktischer Idealismus, and that the despotic, undemocratic bureaucrats of the EU take all of their orders strictly from above, i.e., from members of the EU “Master Race”. So there is no question that what we see today is a perfect reflection of what the movement prescribed.

R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European movement and often called the “Father of the European Union”, was the winner of the EU’s first Charlemagne Prize. He even chose the EU anthem. There is no question whatsoever that those who run the EU embraced his program completely and continue to do so.

Note that the ultimate success of this program would result in a 2-tier society consisting of an inbred, filthy-rich overclass and an impoverished, genetically homogenized underclass inhabiting what amounts to a “world-hive”. In such a hivelike arrangement, war and colonization would no longer be necessary for the royalty-banker “Master Race” to remain in control. The hive would contain workers, drones, and soldiers to police the workers and drones 24/7 and squeeze them for every last drop of blood on behalf of their masters, no wars necessary except for purposes of population control.

[If you want to argue about this, please don’t expect me to engage with you on it. As far as I’m concerned - and many others share my opinion - these are well-documented facts and thus bear no debate.]

How is a person’s brain with a high IQ physically different from a person with a low IQ?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 22, 2018

Well, I suppose I’m the highest-profile living specimen with relevance to this question, having been mentioned in this regard by multiple sources in the mass media.

My cranial volume, computed by subjecting in vivo caliper measurements to several estimation formulae including the Lee-Pearson formula and the spheroid formula, is in the neighborhood of 50 percent greater than that of the average human male, almost enough to be considered a species-level difference. (I’d be considered large-framed, but I’m really not far above the human average in this regard.)

Not too much should be made of this, as there are many other morphological, physiological, and especially neurological criteria to consider. However, one of them is not environment - my brothers and I all suffered from quite a bit of environmental impoverishment and poor nutrition as children, but ended up with high IQ’s anyway.

I suggest that we all face it: the fact that human cranial volume has been shrinking over the last few millennia is not, I repeat not, a good sign, evolutionarily speaking.

In fact, it will probably turn out to have been a very bad sign.

Are some atheists afraid of the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 22

Of course some atheists are afraid of the CTMU.

Which atheists, exactly? The more intelligent ones who have actually read and understood some appreciable part of it.

Their terror owes to the penalty that awaits them for the sacrilege and blasphemy with which they have systematically polluted the minds of entire generations, thereby parting them from the source of being and damning them to perdition.

Is the CTMU absolute truth? If so, why?

Chris Langan
Updated Sep 28, 2018

Yes, the CTMU is absolute truth in a sense roughly analogous to that in which a propositional tautology is absolute truth, but in the expanded context of a new metaformal linguistic construct called a supertautology. (This has been defined and explained at length in several peer-reviewed papers - don’t be afraid to do a little homework.)

Just as a propositional tautology like “X or not-X” is true regardless of the truth values of its sentential variables, the CTMU supertautology is true regardless of the form taken by specific scientific theories therein, and can thus guide the formulation of scientific theories in general. Metalogically, it amounts to an advanced reflexive formulation of model theory which utilizes brand new mathematics in explaining the “absolute” (self-verifying) nature of logic with respect to reality at large on the basis of direct intelligibility.

Because logic is the structure of truth, the absolutization of logic as a requirement of intelligibility amounts to the absolutization of truth. Thanks to a property known as “logical idempotence”, the supertautology spans arbitrary levels of verification all the way up to metaphysical ontology. It is thus applicable in every scientific, mathematical, and philosophical domain.

Addendum: A reader asks the following question:

Question: Given Wittgenstein’s statement that tautologies tell you nothing relevant about reality, why do tautologies take absolute precedence in your theory, and why is it so important that they be used in this way?

Answer: Before one can formulate a meaningful question about the CTMU, one must take the trouble to understand what it says … for example, by reading the above response, which states that the CTMU is not a mere tautology, but a supertautology.

Whereas a tautology is just a circular expression within a language, a supertautology is an entire language configured in a tautological or circular way. In order to take on this structure, a language must assume certain unique and interesting properties. It is from this structure and these properties, which must be shared by the content of the language as a condition of its intelligibility therein, that interesting conclusions can be drawn regarding the content.

The CTMU leaves Wittgenstein and every philosopher before or since in the dust. But before one can understand how and why, one must make an effort to understand what the CTMU says about its own structure and its own properties. Again, do your homework. I’ve made study materials freely available, so it’s no one’s fault but yours if you fail to use them.

[Warning: Because the CTMU has theological ramifications unbeloved of “the atheist community” (if such we may call it), it has many implacable enemies on this site, not one of whom has ever displayed the slightest understanding of it. It is strongly suggested that readers not allow these trolls to mislead them.

A common ploy of such trolls is to demand a “prediction” of the CTMU. Some of these are history; e.g., an early one was that of accelerating cosmic expansion, for which the CTMU explanation has never been duplicated. But the short answer is that the CTMU does not rely on prediction; it relies on the fact that it provides necessary infrastructure for science in general.

A few less stupid (but still intellectually challenged) trolls have responded that science needs no infrastructure, as science already exists and it already works. However, it certainly does need infrastructure, and it certainly does not work on all levels - it tops out well beneath the metaphysical level of discourse occupied by extremely important questions regarding (e.g.) the ultimate nature and origination of reality, including quantum cosmology - and no scientist can explain why not. Hence, the CTMU is an absolute requisite of science.]

Note: Another answer has been posted to this question by a frequent (and just as frequently misinformed) CTMU critic, who states that “a tautology is a tautology with respect to a class of models.” Quite so. To be more specific, a propositional tautology is absolutely true with respect to all intelligible models. We can forget about models outside of this class - after all, they are unintelligible, which means that you couldn’t describe one of them even if you tried.

Why is Langan's CTMU not a real theory?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 28, 2018

This question is not valid; it is not meant to inform, but to impugn. There is no one anywhere who can show that the CTMU is “not a theory”, and anyone who makes this claim is a fraud.

The CTMU is a new and very advanced kind of theory, but the differences between the CTMU and ordinary theories make it stronger rather than weaker. Instead of being a mere body of empirical-inductive speculation haphazardly glued onto one or more formal systems which serve as its theoretical backbone, the CTMU is a metaformal system in which language and universe are combined using the property of intelligibility. It is the only theory of its kind, and deserves applause rather than unpleasant insinuations.

(One obviously biased CTMU question posted for purposes of harassment; six pejorative and misinformative answers posted by people who, to judge by what they have written, know absolutely nothing about the theory itself. What a site!)

In the CTMU, human beings are seen as endomorphic images of the mind of God. Can this mapping be described? We are very constrained local entities, so how does it work?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 28, 2018

In the CTMU, the global identity of reality is explicitly stratified, and distributed morphisms are utilized. So (1) one needs to be very clear on the level of identity to which any given statement or mathematical symbol refers, and (2) one needs to allow for the distributed nature of certain morphisms, where by distributed we mean that the morphism applies to each point in a topological point set.

Notice the implication: the use of distributed morphisms implies that each point of any topological space subject to distributed morphism has internal structure. In the CTMU, this internal structure is called syntax; hence, the points are called syntactic operators.

Some syntactic operators cannot support full isomorphism to the global identity; hence, they are subject to syntactic restriction, and isomorphism is limited to some proper part or aspect of global syntax. But the points in which the syntax of the global identity is fully imaged are not restricted in this way. It follows that their syntax is isomorphic to global syntax. (This does not imply isomorphism with respect to external state.)

And now for a bit of advice. Typically, questions like this come from people who have not bothered to read available material on the CTMU. They are looking for fast answers, they are often confused, and many of them dislike work so much that they don’t even review the answers I’ve already posted on Quora. Unfortunately, this gives others the opportunity to post false or misleading answers, and Quora is sometimes very lax in letting such people misinform its readers.

Readers are therefore cautioned against blindly accepting any answer for any CTMU question on its face unless it comes from me or someone else whose knowledge of the theory can be verified by checking it against the available material, especially if it emanates from someone who has been guilty of misinterpreting and/or badmouthing the CTMU in the past.

What does John Gould think about CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 28, 2018

Obviously, John Gould has done quite a lot of talking about the CTMU right here on Quora. One might be tempted to infer from this that he knows just about everything there is to know of it.

However, as the sole author of the CTMU, I can state with complete certainty that this is anything but the case. Despite the several attempts I’ve made to set Mr. Gould straight on various points of relevance, he continues to make precisely the same errors regarding it that he has made in the past. It’s like being locked in an empty discotheque with the exits sealed, a skipping record on the platter, and the speakers cranked up to 150+ decibels.

I’m not trying to say that John Gould is an especially stupid person; that’s not the case. He manages to say some relatively intelligent things on occasion. But that’s what makes it all the more disappointing, and ultimately more irritating, when he makes glaring mistakes and then automatically defaults to “infinite loop” mode. It’s like trying to sleep with a nuclear-powered cricket in the room.

What I’m saying is that Mr. Gould has an angry little bee in his bonnet regarding the CTMU, and that possibly due to a touch of OCD - we all have a little of that, by the way - he would probably be harder to detach from it than a five-pound lobster with one’s fingers pinched between its claws.

So the long and short of it is simply this: John Gould is “attached” to the CTMU, and inasmuch as the attachment has nothing to do with an actual understanding of it, the attachment may contain a certain emotional element.

If only the emotion were of a positive and constructive nature.

Does Chris Langan have any evidence for his claim that John Wheeler liked the CTMU?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 29, 2018

Yes, I do. Specifically, I still have one of Wheeler’s personalized illustrated postcards on which he had penned a request that I meet with him at Princeton (unfortunately, I was unable to get away from any of the three or so jobs I had at the time).

The next time I see it around the office, I’ll scan it and post a copy somewhere. Until then, any doubters may feel free to doubt it as much as they like, as I really couldn’t care less.

Does Jordan Peterson regard the CTMU as a metamathematical, logically rigorous scientific theory of metaphysics?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 30, 2018

God help poor Jordan if he ever says otherwise! (I’m afraid he wouldn’t stand much of a chance against me, and as a North American clinical psychologist, he probably knows it.)

Of course, maybe someone doubts this who actually knows Jordan. If so, then have Jordan give me a call and we’ll see about setting something up. I’m awfully busy, but if he’s polite and respectful, there won’t be a problem.

Is the CTMU true?

Chris Langan
Answered Sep 30, 2018

Yes, absolutely. Its structure is that of a supertautology, a new mathematical system which incorporates logic as a whole and thus ensures its own veracity.

[Warning: This site teems with anti-CTMU trolls and their sockpuppets, and the Quora moderation staff is completely inadequate to deal with them. Not one of these trolls has ever displayed any understanding whatsoever of the theory or any of its components. Answers to CTMU-related questions which do not come from me, or from someone whose statements can be checked against CTMU material published elsewhere, should be regarded as unreliable, especially if they are both pejorative and free of actual CTMU content. Thanks for your attention.]