simism66 quoted from the book "Representation and Man" as saying: The universe thus conceived as an intelligible total system evolving within itself a representation of itself models nicely Hegel's conception of the Absolute evolving to self-consciousness. In Die Phiinomenologie des Geistes, Hegel proposes that we identify subject-matter and method, viewing the history of philosophy as the history of consciousness, its method as the dialectic of consciousness, and the goal of philosophical inquiry as the coming of consciousness to an awareness of its evolutionary history and, thus, to an awareness of itself as consciousness to self-consciousness. This, too, finds a parallel in the view which I have been sketching. For in treating the having by us of a representation yielding methodology of empirical inquiry as itself a fit subject for empirical inquiry, I perform also the reflexive trick of ultimately identifying subject and method. And the upshot is the same, for what emerges in Hegel's philosophy as the self-actualization of the Absolute finds its parallel here in a synoptic empirical theory of man-in-the-universe which views the epistemic activities of persons and the fundamental nature of the physical arena in which those activities occur as explanatorily correlative, neither being understandable apart from a conception of the other. When we ask whose theory this (ultimate) theory would be, however, it becomes equally appropriate to assign it to the universe as subject as to ourselves - for it is precisely a theory which posits us and our representations as necessary products of the natural evolution of that universe. We are, aphoristically speaking, the universe's way of asking itself what it is like. And in this way, the traditional dichotomy between knowing subject and known object at last disappears. Therefore God requires us and we require God. The relationship is recursive.
Professional what? Discussion board posters? That's just a bunch of anonymous people expressing their opinions about Langan and his 'ctmu' on a discussion board like this one. To their credit though, most of their opinions were decidedly negative. They criticized Langan's arrogance, pomposity and incomprehensible writing style. We have done the same thing here. Turning to the ostensible topic of the thread in the subject line, it is telling that there is very little interest in or discussion of Langan's supposedly earth-shaking ideas by professional scholars. If his ideas were even 1/10 as important as he insists they are (he claims to have answered all the age-old questions about God, the universe, and everything) every philosopher, scientist and theologian on earth would be excitiedly talking about him and the journals and conferences would be filled with nothing else. In real life, we see nothing remotely like that. I think that silence tells us something.
When a genius of a certain sort appears, society is sure to follow. The CTMU is so far beyond what scientists are familiar with that it took 26 years since its initial publication in noesis for the academic community to acknowledge it. It also gets critics and rebellion, disgust and hatred. Recall that it isn't a scientific theory. But it sure is 100% accepted by me.
So why do you promote it when it's clear you have no idea what it is, except that it supports your belief system?
Really? Why is that? I'm not convinced that Langan is a genius. There are all kinds of boasts on the internet about how high his IQ supposedly is, but little information about how it was measured and by whom. I'm assuming that it was measured by the 'Mega Society' (a high IQ club that claims to accept only the top one millionth of humanity) using their own rather dubious test. Are the professional intelligence tests (Stanford-Binet and others) used by psychologists even normed to credibly produce IQ scores above about 160? The problem goes deeper than that. Genius isn't a matter of acing intelligence tests. That's no more impressive than running up huge scores on video games. Genius suggests the ability to accomplish extraordinary things, whether to write symphonies like Beethoven, to paint like Leonardo, or to produce physical ideas like Einstein. What has Langan accomplished? He's a college drop-out who reportedly works as a bar bouncer. He writes pseudo-technical philosophical prose that's largely incomprehensible to others, which suggests at the very least an inability to clearly formulate and communicate his ideas. I'll say that I've encountered bipolar individuals whose speech and prose during their manic periods remind me of Langan's writing style. Isn't Noesis published by the Mega Society? As I suggested up above, if scholars did acknowledge 'the CTMU' as being anything like Langan boasts it is (the answer to all of mankind's age-old questions), wouldn't we expect to see a lot more excitement and discussion in the journals and at the conferences? Wouldn't 'the CTMU' be the subject of a flood of books, articles and university courses? Wouldn't hordes of scholars be rushing to specializing in it and wouldn't it be generating a flood of doctoral dissertations? We don't see anything like that.
Then why peddle it as a scientific theory? Further, why peddle it at all when you should, by now, also accept that noone on this forum is interested in it. If you contained all your CTMU thoughts to the one thread that you were asked to ("Reality is...") then we could ignore you more easily than when you troll the site with utter drivel (to wit your "I am not a genius..." thread that simply urinated over the forum rules, and this one that defacates over them).
All of these attributes define genius. And if you think the Hoeflin tests are subjective think again. The brain is split between right and left hemisphere functions. These functions are the sole purpose for our performance on various challenges and/ or tests. Langan has a unique ability with words. He understands a diverse range of topics and can produce new and profound thoughts. In other words, he is not as stupid as you think. I can verify this. If you are open to the language of the CTMU you will be blown away by its genius. Don't let that stop you from comprehending the CTMU. Yes, but back in '89 it was a journal before the internet. Langan and I have already made progress in a respectful way, even though we are both outside any academic institution, to bring the CTMU to their attention. And we are satisfied. I know I am. Langan of course is more active than I in promoting it.
ok correct me if i am wrong(leaving the "god" stuff aside) The basic tenet of ctmu is that there is a limit to particles and energy that make up the universe. These then have a limited combination and arrangement, which creates an alphabet for the language of the universe including our precious biome. It then falls to us to learn and understand this language of the universe. Are we up for the task?
Definitely. That's an interesting interpretation of the CTMU. The alphabet would then be the elements of the combination or permutation of the language. Where the language of the universe contains itself in two ways, topologically and descriptively. We are definitely up for it.
[–]yellow900 1 point 19 hours ago IMHO: An aspect of this short passage is, to my reading, tautological. If the language of the universe is a self-fulfilling algorithm, it would not be possible to act against it. Thus whether a particular action is for or against the 'telos' is irrelevant given that any action is guided by a deterministic, algorithmic process. The unnecessarily complex language masks a weak central argument equitable to determinism (in this passage). A high IQ has no bearing on the quality of an argument. That being said, perhaps there is more clarity in the actual, full text.
Sherpanauts 1 point 2 days ago From what I've gathered it seems plausible but lacking in necessary evidence. It's overlapping a grey area of Science and Philosophy which is completely fine but it's going to require a lot more observable evidence before Academics of any field would begin to remotely accept this model. At the moment it sounds more like Pseudoscience with Un-falsifiable points. Interesting but i would take it with a grain of salt.
Spellbound, what are you trying to accomplish by cut-and-pasting opinions by anonymous individuals from another discussion board to this one? And what does it have to do with the subject line of this thread: "discussion of ctmu among professionals?" What 'professionals' are you talking about? Who are they? What do they do professionally?
Thank you for your reply as always Yazata. You know I gotchou: CuckYouFunts 10 points 2 days ago Thank you for explaining why you think "If you have a good point you should be able to put it simply." I'll be brief in my disagreement. There is no good way to losslessly compress complex data sets into convenient/ edible chunks. If it took an entire book of evidence and argument to reach a particular conclusion, however nonsensical that conclusion sounds, it is unlikely to take less than that to relate the basis for that conclusion meaningfully to another person. You can do it simply but not meaningfully, or meaningfully but not simply when there is enough information (map-territory paradox). Additionally, if the responsibility lays with the communicator, then the only effective way to approach the problem is to assume that every reader is a child and build up the argument from scratch using the most simple (and ultimately meaningless) language possible to meet everyone where they're at when you don't know where anyone is. However, that will also be ineffective for educated audiences (as I'm sure you've encountered in academia) and is not an economically responsible decision for mortals who have "limited time". permalink parent segFault11235 7 points 2 days ago Right but I think the reality of obfuscation happens by mixing new and accepted ideas in large blocks of information—usually because the speaker doesn't know what is and isn't generally accepted/matters of contention, etc. For instance, even if a whole book is dedicated to quantum mechanics, do we really need to divest the same amount of time in explaining the first few chapters (in theory about atoms, classical physics, linear algebra, etc.)? I'd certainly gloss over those few chapters, and hope the speaker could focus on the more nuanced points, perhaps emphasizing where I may have glossed too casually over something relevant to their greater point. Depending on who you are conversing with, the communication is only lossy if the missing information isn't already shared. I think /u/tungstan's point is that someone incapable of recognizing this probably hasn't thought through the finer points. For instance, your use of the word "lossy" implies you might have a good idea of how compression algorithms work. I don't need 4 pages to communicate to you why I find .mp3/4 data formats perfectly preferable to the every-day music consumer than FLAC or ALAC. We can jump straight to the heart of the matter. permalink parent CuckYouFunts 2 points 2 days ago Assuming that the CTMU is meant to be a catch-all, there is no discipline that could skim over the first few chapters of a book on it, given that it would incorporate information they would not be familiar with. An accepted idea that is non-controversial in one field still needs to be stated and supported in full for a lay person. So, in this particular example, that solution is somewhat inapplicable. In general, the idea is still somewhat inapplicable, which is why materials on subjects are written for audiences with different levels of exposure to and mastery of a given subject. Can you assume the information is already shared? I wouldn't. Or rather, i wouldn't anymore. Everyone is ignorant about something. I dare say, everyone is ignorant about nearly everything and is knowledgeable only about some thing. Additionally, I wouldn't expect any of this to come to the front of a person's mind when writing a book. I'd expect it to come to their mind after editing or after the first people had read it. I also wouldn't expect someone good at philosophy to necessarily be good at theory of mind activities, especially not ones which can easily fall into infinite recursion. permalink parent segFault11235 3 points 2 days ago An accepted idea that is non-controversial in one field still needs to be stated and supported in full for a lay person Right, but the key word I'd first like to point out here is "lay person". The issue at hand is this obfuscation for people that should be fairly familiar with at least the fundamentals of wha the argument pushes forth. If your point is that the CTMU is so fundamentally different and non-derivative of any well-established knowledge that everything has to be laid out, that sounds far more problematic than anything else. Can you assume the information is already shared? I wouldn't. Or rather, i wouldn't anymore. Everyone is ignorant about something. Sure, but it's far more efficient and clear if you state the pivotal points, and then unpack items where the two parties disagree—especially if those two parties reasonably do share a similar amount of information (e.g. two debating philosophers etc.). For instance, in the lossy compression conversation, I'd start by simply making the case to you that the general consumer doesn't need the full range recorded—or even necessarily everything in the audible range—to be transmitted. We don't need to start by talking about compression algorithms or what it means to be lossy—or if we do, you ask about it and we clarify accordingly. More relevantly, from the summary provided by the CTMU, I don't find the reduction of matter as "information" particularly intelligible or accurate, that would be where both our times would be best invested. Additionally, I wouldn't expect any of this to come to the front of a person's mind when writing a book. But we aren't just talking about books now. Books, of course, are permitted and should be as comprehensive as necessary ("how long is a piece of rope?"). But in the context of dialog, especially between two well-informed professionals, the obfuscation is needless and telling. If someone comes to me and tells me that they're a software engineer, and I ask them why they believe a recursive implementation is preferable to using a stack data structure, I would expect that the speaker doesn't dwell on what the two items are, how they're formulated, etc. A straight answer is best. And I'd assume they didn't know what they were talking about if they didn't recognize this. permalink parent CuckYouFunts 3 points 2 days ago Right, but the key word I'd first like to point out here is "lay person". The issue at hand is this obfuscation for people that should be fairly familiar with at least the fundamentals of wha the argument pushes forth. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. I'm a particle physicist. You're an organic chemist. A third party is a sociologist. Write a document that involves fundamentals in all 3 fields without potentially obfuscating the issue for another present party. The difficult inherent to that position increases non-linearly when accounting for all disciplines, all fields and sub-fields and specialties, and that's without a discussion on field-specific uses of common jargon. A theory of everything is going to run the risk of sounding like nonsense, especially an early version of a theory of everything written by one person who is unlikely to be an expert in the fields that need to be tied down. If your point is that the CTMU is so fundamentally different and non-derivative of any well-established knowledge that everything has to be laid out, that sounds far more problematic than anything else. My point is that it has to work to the lowest common denominator. Even the academic discipline lowest common denominator is ridiculously rudimentary. Again, using the 3 fields discussed, I can name off the top of my head at least one basic idea from one field that will elicit blank stares from the other 2 present. I think we're at a sticking point. The remainder of your discussion treats the context as that of a discussion. The CTMU appears to be a collection of static documents, which I also think is more reasonable than explaining the same idea multiple times to individuals of varying mastery. permalink parent *Taps chest twice* Pe-ace, Nick.
