A Being That Syntactically Self-distributes Itself

I think the bouncer part is kinda amusing. I mean, he's got a much higher IQ than me, but he could probably also kick my arse. So I'd have no recourse whatsoever if I was really pissed off about losing an argument. Heh.

Further, he has a really big head. Literally. So big that he's apparently never been able to find a motorcyle helmet that fits him.
 
There are other entries on the internet about Chris Langan.
This one is interesting: http://www.nwabelts.com/Genious/
Try clicking on HOME. It leads to stuff about a man called Parkin and his family and pets.

Other links lead to Walt Disney World. Most link nowhere.
At the bottom it has copyright ABC, but it clearly has nothing to do with them.

Why would anyone be making a site like this?
Perhaps it has nothing to do with Langan, and someone is creating strange sites about him,
but I'm getting suspicious.
 
Captain Kremmen said:
How dare you call him a nutcase!
According to his wiki entry, he is the "cleverest man in America",
and his IQ couldn't be measured because it was off the scale.
He even taught himself to read, aged 4.
He left college because his lecturers had nothing to teach him.
He works as a Bouncer.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
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I'm sure he's really clever at making shit up! That takes talent.
 
I'm not exactly going to play devil's advocate here, but I am happy to inject some further information about the CTMU into the discussion.

What is nature? Langan is promoting a substance monism, and he calls that substance "infocognition" which is as the term suggests part information and part cognition. So it's essentially a sort of monistic idealism.
 
Fork said:
Spirit is a type of awareness and as such is built into the fabric of spacetime. It is software.
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Actually according to the CTMU it would be more correct to say that the mind of God itself is the fabric of reality, rather than something that is merely built into it.
 
Rav said:
Not just obscure, but sometimes invented. One of the biggest criticisms of Langan's work is that parsing it is difficult, if not impossible.
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I'm not familiar with the guy. All I know about him is that several posters on internet discussion boards have been fascinated with his boasts about his own intelligence.

Not only does he have a ridiculously large vocabulary, he is often co-opting and even inventing terminology. As such, it seems clear that he's put more effort into trying to be impressive than he has into trying to be understood.
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It's a style that philosophers sometimes affect, I guess. Reading these authors I will get the feeling that they are saying something incredibly profound, but I can't quite get my mind around what it is. (Over the years I've started to suspect that if I could understand it, it wouldn't seem nearly so profound.)

I much prefer a clear and transparent philosophical prose style that seeks to make matters clearer, not more obscure.

I mean, why state that CTMU is so conceptually simple that even a layperson can understand it (which he does on his website) but simultaneously effectively obfuscate all the juicy details? Is it intentional?
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It sounds like an implicit put-down directed at his readers. (This is so easy that even 'normals' can easily understand it. You (the reader) can't understand it. Conclusion: you're an idiot.) Nice game-playing, but bad philosophy.

Is he using his intellect to hide from scrutiny? Because really, I bet you don't need an IQ of 195+ to engage in an effective critical analysis of the key conceptual components and supposed "proofs" in his CTMU.
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If Langan really has extraordinary philosophical ability (and not just the ability to ace IQ tests), then he needs to stop boasting about how extraordinarily smart he is, and perform the much more difficult task of expressing new and extraordinary ideas in a clear and comprehensible manner.

So I'd say that until he decides to start communicating his ideas more clearly, there's not a whole lot to discuss.
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I agree.
 
Fork said:
Doesn't matter who he is. What matters is his proof which is logically constructed.
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I'm not convinced that there is a logical proof. (A proof of what, exactly? The existence of God?) Even if there is a proof of something somewhere, the truth of its conclusions would still be dependent on the truth of the premises that initially went into it. (It's entirely possible for a logically valid proof to produce a false conclusion, if any of its initial premises were false.)

Based on the original post in this thread, one of Langan's premises appears to be some form of panpsychism. That's highly speculative, at best. (Highly unlikely in my opinion.) So if that's what he's basing this on, then his conclusions would seem to be highly speculative as well.

Open your eyes and you will see.

The days in which God could not be known and thought to be beyond us are gone.
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Sure, if the rest of us would just share your faith in Langan's speculations. But why should we do that?
 
Yazata said:
I'm not convinced that there is a logical proof. (A proof of what, exactly? The existence of God?) Even if there is a proof of something somewhere, the truth of its conclusions would still be dependent on the truth of the premises that initially went into it. (It's entirely possible for a logically valid proof to produce a false conclusion, if any of its initial premises were false.)

Based on the original post in this thread, one of Langan's premises appears to be some form of panpsychism. That's highly speculative, at best. (Highly unlikely in my opinion.) So if that's what he's basing this on, then his conclusions would seem to be highly speculative as well.
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No, it is not speculative. It is very valid.


Sure, if the rest of us would just share your faith in Langan's speculations. But why should we do that?
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If you read the rest of that post you quoted from I explained how anyone can come to know God.
 
Fork said:
His arguments are well supported by logic. It's easy to dismiss something you fail to understand.
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Fork, you need to read David Bohm and you will understand what it is you are trying to say.

Here is a little review that may ring a bell. David Bohm was an eminent physicist and a close friend of Einstein. IMO, it was Bohm's ideas that prompted Einstein to say "my religion is of a somewhat different kind" (loosely translated).

In Bohm's view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary "subtotalities" derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy of a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.

(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement." (Ibid., p. 11.)
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http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-boh.htm
 
Langan accepts the theory of evolution, but believes it could not be responsible for the specified complexity of the biodiversity we see today. He believes on various levels intelligence is responsible for the evolution of life, the ultimate level being "GOD" or the Global Operator Definor (or Designer), which is compatible with the monotheism found in the God of the Bible, he even believes there is a logico-mathematical explanation for the phenomenon of a "messiah", which suggests Jesus wasn't the only one, however he describes his personal approach as "logical theology" in his words,

What does this say about God? First, if God is real, then God inheres in the comprehensive reality syntax, and this syntax inheres in matter. Ergo, God inheres in matter, and indeed in its spacetime substrate as defined on material and supramaterial levels. This amounts to pantheism, the thesis that God is omnipresent with respect to the material universe. Now, if the universe were pluralistic or reducible to its parts, this would make God, who coincides with the universe itself, a pluralistic entity with no internal cohesion. But because the mutual syntactic consistency of parts is enforced by a unitary holistic manifold with logical ascendancy over the parts themselves - because the universe is a dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous, self-consistent infocognition - God retains monotheistic unity despite being distributed over reality at large. Thus, we have a new kind of theology that might be called monopantheism, or even more descriptively, holopantheism. Second, God is indeed real, for a coherent entity identified with a self-perceptual universe is self-perceptual in nature, and this endows it with various levels of self-awareness and sentience, or constructive, creative intelligence. Indeed, without a guiding Entity whose Self-awareness equates to the coherence of self-perceptual spacetime, a self-perceptual universe could not coherently self-configure. Holopantheism is the logical, metatheological umbrella beneath which the great religions of mankind are unknowingly situated. Why, if there exists a spiritual metalanguage in which to establish the brotherhood of man through the unity of sentience, are men perpetually at each others' throats? Unfortunately, most human brains, which comprise a particular highly-evolved subset of the set of all reality-subsystems, do not fire in strict S-isomorphism much above the object level. Where we define one aspect of "intelligence" as the amount of global structure functionally represented by a given sÎS, brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S). This limits their capacity to form true representations of S (global reality) by syntactic autology [d(S) Éd d(S)] and make rational ethical calculations. In this sense, the vast majority of men are not well-enough equipped, conceptually speaking, to form perfectly rational worldviews and societies; they are deficient in education and intellect, albeit remediably so in most cases. This is why force has ruled in the world of man…why might has always made right, despite its marked tendency to violate the optimization of global utility derived by summing over the sentient agents of S with respect to space and time."[1]

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
 
Yeah, OK, whatever. It all sounds wonderfully internally consistent. But you've yet to even begin to tackle the issue of it's metaphysical truth value. Appeals to tautological logic just aren't going to cut it. As Yazata has rightly pointed out, a demonstration of the truth of the premises that underly it's construction is what is necessary.
 
Fork said:
His arguments are well supported by logic. It's easy to dismiss something you fail to understand.
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You explained it very well. If the universe itself is it's own creator, then that is a naturalistic explanation, not a spiritual one. You failed when you said that the universe is self-aware. Awareness is by definition a concentrated information processing and reaction capability, something that the universe as a whole lacks. What's the evidence for such a spirit? What exactly is the software and what is the hardware?
 
Fork said:
What part of what I said is gibberish. Spirit is awareness.
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"Spirit is awareness"? What does that mean?

I just opened my 'Oxford Guide to Philosophy' to two pages at random and looked at the first two philosophical sounding words that met my eye. They were 'modernism' and 'form'. So clearly, 'Modernism is form'. (I could probably even defend it, by pointing to abstract art and stuff.) There are computer programs designed to produce philosophical sounding sentences by doing that.

Doing it again: 'pre-established harmony is logic'. That sounds kind of vaguely plausible too.

The hard part of philosophy isn't making cosmic-sounding statements. Anybody (even machines) can do that. The hard part is explaining clearly and comprehensibly what the statements mean, and then defending those ideas against objections.

You seem to lack understanding and as a consequence are spewing ignorance. That is rather stupid.
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If people here lack understanding of what you are claiming, then it's your job to provide them with explanations of what you are trying to say. That means that you will have to actually string your ideas together so that they clarify and support each other. That can't be done in a single short sentence, you need to make longer posts and state things in your own words. Just quoting other people's words off various wikis out of context isn't accomplishing what you need to do.
 
spidergoat said:
You explained it very well. If the universe itself is it's own creator, then that is a naturalistic explanation, not a spiritual one. You failed when you said that the universe is self-aware. Awareness is by definition a concentrated information processing and reaction capability, something that the universe as a whole lacks. What's the evidence for such a spirit? What exactly is the software and what is the hardware?
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No, the universe does not lack this capability, it is real. Yes, there is evidence for spirit, although you cannot see God you can be at one with Him/It, a single Being. Software is mind or personality, hardware is body.
 
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