A Being That Syntactically Self-distributes Itself

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.
What is the evidence for this spirit?
If you are talking about bodies and minds, those are not universal at all, they are discrete entities.
 
Langan accepts the theory of evolution, but believes it could not be responsible for the specified complexity of the biodiversity we see today.

Why not? He seems to be introducing the creationists' 'irreducible complexity' idea there, and it needs to be defended.

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,

Langan's excursion into heterodox Christian theology isn't really relevant to this thread. But it does make him sound rather crankish in my opinion.

What does this say about God?

All we've been given so far is Langan's unsupported belief that biological evolution doesn't explain biological complexity, along with his redefinition of the word "God" as "Global Operator Definor", an assertion that his idea is consistent with the Bible, and an assertion about his having some as yet unrevealed "logico-mathematical" argument for the existence of a multiplicity of "messiahs".

First, if God is real, then God inheres in the comprehensive reality syntax, and this syntax inheres in matter.

Langan derives this from what was already written up above? How in the world does he do that?

What does "comprehensive reality syntax mean"? How did he arrive at the idea that God "inheres" in this "syntax"?

Conventional Christianity would say that God is a thoroughly transcendental being who created the natural order (which is what I'm guessing that "comprehensive reality syntax" means). Though there is indeed a strand of Christian Neoplatonist speculation that imagines that Plato's forms and maybe natural laws exist as eternal ideas in God's mind that are kind of manifested in time and space here in the physical world.

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.

Langan seems to be pushing God's immanence a lot harder than Christian Platonism would. But apart from Langan calling God "Global Operator Definor", we still haven't been given any reason to believe that God even exists, let alone is somehow identical with the natural order. It's all just been a non-sequitur so far.

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.

What's a "unitary holistic manifold"? What does it mean to say that it has "logical ascendency over the parts themselves"? This may be what I was addressing in an earlier post when I said that it's probably a philosophical mistake to suggest that a pile of sand consists both of physical grains of sand, along with some much more mysterious being called a "pile" that somehow distributes itself among all the grains and has "logical ascendency" (whatever that means) over them.

Saying that the universe is a "dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous self-consistent infocognition" looks like a pretentious way of restating the pantheistic conclusion. Trying to justify the pantheistic conclusion by linking it to this new phrase by use of the word "because" appears to render the whole thing circular.

What's more, the word "infocognition" appears to be gratuitous. We still need some reason to believe that the entire universe, or the abstract natural order that underlies it (or whatever Langan's talking about) really is a mind-like entity that's capable of thought and cognition. He just seems to have thrown that one in there because he likes it.

My impression is that Langan may be operating in the opposite direction from most of the rest of us. We start out from 'Why should we believe that?' Langan seems to be starting out from his own theological conclusions, which he seems to embrace a-priori simply because he likes them, and then tries to work backwards from there to reasons that he hopes might justify them.

Thus, we have a new kind of theology that might be called monopantheism, or even more descriptively, holopantheism.

This does appear to be theology, as opposed to philosophy. It's basically an intellectual elaboration of things that Langan already believes for his own religious reasons.

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.

The panpsychism is just being assumed there. And the whole whole "unitary holistic manifold" thing is being assumed as well, along with that idea that the manifold must itself be sentient.

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.

Why should people believe that space-time is "self-perceptual"? If we snip that assumption out, then this looks like the familiar creationist claim that a creator is necessary to "configure" the universe.

Holopantheism is the logical, metatheological umbrella beneath which the great religions of mankind are unknowingly situated.

There are many religions out there that don't imagine a cosmic creator, don't imagine that the creator is somehow the universe itself (how does that work?) imagined as a sentient being, or believe in any of Langan's speculations.

Why, if there exists a spiritual metalanguage in which to establish the brotherhood of man through the unity of sentience

Another speculative a-priori religious idea of Langan's.

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."

That definitely looks like gibberish. Translating it into English, Langan seems to be claiming that only people of sufficiently high intelligence can perceive the cosmic connections that he sees. ("Brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S).") And remember, he's the (self-proclaimed) world's smartest man. So if you don't agree with all of his highly peculiar speculative theological premises, then that's simply because you're stupider than he is.

Once again, I don't think that this is really philosophy at all, even if it consciously tries to assume the form of philosophy. It's ultimately Langan's claim to possess a kind of religious revelation that only he, and others like him (if there are any) can possibly enjoy. And as with all assertions of unique religious experience, the problem for everyone else is distinguishing true revelations (if there are any) from what might just as easily be called psychotic delusions.
 
What is the evidence for this spirit?
If you are talking about bodies and minds, those are not universal at all, they are discrete entities.

Not true, you cannot say for certain that they are not universal. In the CTMU, a rock can process information as its molecules interact with the environment and with itself, but according to Langan, it does not possess any independent volition or any intrinsic ability to optimize its environment.

I will respond to Yazata's above post late next week when I can.
 
Not true, you cannot say for certain that they are not universal. In the CTMU, a rock can process information as its molecules interact with the environment and with itself, but according to Langan, it does not possess any independent volition or any intrinsic ability to optimize its environment.

I will respond to Yazata's above post late next week when I can.

A rock is the very definition of something that lacks spirit. It has a nature, and in some sense processes information, but it's quite a stretch to call it the mind of God. In any case, most of the universe isn't rock, it's space.
 
A rock is the very definition of something that lacks spirit. It has a nature, and in some sense processes information, but it's quite a stretch to call it the mind of God. In any case, most of the universe isn't rock, it's space.

Yes, you are correct. To have a spirit you need to be one with God. A kind of oneness with Him/It.
 
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The Spiritual Philosopher Rumi wrote the following and I thought I'd share it because it's deep:

Do you know what Sema,
the Sufi Dance of Whirling Dervishes is?
Sema is letting go completely of your existence
and tasting eternity in non-existence.
Sema is hearing the affirmation sound of
separating from self, and reaching God.
Sema is seeing and knowing
the State of Lord, our Friend,
and hearing, through the Divine Veils,
the Secrets of God.
Sema is struggling with your carnal soul,
your ego,
and throwing it to the ground like a half-slain beast.
Sema is opening the heart like Shams of Tabriz
and clearly seeing the Divine Light within.
 
"As readers of Noesis will recall, this crucial redefinition begins with a mutual, recursive interdefinition of information and cognition within a "reified tautology" called a quantum transducer. The quantum transducer, being paradoxiform by direct analogy with tautologically-based inference, models the way subjectively-tautological cognitive syntaxes transduce information in time. The universality of this model allows reality to be reduced to it, and thus to (cognitive) information. "Information" is the objective aspect of the quantum transducer for itself and for all others; it is cognition-for-cognition, equating generalistically to a cognitive identity relation on that part of reality to which it corresponds (i.e., the part containing all the transducers playing active and passive roles in it)."Langan, 1992, Noesis 76

http://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Infocognition
 
Because without spirit you can never know what reality is. I am not reading into it anything more or anything less than what it is.
That implies they are separate. And yet you also said they are the same. I still don't know what it is.
 
That implies they are separate. And yet you also said they are the same. I still don't know what it is.

Yes, they are the same. According to Langan, reality is a single substance called infocognition (information and cognition combined). Thus, spirit is made up of infocognition.
 
... CTMU constitutes absolute truth—because it is founded on tautology and supported by logical and mathematical reasoning—it proves the existence of God.
The claim that a conclusion is supported by logic is at best bald. The logic must be valid, and it must operate on best evidence, or the conclusion is invalid. The claim that there is proof of the existence of God is worse than invalid. It's at best specious.

The above basically says that God is a single being that can distribute itself over reality at large.
It reads more like a justification for that based on a pretext of having followed some kind of logic. The methods used parallel those of pseudoscience.
 
In the CTMU Langan equates physical interaction with information processing because interaction of any kind results in information processing.
 
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