Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Post 37.05/25/2018
Another Theory of Everything
Christopher Langan's Model of the Universe
In blog post 11 Theory of Everything,1 I briefly reviewed Christopher Langan's CTMU theory, which has some similarities to the Enformationism thesis – in particular, a key role for Information. Here, I'll note a few significant points where we agree or disagree. I haven't read the original publication – it's written for experts – so these comments are based on the CTMU-wiki website, and Langan's Quora Forum posts. His proposal falls into the category of Cosmology, or Reality Theory, which examine Nature in its broadest sense, including conjectures on why our world exists at all. They inevitably imply an ultimate fundamental Reality2 beyond space-time, underlying the superficial parts we can detect with our senses.
Most theories of reality in the last 10,000 years have guessed that our sensory reality is merely the tip of an ontological ice-berg. Indeed, modern science has discovered that the visible spectrum of light is just a minor segment of the whole range. And Quantum Mechanics has found that our macro reality is built upon an invisible field of energetic sprites that we perceive collectively as tangible things. But mainstream Science has ignored the philosophical & religious implications of that unseen reality. Yet a few freethinking mavericks have taken the hint to its logical & ultimate conclusion. They seem to agree that the incompatible cosmologies of religion & science were missing something essential to any TOE : the mind of the observer.
Back in the 1980s, bar-tender & bouncer Chris Langan began to create his own eccentric worldview from scratch, beginning from some logical axioms and tautologies. Unfortunately, since he is a certified genius, some of his technical reasoning may be difficult for the rest of us to follow. For example, Axioms are statements that are assumed to be true, because they can't logically be false. And Tautologies are absolutely true only because they are based on circular reasoning. Even so, they are the foundation of Logic & Mathematics.
Although most human knowledge is uncertain & relative, Langan is confident that his two-value true/false reasoning can lead to absolute Truth3. I'm not so sure, but it may be as close to Truth as we can get without divine revelation. All of our normal thinking has to deal with Fuzzy Logic and more-or-less-true statements of fact4. In the early 20th century, mathe-matical philosophers Russell & Whitehead made their own attempt to place human knowledge on a secure footing. But they never reached that ideal of absolute certainty because Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proved that some mystery will always remain5.
Mr. Langan has an unusual definition of Ultimate Reality, asserting that it is based on human perception. But I make a key distinction between physical reality, which is what we perceive, and the meta-physical parts of reality, that we can only imagine. In other words, Reality is known by Perception; Ideality is known by Conception. What Langan calls Ultimate Reality, I call Ideality, because if our world exists as an idea in the mind of G*D, then physical properties are a sub-category of Metaphysical Qualia. So it seems that Lagan's "ultimate reality" is an attempt to avoid duality. But my Ideality is inherently unitary in that it encompasses both perceptual and conceptual aspects of Reality, This is the key insight of Enformationism.
Post 37 continued . . . Click Next
Christopher Langan’s Cosmic Theoretic Model of the Universe
1. Theory of Everything : http://bothandblog.enformationism.info/page41.html
2. For science, the ultimate reality is an infinite array of Parallel Worlds, or a world-creating Multiverse. For most religions the absolute reality is God. For Langan & me, it’s a bit of both.
CTMU wiki :(Not Wikipedia) http://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe
3. Tautology Truth : “ Unlike scientific theories, which rely on observation to establish their correspond-ence with reality, the CTMU is intended through its tautological construction to correspond with reality necessarily, in all possible worlds . . . . so that "much of the theory has to be proven like a math theorem rather than confirmed on a lab bench". ”
4. Fuzzy Logic : “Langan argues that 'even so-called "nonstandard" logics, e.g. modal, fuzzy, and many-valued logics, must be expressed in terms of fundamental two-valued logic to make sense.' ”
Notes about CTMU : Langan’s theory is not a scientific work, but a philosophical treatment. Although first published around 1990 in a high-IQ journal, almost 30 years later, it still hasn’t been officially published in a peer-reviewed scientific or philosophical journal. He is currently working on a book to be called Design For A Universe. As I well know, it takes a long time to create a Theory of Everything from scratch. The general concept of a mind-based world fits my own TOE, but until a version for lower IQ people becomes available, I’ll withhold my full support .
<< It would be better to say that the CTMU is a theory about science. Instead of being a mathematical description of specific observations (like all established scientific theories), it is a "meta-theory" about the general relationship between theories and observations …i.e., about science or knowledge itself.>> ___CTMU wiki
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