We've mentioned looking into Christopher Langan’s CTMU reality theory on a few occasions. This post will introduce that project.
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above.
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Image adapted from Colossus by Alex Olmedo.
There are a few things to consider before examining Christopher Langan and his CTMU (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe) reality theory. It represents a singular challenge for us and is not something done lightly or in a single post. This will lay out those considerations - the whats and whys as well as our own relevant strengths and limitations. The Band usually avoids being explicitly personal, but that same singular challenge forces us to be more self-conscious for reasons that will be clear. After this post, there is some scheduled business to attend to before returning to Langan and the CTMU. Another installment to the arts of the West and a wrap up the recent tour of the House of Lies with some implications. But by then we should have finished enough of our long-running preparation to come back around and get into the CTMU directly.
Start with who Chris Langan is, what his reality theory is, and why the Band is interested in looking at it. The first two lead into the second – his intellectual profile as world's smartest man and the ambitious nature of his project make it a formidable challenge to the Band’s essentially Christian world view. Click for a link to the main CTMU paper that we are working from.
That relatively few people can even understand the CTMU makes this more important to address. The opacity lends a mystique to the theory that isn’t Langan’s apparent goal – in our experience he is as direct as his material allows – but exists all the same. Not being able to read it means not being able to assess it. This is apparent in the whiffing of his critics, whose dismissals reveal their own comprehension limits and will be addressed in a moment. But it also means that those not given to triggered gamma self-immolation can't determine how it relates to their own beliefs either. Awareness that someone of Langan's ability has declared a conclusive answer to the nature of reality becomes more rhetorically potent if that answer is unreadable. We propose to read it.
That gets to the challenges his thought presents for us, and how we can work around them. The CTMU is Langan's signature achievement, and that same intellectual profile that gives him his credibility eclipses our not insignificant cognitive abilities. This means our reading cannot claim to be definitive, nor can we comfortably second guess Langan's intentions. Unavoidable artifacts of being eclipsed...
But challenges also bring benefits. Engaging the CTMU forces us to push our limits and stretch our thoughts in unfamiliar ways. A recent post on parameterizing the concept of church over time would not have occurred to us without reading Langan. Likewise the addition of deontology to our Ontological Hierarchy. Before we start, we expect to further refine our ontological hierarchy as a way of visualizing basic relationships of reality as broadly conceived. Even our definition of reality emerges as something in need of clarity.
Plus it’s really interesting. The inherent challenges of the CTMU means it gets way less attention than it deserves. If we can remedy that in our small way, then we should.
Take the "conspansion" diagrams from the linked CTMU paper. This refers to how objects and events "shrink" internally through the parametric production of future states within present ones over time. So that the universe appears to expand relationally. Con-spansion - simultaneous contraction and expansion.
The mechanism of conspansion is akin to how further defining a set simultaneously increases the number of elements while attributively contracting the range of possibilities. This is an important aspect of Langan's conception of the universe as reflexively self-fashioning, and it's derivation is typical of how he melds knowledge domains.
Langan is someone we’ve mentioned on a few occasions. He's sometimes billed as the smartest man in the world, and with an IQ that may top 200, there’s no point quibbling with the provability of that claim. It’s certainly close enough to give an accurate indication of the scope of his intellect. Just reading his CTMU and contemplating it in its totality is sufficient corroboration of his cognitive profile.
The numbers may not be exact. But it puts things into perspective.
To be fair, that is a flacid definition of genius at the top. The Band defines genius as intelligence plus accomplishment. High ceiling and something memorable achieved with it.
We are not interested in debating whether the CTMU is a work of genius-level accomplishment - it may well be. But his pure cognitive firepower is overwhelming. The conceptual shifts, complexity of integrated structure, intensity of information density... The sheer scale and integrated scope of his vision - if you can see it - is awesome.
The Band realizes that the masses tend to be most impressed with mental feats, and he has plenty of those in his bio.
But Rain Man-type savants also perform amazing mental feats and no one really cares about their opinions otherwise. Let alone looking to them for theories on the nature of reality. And that raises the central problem for Langan’s public profile and the related lack of attention on the CTMU. He's too intelligent for most of his critics to even grasp what he's saying.
This is where the comprehension gap comes in – the inability to meaningfully communicate or comprehend beyond a certain difference in intelligence.
The comprehension gap problem is exacerbated for Langan by the Dunning-Kruger effect, the related currency of false authority that makes up "academic expertise", and Vox Day's socio-sexual hierarchy. The first refers to the tendency of the mildly clever to think of themselves as much smarter than they are. And since they can't meaningfully "see" past the comprehension gap, they can't perceive their own limitations. This is endemic in university where such midwits obtain mastery of some "discipline" - itself a flawed silo that at best partly represents aspects of reality - and confuse it for actual comprehensive understanding. Like physicists blathering about numerological solutions to questions of existential origins. Highly proficient within a certain disciplinary silo, but too limited to see either the intrinsic limits of themselves - or their silo - for the problem at hand.
An IQ of 130 is pretty rare. Most physicians don't have one. Neither does the average professor. It's also inadequate for the sort of theorizing that the Band does. Let alone the likes of Langan.
Vox Day's socio-sexual hierarchy is an immensely useful concept that we've posted on before. The comprehension gap problem is compounded by the extraordinary number of gammas in that midwit zone and in the appeal to "scientific authority" camp. Not only can they not perceive the difference between modern institutional scientific presuppositions and the scientific method, their entire fake self-perception of "genius" is predicated on the misperception.
When confronted with things outside their little silos that contradict their assumptions, retarded ironic defensive rage ensues. And they mentally and psychologically can't see it.
Langan's combination of incomprehensible intelligence, embrace of physicality, and complete disdain for credentialed authority is a trifecta of gamma triggers elevated to Platonic Form tier.
Here's a perfect example of a not all that bright gamma taking issue with the idea of the communication gap. Click for a link. This gamma's certainly not a 130 - probably closer to slightly above average. A 110 perhaps. Note how the headline promises a "myth" before moving into a tepid appeal to methodology as the metric of reality. It ends in a quibble, conceding to common sense that intelligence gaps impede communication "but that this always does happen once a specific difference in IQ points is reached seems doubtful”. We can't guarantee a precise magic number... is a conclusion considerably different from the impression given by the headline. And almost certainly by design since a journal knows better than most that more people skim headlines than process articles. Being well more than 2 SD north of said gamma, we'd guess the motivation is a mix of misunderstanding and butt hurt.
Imagine what Langan has to deal with...
Perhaps we can rephrase.
It is impossible for much smarter people to discuss smart things with significantly less smart people. And painful to learn through experience that they can’t.
This is neither arrogance nor insult, any more that noting a giraffe can see further than a porcupine. IQ has some inexactitude that comes with any assignment of a precise number for a multifaceted attribute. But differences in overall cognitive ability are painfully clear. If this is troubling or upsetting, that’s a measure of not being that smart. If they were smarter, it would be as obvious as sunrise. The alternative model is the midget opining emphatically on a shelf he can't see.
Drop below a certain point and metaphoric thinking isn't possible.
If that's not the case, it's easy to grasp with a visual metaphor - the big one doesn't fit in the little ones.
The two standard deviations difference in IQ, or about 30 is a rough measure, not "mythic". IQ is a general summation while individuals have aptitude peaks and valleys within that. In some areas they overperform and in others underperform. Nor does it mean that no communication is possible – the Band has shared basic information and instruction across about a 6 SD gap or ~90 points. What is means is that beyond a certain gap, unfiltered full capacity of thought isn’t meaningful communicable. The composite frame of reference, interlocking conclusions, shifting secondary implications, and conditional consequences can’t be cogently grasped. The person on the upper side of the gulf has to slow down and simplify, and this isn’t intuitive either.
Some perspective.
We aren't just blathering. At peak, the leader of the Band has tested at slightly above 4 SD over the US average of ~98.
The most generous evaluation of our absolute peak, graphically presented in maximal gamma triggering format.
Thought experiment. This is highly speculative for several reasons, but consider that an approximate range of 30-50 is applied to chimpanzees. Very approximate and not uncontroversially - species differences undermine the applicability of a human metric to a non-linguistic animal. Adding to the imprecision - the Band was a relatively late bloomer rather than a prodigy, meaning the relative gulf peaked in the later 20s. On the other hand, animals exhibit some pattern recognition, basic cause and effect logic, and reality-based learning that human FTS-2 doesn't. That skews the comparison the other way. So very generally...
If we take that as a rough marker, the gulf between us and our average classmate was at least comparable to that gulf between our average classmate and a chimp. Basic communication could be bewildering, group interests inexplicable, and over time we learned through negative reaction what and how we could say things. We also became adept at detecting thought structures and capacity in others. Fortunately, once we realized what was happening we learned quickly.
Think about that for a moment though. The need to "learn" people has nothing to do at all with psychopathic coldness. It's an illustration of how much of a factor the gap can be on interpersonal experience.
Now we instantly disengage the moment some contention or dispute reveals a limited comprehensive capacity, There's no point in continuing because it's not an issue that more information can fix. The gap also means is that someone in the middle of the bell curve becomes incapable of even recognizing extremely high intelligence. Because it falls outside their ability to process or comprehend. They can't think it, so they can't "see" it. The highly intelligent can be shocked at what registers as “smart” to the masses. That's because it has to fall within rough gap range from the average - otherwise it doesn’t register at all.
This is where mental feats come in. They seem like little bursts of mental magic totally beyond the powers of even what passes for a smart person to the masses. Ways to make the otherwise invisible register. But from our perspective, the exceptional intelligence tells are functional. Information processing speed and capacity. Working memory. Ability to combine ideas across knowledge domains to generate insights. Pattern recognition of all kinds. Logic. Learning curve and adaptability. The list goes on, but it makes the point.
Now, Chris Langan has an IQ between 2.5-3.5 SD above ours.
We had to extend the graph. And it shows. We are way outside of his gap. On the wrong side. Talking intensely with us would prove tiresome and limiting for him in significant ways. The chimp analogy starts to become uncomfortable. But the whole point of getting unusually personal and sharing out experience above was to point how widely we can see. Especially when it comes to the wide-scale associative conceptual abstraction and association we’re best at. There's tons of technical knowledge and ability that we are ignorant of, but we are not accustomed to struggling with well- presented complexity. And we can barely see what he's doing in a holistic way. Taking in his conceptual scope, intricacy and information density maxes us out in an unfamiliar ways.
No one not to the far east of the bell curve could write the CTMU.
Let alone present it as cogently as he does. We certainly couldn't have produced it. It’s all we can do to keep it in sight at times. And yes, we are aware of the charges his wording is unclear or there are too many neologisms. How else does one use language and concepts derived from disciplines to address questions that the disciplines are incapable of addressing? That's precisely what we are talking about when we bring up comprehension gaps.
Speaking of triggering...
The scope, information density, and conceptual richness are simply too much even for most smart people to hold onto. So they quibble with isolated aspects that they can grasp, while missing how those are subordinated to the larger structural logics. But “disciplines” are self-evidently insufficient on their own - otherwise they'd have answered the big ontological questions they've instead whiffed on. Most of Langan's critics can't even see the onto-epistemological limits of the disciplines they base their critiques on. That they self-actualize through. Making them incapable of the critical stance they profess to take.
Instead we hit limits of discernment and make-believe. And as any exceptionally intelligent person has experienced when "arguing" with someone who can't grasp the limitations of their frame of reference knows, the problem isn't lack of information. It's a lack of processing capacity. They can't simultaneously grasp their disciplinary silo and it's place in larger integrated infocognitive frameworks. Making a meaningful sharing of ideas impossible. If capacity limits could be surmounted, they wouldn't be... capacity limits. There's a parallel between the limits of disciplinary range and the limits of the discipline-huffers who can't see them.
But instead of recognizing limitations, beast-huffers prefer self-indicting rage over the reality that people more intellectually capable than them are aware of realities that surpass them.
A crude analogy is attempting to explain to a baby in a certain developmental stage that it doesn't become invisible when it covers its eyes. The conceptual capacity isn't there to process the necessary contextuals to grasp the why the frame of reference is inadequate.
In various interviews and other comments, Langan has expressed annoyance at being ignored by the mainstream knowledge industry. What a sham academia must be if there is no place for someone of his obvious intellect. He is correct that it is a sham, but that’s not the only issue here. He’s too smart. Consider what the Band has written about university in the beast era. Where on earth would someone 5 SD north of the professoriate even be understood? Or as the smart Bandling - the one east of us on the bell curve - pointed out, what discipline would he teach in?
This isn't the operant principle in practice that official science - Science! - actually runs on. That dances to beast narrative. Honest description or identification of what is objectively real is not at all the point.
If there is one thing Langan appears to miss about beast science, it's that the free-wheeling gonzo physics that captured his imagination in the 70s has nothing to do with academic science as an institution today. There are the odd intellectual outliers scattered hereabout. But they work in self-absorbed isolation. They certainly aren't charting the institutional course. The system itself exists to perpetuate beast narrative atop a self-evidently fake materialist onto-epistemology. It doesn't want to identify reality. So there's no place for someone who does. And the sort of self-indicting atheistic clown posturing on the internet is definitionally not one of those intellectual outliers. Meaning the [recognize the gap and disengage because it's pointless] axiom has to kick in.
The CTMU is described as a “reality theory” or theory of everything, although trying to classify it hides as much as it reveals. Most attempts at a grand theory of everything to explain the totality of reality and our existence in it start from purely materialist assumptions. This means they can never answer the question of origins in a satisfactory way and are necessarily DOA. Necessarily because the origin is the most important element. And if limited to material causality, the genesis of the material is outside the possibility of explanation.
But one miracle means no longer operating in the strictly material. And that means that the system now has to account for the role of metaphysics. Failure to do so renders the game pointless. Lucrative, and lots of titles, accolades and nice buildings, but pointless.
The pretense that a purely materialist framework can address the origins of the material makes ultimate answers impossible. Which keeps the massive institutional grift paying out until the wheels finally fall of systemically. And that means a steady market for endless flings of made-up spaghetti at the discursive wall. None of which will ever stick - because they can't - or even be remembered in a few turns of the cycle - but are good for the resume in the moment. Click for an example that is actually revealing, just of things other than claimed.
With sufficient cognitive horsepower, a pattern emerges in the materialism grift where the theorists’ primary purpose appears to be denial of human significance.
It’s a fundamentally satanic perspective where rejecting the metaphysics of Creation or the inborn sanctity of man is the goal. This invariably consists of manipulating some equations, then declaring them keys to the fundamental nature of reality. While assiduously ignoring how this structure came to be.
And believers in this mythopoeia will attack the CTMU as not being empirically verifiable or predictive...
Langan sees through this ontologically-gelded myopia instantly and set out to build the CTMU to consider the physical and the metaphysical. Including the problem of origins. But that means rejecting the entire flawed onto-epistemologial and semiotic frames that modern institutional Science! takes as starting axioms. A non-starter. And an example of being too smart for the discursive silos that make up modern academe.
Then throw in the Dunning-Kruger gammas...
The CTMU is built completely differently. It accepts certain scientific premises, but is an attempt to theorize the totality of reality by working logically from what that must entail. Given that there is a reality that we can perceive and engage in some fashion, what is necessary for that to exist? This leads him through a dizzying array of ideas and conclusions that we’ll try and break down when we engage the it directly in the posts to come.
And this gets to why we are motivated to address Langan and the CTMU. Readers of the Band know that our world view is fundamentally Christian. We do accept that there are aspects of scripture that are allegorical and limits to a fallen intellect looking at a valley of shadow through a glass darkly. But we also believe the account to be essentially True. Divinely inspired Truth, in fact. Creation, the Fall, and the necessity for redemptive sacrifice. Over the course of the Band we have reasoned to our satisfaction that what can be known logically and empirically of reality is consistent with those metaphysical aspects that are beyond our apprehension. Click for a post.
Different context but the point stands. We have no problems accepting limits of discernment and understanding. We're finite and fallen.
The CTMU acknowledges the metaphysical, but conceives of it's relationship to the material in a more continuous way that we would. It arrives at a concept of God, but with a recursive tautological account of universal self-creation that isn’t compatible with directed Christian Creation. This means that the smartest man in the world has devised a reality theory that differs from Christian dogma in significant ways but can’t be dismissed out of hand like the materialist numerology of beast Science!. A much more serious thing that it would be were it granted the academic attention Langan has mentioned. That's onto-epistemological erasure. This is much different.
Given that the Band’s motto is what can we know and how can we know it, we are almost compelled to visit such a creation. Not to try and “disprove” it – we aren’t capable of that without misrepresenting the complexity. But to ascertain how and why it differs from our Christian notion of Creation. And to see if there is anything that we can learn from the exercise.
Readers are also familiar with our Ontological Hierarchy – the graphic representation that ontology and epistemology are layered and related from a human perspective.
This is the most up-do-date version of it, with binding logos between ontological levels, the extension into self-erasure of evil, and the related epistemological and deontological tiers on the right. The need to add explicit objective morality came to us from an earlier reading of Langan. The Good, Beautiful, and True are old Platonic terms that just refer to abstract qualities of ultimate reality as it crosses into the capacity for temporally-sequenced human conceptualization.
The Ontological Hierarchy isn’t a reality theory per se because it acknowledges a noumenal or transcendent “level” that can’t be theorized beyond the necessity of its existence. Nor are the transitions between levels perfectly quantified, partly because theoretical quantification isn’t applicable to understanding all levels of reality. It’s a form of abstract epistemology that is of limited descriptive value for empirical reality and not of value at all for ultimate. This is one assumption where we diverge from Langan. Different but interrelated and tied together by Logos describes the aspects of our being-in-the-world without comprehensive theoretical unity.
We also assert that there are intrinsic limiting filters to the human ability to grasp onto-epistemological clarity.
Langan does address we're calling "the viewer’s share" – the reality that reality only exists to us in our perceptions of it. His concept of telesis implicates us in the formation of the universe as localized telic operators or telors. We would suggest that this improperly conflates representation and reality. Langan suggests the reality and representation are isomorphic to the point of conflation. More to come in later posts.
Quantum uncertainty involves a viewer’s share as well. Though there, the incompatibility between the abstract formulas and human perceptual experience suggests opposite sides of an Ontological Hierarchy divine. Or limits of discernment, where abstract quantitative reasoning fails to correspond with fallen empirical perception. Langan doesn’t differentiate between onto-epistemological levels but prioritizes logic in a single unified conception of reality. This is also something we’ll take up in detail later.
The other is something Langan doesn’t take up and yet another thing we’ll look into further. That’s the semiotic filtering – the communicative reality that our discussion of any level of reality is dependent on material signs.
Letters, numbers, and pictures. Reality may only exist to us in our perceptions, but our perceptions only exist to others in our signs. And representation is materially different from the thing represented. Even if the conceptualization that results - the mental picture - is the same.
Langan conceptualized reality in linguistic terms – not identical to human language, but an SCSPL or Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. Where processing and configuration, syntax and content and mutually generate in total self-containment - to the point where SCSPL "linguistic" expression is perfectly homologous or identical with the reality it describes. Reality becomes infocognition - information "content" and cognitive processing "syntax" as one indivisible reciprocal reflexive self-fashioning. Where theory of reality and reality are isomorphic. What we call semiotic filtering would add that his act of theorization results in a material construct intended for readers. Is this significant?
The Ontological Hierarchy is not a reality theory because it doesn’t offer an comprehensive explicatory theoretical account of reality. It is a descriptive visualization of how reality appears to us, meaning that the viewer’s share is built in. We aren’t dependent on any philosophical model because philosophical models are inherently limiting. But if we had to find the closest analogy it would probably be phenomenological because we assume an “objective” – meaning external – reality that temporally precedes our existence in it.
Bernard Jean Corneille Pothast, A Happy Family, 20th century, oil on canvas, private
This is what we mean by “material reality”. A physical environment known empirically with apparently consistent properties that we are born into and come into consciousness in. Catch a ball, hear a noise, bump your head – all are purely material aspects of being in the material world. Infants and animals respond to physical stimuli. Before we can think, we are.
Robert Hannah, Master Isaac Newton in His Garden at Woolsthorpe, in the Autumn of 1665, 1850s, oil on canvas, The Royal Institution
Abstract thought – logic – extends thoughts beyond the purely sensorial material. This is where we hypothesize things that can’t be seen – everything from moral principles to… well… reality theory.
The Ontological Hierarchy is hierarchical because the things known abstractly that can’t be perceived directly are considered “more” true or real than the material things that can be. This is the epistemology part of onto-epistemology – the modes of knowing abstract realities are considered to be of greater truth value that the subjective and unreliable senses. Abstract reality itself is timeless and unchanging - unlike entropic, shifting material reality. This is how we get to ultimate reality as the most True and faith the most certain.
Langan recognizes that a noumenal ultimate reality in a Kantian sense is external to his logical-empirical account of reality and excluded as a result. Faith doesn’t really enter into his work.
His ultimate reality/God is the level of reality that has no ontologically or temporally prior explanation or situatedness. But he does assume that it can be adequately framed through conceptual structures of abstract human logic. And like the parameters of a set, distributes across all reality "below". Another point for closer scrutiny.
The Band perceives the levels of ontology and modes of epistemology as appropriate to their own domains. If you need to eat, material activity is more pertinent that mathematical formulas. But obviously there is overlap – mathematical formulas can lead to higher material crop yield. This means that there are continuities as well as differences along the OH. Humans themselves have aspects of all three – body, mind, spirit – despite inhabiting material space and communicating with material signs. We realize that we can be accused of a dodge - claiming not to be a reality theory lets us off the hook by leaving the connections somewhat vague. But that's also the recognition of our intrinsic limitations. We are not being clever when we sidestep ontological continuities. We aren't clever enough to fully grasp them.
Another motivation behind looking at the CTMU is to see how someone much smarter addresses some of these questions. The hope is that it may clarify and refine our own descriptive efforts.
Then there is the issue of temporality.
Empirically, time seems basically linear – we are born, days pass, we age, days pass, we die. Consciousness begins and ends. Whatever happens after is after. Temporally sequenced.
The problem emerges when we attempt do translate the experience of time into the semiotics of abstract quantification. The language of math.
Physicists can show that mathematically, time is neither constant nor theoretically linear.
Higher dimensions likewise allow for the possibility that our perception of temporal linearity is a limit of our three-dimensional existence. And yet...
Sequencing still happens. The theory postdates the theorist. The world precedes the perception of it. We don’t exist materially prior to birth. After birth, we do. We are small before we are big. And any creation is preceded by its creator. These are material facts of existence. And any string of numbers or printouts that say otherwise are a) largely irrelevant to material existence and b) things that come into existence after the person who created them.
Thought experiment.
Yahoo Serious, Young Einstein British Quad Movie poster, 1987; Salvador Dali, Profile of Time, conceived in 1977, first cast in 1984, bronze
Consider the paradoxical results of material-abstract relations with theorizing the relativity of time as an example. The physicist has to appear before the theory. Therefore time either exists objectively and prior to the physicist with extant properties awaiting discovery or the relativity of time is created - spoken into existence - by the act of theorizing because reality is created by the observer. Since the stability of the perceptual universe is an anchor of Langan's theorizing, we suspect he would lean towards the former. But in either case, the sequential arrangement of material physicist then abstract theorizing supersedes any relativistic conclusions the theory draws. Relative rates don't effect priority order. And sequencing implies some sort of temporal dimension.
See the differences between linked onto-epistemological levels? Their importance becomes clearer when we realize that theory is a semiotic artifact that appears at a moment in time.
Langan theorizes reality as a self-generating linguistic process where the syntactic operations and content are mutually recursively self-creating. His formation is actually much more complex than that– we are not doing it justice at all and will be more through in posts to come. But even with temporal recursivity in what he calls telesis – the reality-forming work of telic operators general and localized – verbs are used. Descriptive action. And that implies some sort of sequencing. Bringing us to temporality.
This is different from what the Band refers to as true a-temporality. The absence not only of time as a physical property, but of any sort of before-after sequencing at all. We associate this with ultimate reality. Before the Creation. It is something we cannot even conceive of because thought itself is sequenced. But the definition of a temporal sequence presumes the preceding a-temporal originary state from which it comes. That's what the Band calls God qua God. Not the identity of an extant reality, but the apophatic ground against which Langan's totalizing definition of reality is positively conceptualized. The latter is closer in relative ontological scale to a Neoplatonic world-mind or demiurge than true transcendence.
And if the smartest man in the world - who juggles knowledge domains like data points and acknowledges the necessity metaphysics as well as materiality reasons out an alternative to our Christian framework? That's something we have to address seriously. Because not many can.
We're not 100% sure we can. And that brings us to why this has taken so long.
We may not be smart enough.
The Band does possess certain attributes that do equip us for this sort of task. Like Langan, we see the intrinsic limits of “disciplines” and recognize the need to treat knowledge and thought as unified wholes. We are also comfortable combining disparate types of concepts to build composite structures and insights. For example, we don't care whether he uses "set theory" in orthodox ways, only the meaning of the ideas his usage expresses. But the IQ gap means he is far more capacious in what he can bring together and cognitively powerful in generating structures and insights.
In our thinking about thinking post we described how greater intelligences can pull together more information and connections and by holding more together at once, see broader and more complex patterns. Langan can encompass so much at once and manipulate vast fields of data through overlapping lenses. We get the impression that the whole CTMU exists in his head as a fluid logical totality. And that he can work on it in that totality. We can't hold the whole thing. Where he is holistic, we have to become sequential and rely on extensive notes. This means we don't see it the same way, opening up all kinds of possibilities for misunderstanding.
It is true that IQ is a general measure and that individual aptitudes within it vary.
These sorts of breakdowns always understate the interrelated aspects of intelligence. But it does a good job of pointing out how many components there are to it.
The Band is especially strong at broad abstract conceptual visualizations and pattern recognition across domains. The skills most needed to follow something like the CTMU. In these areas, we may even scrape the bottom of the gap between us and Langan. We are also inclined to think past and across disciplines and recognize the limits of materialism, making Langan's approach intuitively sensible to us. This mix of aptitude and attitude is not common - it's why we observed there are not many who can take this up. But it still may not be sufficient.
A general average means peaks come with valleys.
As the interminable typos in our work show, we are less inclined to fine detail and precise accounting. We can barely glimpse his big pictures but his information density just blows us away. At times, the CTMU seems fairly clear and at others it’s a fog of symbols.
The time has been necessary to even try and do it justice. We only have limited time for the blog. And there's never a point engaging a straw man of your own making. In addition to the CTMU paper we’ve watched an in-depth video - which is something we never do – in order to better understand. But ultimately we are on the unfamiliar ground of not being sure we haven’t misunderstood an important idea or missed a significant implication. As such we will be more cautious and less aggressive than usual.
We can't critique his logic. The nature of the CTMU is that it subsumes anything sententially real. And anything that isn't sententially real is excluded from the reality that the CTMU theorizes. Tautology - true statements in any circumstances, or statements that can't not be true - is a basis of Langan's theory.
But we can discuss some assumptions and framing. So that's where we'll be focused.
We respect Langan’s work and his self-evidently vast intellect. We even hope to learn and evolve from him. The encounter is humbling. But it’s also necessary. And we don't need to discuss ourselves any more, but please feel free to share any comments.
We hope our readers will enjoy it.
Montague Dawson, Galleon in Moonlight, 20th century, lithograph
