Scienticious
Rising Star
Dear forum,
I'm a college student, currently 20 years old, planning on going into math and physics. I also have a deep interest in metaphysics and have read some spiritual texts including some of Ken Wilber, the Upanishads, the Pali Canon, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watts' 'Taboo against knowing who you are'. Also I've probably seen more than my fair share of Alan Watts, Terence Mckenna and various Buddhists and mystics on Youtube.
Less than a year ago I was a physical reductionist without a clue, but thanks to the texts and people I've mentioned above all of that has completely changed. Now that that's out of the way:
Things became especially interesting for me when I discovered Christopher Langan, an extremely intelligent individual who has developed what he calls the 'Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe'. According to Mr. Langan the theory makes no assumptions whatsoever and instead relies on logic and reductio ad absurdum arguments to build a framework that establishes an identity between reality and mind, describing reality/mind as a self-processing and self-configuring language that arose out of what he calls UBT (unbounded telesis, commonly referred to as 'nothingness').
Now first of all I have to qualify what I'm about to say by saying that I don't fully understand the theory; all I can say is that from my limited understanding and experience I find the CTMU's concepts exciting, intuitively appealing and very reasonable. What's also interesting: this theory seems to explain many of the insights I've read about in the quality trip report section and from Terence Mckenna.
Here's a skimmy featuring some of the more intuitively appealing concepts:
Self-configuring Self-processing language (SCSPL reality): As reality necessarily includes anything relevant enough to influence reality it must supply itself with everything needed to emerge and refine itself. Essentially SCSPL amounts to 'generalized cognition', where information = language and both are characterized by structure (dating back to Korzybski and perhaps earlier this was understood).
"The somethingness of nothingness: According to Chris Langan reality evolves from what he calls a primordial realm of infocognitive potential called unbounded telesis; "nothingness" as he defines it is a realm of zero constaint and thus any logically self-consistent possibilities are able to emerge and refine themselves.
The nature of causality: The CTMU asserts that reality is neither purely deterministic nor is it non-deterministic. Instead, reality emerges without any pre-existing laws, plans, or informational constaint and evolves through a mechanism called 'teleologic evolution'. Reality designs itself; it's a self-determining system and thus can create its own meaning. In such a scenario this amounts to "bona fide meaning" in the strictest sense of the words.
The meaning of Life: God can essentially be thought of as globalized consciousness; all sentient minds are endomorphic images of the mind of God only more limited in scope. The mind of God is reality itself, globalized Self-configuring self-processing language and the minds of all other sentient beings are embedded in this reality as sublanguages. The purpose of life can be described as self-configuring one's mind in a way that helps reality/God itself evolve in the process. (We're in class)
Self-Resolving Paradox: The "default" stage of reality amounts to a paradox somehow relating to the self-selection problem itself where the emergence of intelligence was based on a logical priority of the system to select itself.
Reality = Reality Theory: As a self-describing mechanism, reality is analogous to a theorist in the process of introspection. As reality has nothing to consist of except itself (mind/SCSPL/infocognition), it amounts to a system which consistently perceives itself, a system characterized by profound self-similarity and self-reflexivity in which its global structure also functions as its distributed syntax.
Here's a link to the theory itself:
Here's a link to an intro to the theory:
Some helpful Q & A:
I don't know of a better place to share the CTMU than with you guys, I hope some of you can understand it better than I currently do; it seems that full understanding requires knowledge of computation theory, mathematical logic, computation theory, topology and other areas of higher math but on some level I've found you can get something out of it without having that background.
I'm a college student, currently 20 years old, planning on going into math and physics. I also have a deep interest in metaphysics and have read some spiritual texts including some of Ken Wilber, the Upanishads, the Pali Canon, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watts' 'Taboo against knowing who you are'. Also I've probably seen more than my fair share of Alan Watts, Terence Mckenna and various Buddhists and mystics on Youtube.
Less than a year ago I was a physical reductionist without a clue, but thanks to the texts and people I've mentioned above all of that has completely changed. Now that that's out of the way:
Things became especially interesting for me when I discovered Christopher Langan, an extremely intelligent individual who has developed what he calls the 'Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe'. According to Mr. Langan the theory makes no assumptions whatsoever and instead relies on logic and reductio ad absurdum arguments to build a framework that establishes an identity between reality and mind, describing reality/mind as a self-processing and self-configuring language that arose out of what he calls UBT (unbounded telesis, commonly referred to as 'nothingness').
Now first of all I have to qualify what I'm about to say by saying that I don't fully understand the theory; all I can say is that from my limited understanding and experience I find the CTMU's concepts exciting, intuitively appealing and very reasonable. What's also interesting: this theory seems to explain many of the insights I've read about in the quality trip report section and from Terence Mckenna.
Here's a skimmy featuring some of the more intuitively appealing concepts:
Self-configuring Self-processing language (SCSPL reality): As reality necessarily includes anything relevant enough to influence reality it must supply itself with everything needed to emerge and refine itself. Essentially SCSPL amounts to 'generalized cognition', where information = language and both are characterized by structure (dating back to Korzybski and perhaps earlier this was understood).
"The somethingness of nothingness: According to Chris Langan reality evolves from what he calls a primordial realm of infocognitive potential called unbounded telesis; "nothingness" as he defines it is a realm of zero constaint and thus any logically self-consistent possibilities are able to emerge and refine themselves.
The nature of causality: The CTMU asserts that reality is neither purely deterministic nor is it non-deterministic. Instead, reality emerges without any pre-existing laws, plans, or informational constaint and evolves through a mechanism called 'teleologic evolution'. Reality designs itself; it's a self-determining system and thus can create its own meaning. In such a scenario this amounts to "bona fide meaning" in the strictest sense of the words.
The meaning of Life: God can essentially be thought of as globalized consciousness; all sentient minds are endomorphic images of the mind of God only more limited in scope. The mind of God is reality itself, globalized Self-configuring self-processing language and the minds of all other sentient beings are embedded in this reality as sublanguages. The purpose of life can be described as self-configuring one's mind in a way that helps reality/God itself evolve in the process. (We're in class)
Self-Resolving Paradox: The "default" stage of reality amounts to a paradox somehow relating to the self-selection problem itself where the emergence of intelligence was based on a logical priority of the system to select itself.
Reality = Reality Theory: As a self-describing mechanism, reality is analogous to a theorist in the process of introspection. As reality has nothing to consist of except itself (mind/SCSPL/infocognition), it amounts to a system which consistently perceives itself, a system characterized by profound self-similarity and self-reflexivity in which its global structure also functions as its distributed syntax.
Here's a link to the theory itself:
Here's a link to an intro to the theory:
Some helpful Q & A:
I don't know of a better place to share the CTMU than with you guys, I hope some of you can understand it better than I currently do; it seems that full understanding requires knowledge of computation theory, mathematical logic, computation theory, topology and other areas of higher math but on some level I've found you can get something out of it without having that background.
