Are we being hampered by hidden forces behind the scenes?

[Ostronomos]

Featured in the following youtube video are topics including reality and its equivalence to energy, the implied forces of good and evil hiding behind the scenes, and of course God. Langan's views may seem a bit one sided to some but that is only because he somewhat falls short of the ultimate genius level. I personally need to do more research about the supposed evils that exist in the world. The only force I fear is God.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/T7NbZIi6UgY

[C C]

Christopher Langan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan

B. A. Rehl (machine cognition and artificial general intelligence theorist and researcher):

CTMU is really not that complicated. Chris lumped together various concepts from philosophy, math, and to some extent language and computation to create a toy theory.

Imagine that the universe is essentially a type of computer. This computer runs a program that is derived from innate characteristics of its existence. As it runs it increases in complexity and information content. Eventually it becomes intelligent and is able to consider a purpose or direction. But this doesn’t actually work, so it is further proposed that the complex and intelligent future mind is able to send back instructions to its younger, non-intelligent self so that it will eventually become intelligent. In other words, even intelligent design is itself intelligently designed.

For certain people, seeing fractal or repeating patterns can make ideas seem more real or plausible. In other words, an idea is believed to be true because the structure or form appears aesthetically pleasing. It’s nearly impossible to read Chris’ writing without noticing his strong preference for this. The concept of recursion is brought up over and over. Particularly in a language like Prolog, recursive operations can seem almost like magic. So, it isn’t difficult for me to see how this could have been associated with creation.

Anyway, it is assumed that information or data is the fundamental property of reality. So, if you gain enough information you could create physical objects and properties. I can’t say that this is a completely ding-bat idea as it was seriously proposed in digital quantum theory and used in Greg Bear’s novel, Anvil of Stars. I suppose it isn’t any crazier than claiming that God spoke things into existence. Thus God would be the universe, the mind of the universe, the creator of reality, a self-creator, the source of all knowledge, and the director of all things. This concept is not really so different from ideas like Boltzmann Brains which was used in the film, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2.

Rene Descartes was pretty sharp in math and geometry as we see with Descartes’ Theorem. However, his work on psychology was laughable, his theory of dualism was lacking, and when he tried to prove the existence of God all he did was get caught up in his own assumptions about logic and necessity. CTMU isn’t worse than Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, but it also isn’t anymore correct.

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EXCERPT (from video interview): [...] 7:42 So yes, like we talked about, I am interested to chat with you about the nature of reality, consciousness, infinity; and I feel like one of the best places to start is just going directly at the source of how the universe comprehends itself. And would you say that that's obviously cognition?

It's a form of cognition, although it's not the same as human cognition. The universe has its own much more powerful kind of cognition where it literally apprehends everything at once, but it does so through the eyes of all of its secondary television(?), which of course includes human beings like us.

So how does the universe comprehend everything at once?

Well, now if I were the universe I could tell you that. Unfortunately. Just like you, I'm a localized creature within the universe. So my perception is usually limited, unless I'm getting some kind of help or I'm occupying a higher form of consciousness. Usually I can't see very far beyond my own account.

So the reason our consciousness is that way is, so we can survive on this level of existence. This is terminal reality, so we have to stay in touch with it. That means that we can shift our focus, but our focus always has to be in terminal reality. At least when we're actually coping with threats, dangers, things that we want, things that we need to do. We have to stay attached to them and that's what our consciousness is tailored to do.

There are, however, higher forms of consciousness. That it is very hard for us to conceive using just the form inside our heads. But if you can deduce for example that the universe has a kind of sentience and that sentience is necessarily different from our level of consciousness, in certain respects, then you may safely ascribe it to the universe. Because it's a matter of logical necessity.

Cool. So where is the universe's sentience if it's not localized within the sentient creatures?

It's distributed over everything in the universe. In the CTMU, the points of the universe are events, which actually contain states. Interacting states, they interact in events and these are the points of the manifold. The sentience of the universe is distributed over all of those points, so that it misses nothing. In other words, people wonder what is this higher sentience, what is the mind of god, what does it perceive? It perceives everything through every point.

Okay, so the sentence is distributed across a manifold?

Yes. You know what a manifold is, right?

Many fold.

[laughs] That's one way of looking at it. It's also a certain kind of space, and you can describe properties to it. For instance, it's locally Euclidean, in most cases. Which means that we have something approximate in Euclidean geometry in our separate frames of reference, and they're the consensus(?) [consentience? conspansive?] . The manifold of the CTMU differs from ordinary manifolds in certain respects.

One of those respects is, of course, point structure. I've just described points in a different way than most mathematicians would describe the points in an ordinary manifold. In an ordinary, real manifold, for example, which is a manifold parameterized by real numbers, points are zero dimensional cuts in the manifold. The cut is something of course that has to be bridged from one point to another, or one section of the space to another, so they can actually separate the space. That's what a cut does, but of course then if you separate the space, the space is not connected, and it falls into pieces...

13:10 [...] and so the two are ultimately one, and let's see if this is aligned with what you were saying a moment ago, which is that consciousness or perception depends upon the material or the physical.

Well, consciousness is dual. When I say dual, what I mean is if somebody into Asian philosophy would say non-dual, those would mean the same things. But actually we used dualism for that concept, for the concept of two things being separated. And duality for the idea that two things coincide in one particular point. Now consciousness must have this duality throughout. In other words, we have to have a set of patterns, which in the CTMU use is called syntax, in terms of which we see the world. And then we actually have to have a body with which we are in contact, that is actually in the world, so that serves as a kind of sense or controller.

We get to sense and control the universe through the body, that's how we can have a metaphysical nature and at once have a physical nature, a physical body. 

We say that every physical point in the conspansive manifold has a metaphysical neighborhood. That due to certain mathematical considerations, in effect in the consensus manifold has to be both interior and exterior to every point, but we use certain distinctions like those between semi-languages in the CTMU in order to separate them...