dpc on Nostr: I've been going down a rabbit hole of CTMU , so will clear my mind and share some ...

I've been going down a rabbit hole of CTMU , so will clear my mind and share some thoughts on it in case anyone finds it interesting.

I dig this kind of stuff and generally in last the decade or more my worldview shifted from a rather standard western intellectual scientist mechanical atheism into realization that consciousness can not be derived from physics or computation, therefore consciousness is probably the fundamental aspect of reality, which both the eastern philosophies and western science seems to converge on.

So here comes CTMU. It is a ToE (Theory of Everything) , developed by Christopher Langan which has the highest in the world recorded IQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan

From what I can tell tell he's very smart and makes a great impression. What's best is that due to his upbringing he's not an academic, but a proper down to earth dude. Just extremely smart and (self) learned. Whole life he worked as bouncer, firefighter, farmer and such. So to me, with my distaste for academia, the guy himself is just a gem.

Anyway - the theory. In a nutshell: Langan starts with logical reasons why consciousness must be the fundamental aspect of reality, or otherwise just the logics of everything wouldn't add up. Then he builds a methapysical model of the universe as a language: a self-generative and self-perceptual system. I hope I didn't butcher it too much. The stuff is abstract, nuanced and takes from various aspects of linguistics, mathematics, physics, and what not.

As far as I can tell it's not nonsense or some quackery that can be simply dismissed. But it is so abstract and requires understanding of things from so many disciplines, that it is hard to really fully grasp, even for very bright people, which you can see when watching these few videos when someone actually tries to debate with him.

That and that fact that the end conclusion is that the universe can be considered a single self-reifying consciousness, which all conscious agents are kind of fragments of (which is also something I intuitively believe). Langan is open about his religious interpretations of such universe-consciousness.

So - the guy is an outsider to academia , with open semi-religious beliefs/interpretations and thus somewhat off-putting to people that could more rigorously think about it, intellectually intimidating, the whole thing is not exactly easy to meaningful criticise without spending considerable amount of time and effort to internalize. All of this made his theory sit for decades without the world really paying any attention. The interactions or criticism I've found online w.r.t. CTMU are always rather uninformed and shallow.

From my PoV, it's worth looking into, just because it's intellectually stimulating and not well known. Unfortunately as a metaphysics, it seems more philosophical than practical, so I'm not aware of any predictive consequences that could either be used to show that it actually seem to correspond to observable reality. Maybe there are some and I just didn't get to that part.

If you are interested, I the best video to get an overview so far I've found is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA