This fellow seems a little intellectually insecure to me, his style of writing / communication displayed in both the youtube videos and his theory, he appears to be making it complex to illustrate that he's capable of grasping complex things, rather than needing to illustrate actually complex ideas.
The finishing points about "god" without ever really nailing down an empirical definition of the term beyond "indeterminate omnipresent universey type stuff" strikes me as kind of disingenuous also.
Still, I don't doubt he has some mental agility, and it certainly looks like the world has dealt him a harsh hand, and I'm quite familiar with what circumstance can do personally.
It's disappointing that the highest rated comment is essentially ad hominem. I've been aware of the CTMU for many years and was hoping smart folks would engage his ideas. Sadly, it appears the intellectual insecurity here is as great as that attributed to Langan.
Arrogance and insecurity may be regrettable traits for getting along with people, but are irrelevant to the truth of a matter. Truth/falsity should be judged on its merits.
> Still, I don't doubt he has some mental agility
Pretty condescending. That's sort of like finding someone who has a vertical leap 8 inches greater than Michael Jordan and saying "I don't doubt he has some athleticism..." Maybe you don't think transcendent jumping ability necessarily makes you a good basketball player, but you'd sure give someone with that trait a harder look. In a similar vein, you may not think an IQ score is the final word in apprehending great truths, but you should certainly take a little extra care, I'd think.
At least, when I encounter analysis by someone who is significantly smarter than I am, and I don't fully understand their claims, my first impulse isn't to be dismissive or make ill-defined, hand-wavy criticisms.
I was not under the impression that anything about what he was saying was difficult to understand, merely that it was poorly communicated, I do not see any original ideas here or concepts that have not been covered in more exacting details in various philosophy courses.
I don't mean to heap ad hominem on him, I'm simply pointing out that if one is trying to present their ideas then they ought to present them clearly without recourse to attempting to make themselves appear more complex and sophisticated. There are even examples on this very thread of people illustrating much the same ideas as in the original article in a better format.
From a personal perspective, I have a lot of sympathy for him, I watched the entire series of youtube videos about him and I find it something approaching an indictment of humanity that this guy is a bouncer.
I think your dismissive rebuke is just not digging deep enough.
This is either so brilliant that I can't follow it, or the product of paranoid-schizophrenia of the TimeCube type (along with numerous other famous internet kooks) cloaked in more intelligence than I'm used to seeing.
I don't usually have so much trouble deciding. There's a bit more coherence than I'm seeing from such things. On the other hand, it does show a lot of one of the hallmarks of such writing, which is referring to various non-standard premises like the "Mind Equals Reality principle" that I can find no explanation for on the net beyond what is seen in that writing, and tends to cloak an idea that can only be sort of expressed in fuzzy words in vaguely mathematical garb that really only exists in the author's head. (Google for "Mentifex" for a much clearer example, and don't miss the FAQ at http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html . The theory, such as it is, is cloaked in scientific jargon, but has no correspondence with the real world.)
Hard to tell. It would depend on whether the ideas actually have a backing that one could get at in conversation, or whether this is it. When pressed for details, the difference is the paranoid-schizophrenic ideation is endlessly recursive (talk to the timecube guy as much as you like, but you'll never get anywhere; back him into a logical corner and he simply starts insulting you), whereas real ideas can actually be shown to be grounded in something else real.
Well, not really, but it just made my morning to see someone being so reasonable (as in your last sentences) instead of just yelling "He's a pretentious idiot who can't talk clearly".
I agree, and though I wouldn't presume to place myself anywhere north of the meaty center of the bell curve, I'm nevertheless confident that I can see the Achilles Heel in his world view: he does not hold logic to be a mere tool - one that can be misused, and one with intrinsic limitations. [1]
Logic can be misused because it is only as good as one's starting assumptions. Moreover, even when you have some very nice sets of initial axioms, like those of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, logic necessarily leads you (if you can follow Gödel) to the conclusion that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.
And, it strikes me, that elementary arithmetic is small potatoes in in comparison to the grandiose goal of obviating faith through a logically-proven god.
This guy might be fun to have a beer with, though.
[1] I didn't come to this conclusion through the linked article alone. Watch the youtube video that ice_man posted, and you'll see it in the first 60 seconds of him talking. This video, by the way, is an excellent study in propaganda filmmaking techniques. (Watch all 3 parts.)
Yes...a cautionary tale about giving too much weight to the Intelligence Quotient metric, and how it might lend a semblance of credibility to conservative agitprop dismissive of Darwin, the university system, and progressive federal expenditures. ;-)
I think I would've been a bully rather than a hacker had I met someone this arrogant and pretentious in high school. The only amusing part of that video is when he tells the story of getting chained to a truck and dragged up the street. Clearly, that didn't happen enough times.
"Perhaps men of genius are the only true men.... Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all.... And the rest of us -- what are we? Teachable animals."
I am always disappointed when someone cloaks their ideas in such thick intellectual veneer. I can't do justice to someone else's voice, but a few minutes were all that was necessary to make the first paragraph sound like a person:
(translated from semi-scientific posturing) "One of the things that makes us human is thinking about the big picture. Unfortunately, it's easy to make simple mistakes in the attempt think about the biggest picture: the universe. (Please understand that by 'the universe', I mean to say everything; it makes no sense to me to speak of things that aren't a part of the universe.) I sometimes unthinkingly imagine about the universe as the collection of all the things that exist; and that makes sense, doesn't it?
Maybe not. What about pi? The relationship between a the diameter of a circle and it's circumference appears in all kinds of surprising places --- it seems like it is an inherent part of the universe. Pi doesn't exist on it's own, though; at least, I can't imagine pi, floating in space all by itself. Pi seems to be a part of the fabric in which everything else exists. Any theory of the universe must take that fabric into account as well. As far as anyone can tell, the laws that underly the universe, the fabric, is the same everywhere. The fabric unifies the universe. So if I try to think about the universe sensibly, I can't talk about anything outside of it (a philosopher might say 'use monism instead of dualism'), and I must explain the unified whole (holism rather than reductionism)."
Chris Langan, wherever you are, you can do it! Don't be afraid to show your ideas to the world naked as the moment you thought them. The worst you can do is be wrong, and that's not bad at all.
Do you read scientific journals much? Papers are usually filled with long, grammatically complex sentences full of obscure technical jargon. Given the subject matter, it seems a bit silly to hold the author to a different standard.
I do, and they disappoint me for the same reason; I work in a machine research lab, and we work very hard to write papers which are both clear and publishable. I hold every writer to the same standard --- communicate in the clearest possible way. Sometimes the form/content relationship requires difficult prose, but that is surely a rare occurrence outside of modern fiction.
He published online, and suffered from no external pressure to obfuscate at all; if he made simple things complex it was from an inability to communicate or a desire to conceal.
I think Malcolm Gladwell talks about this guy a little in Outliers and attributes much of his personality to his upbringing. One might query whether by virtue of being that intelligent, one is already predisposed to isolation and intellectual elitism, but perhaps in this case it is neither here nor there. I have always found (and believe mostly) that brilliant people can describe their ideas (at least generally) in ways us normal knuckle draggers can understand. I would be interested in a capsule summary of CTMU for the common man. However, this intellectual ego-stroking in the videos etc. makes me think Mr. Langan would never so corrupt his lofty ideas.
Elsewhere I've seen him claim that he can make new predictions about the natural world based on his theory, which suggests it's falsifiable. Sadly, the true nature of the universe and all existence doesn't have enough bearing on my life to follow up on it.
