As a follow up to our previous Substack post (embedded below) about Chris Langan’s Publications 1989–2025, we’re delighted to announce that a paperback edition is now available on Amazon.

The paperback edition of Chris Langan’s Publications 1989–2025 contains the following previous publications:

• Chris Langan’s Major Papers 1989–2020

• FAQs About Reality. Chris Langan’s Social Media Posts. Book One: Quora

• The Art of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Selected Essays – Revised and Expanded Edition

• Dialogue on the CTMU

• FAQs About Reality. Chris Langan’s Social Media Posts. Book Two: Patreon

• The Smartest Man in the World: The Interview They Didn’t Want You to See

If you’d like to have them all in one volume, please consider purchasing a copy, and if you find the content valuable, please leave a five-star review on Amazon. It took an enormous effort to bring the volume to you, and it is our dream to make it a bestseller that is impossible to ignore with thousands of five-star reviews.

Let’s cancel the cancellation together.

Purchase the book on Amazon

• Chris Langan’s Major Papers 1989–2020

• FAQs About Reality. Chris Langan’s Social Media Posts. Book One: Quora

• The Art of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Selected Essays – Revised and Expanded Edition

• Dialogue on the CTMU

• FAQs About Reality. Chris Langan’s Social Media Posts. Book Two: Patreon

• The Smartest Man in the World: The Interview They Didn’t Want You to See

Chris Langan's Publications 1989–2025

A paperback edition is being prepared for publication and we will let you know when it’s ready.

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Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise.

– JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER, 1986

Abstract

The Simulation Hypothesis is the widely discussed conjecture that we inhabit a directly experienced but nevertheless artificial reality which, while supporting human consciousness and perception, is produced and displayed by a host system occupying a higher-level reality unseen from below. Reality is thus implicitly defined to have at least two levels, the one in which we seem to exist, and another associated with the host system. As the term “reality” is undefined beyond this hypothetical relationship, the Simulation Hypothesis is indifferent to the details, e.g., where the host system is located, how the host system works, who or what created and/or controls the host system, and in what respects the simulation resembles the higher reality containing it. But in any case, there must be an ultimate all-inclusive reality or “ontic ground state” that contains and supports whatever reality-simulations may exist, and it is natural to ask whether some aspects of the simulation concept may apply to it. The Reality Self-Simulation Principle states that ultimate reality is itself a natural reflexive self-simulation in which all intelligible levels of reality must exist whether simulated or not. Where ultimate reality is a global self-identification operator configured as the CTMU Metaformal System (Langan, 2018), i.e., the identity-language of intelligible reality, the Reality Self-Simulation (RSS) can be identified with the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU; Langan, 2002), which thus describes reality as a self-simulating identity operator R* : R_INT | R_EXT and details its structure and dynamics, showing that it possesses its own universal form of consciousness (coherent self-identification and self-modeling capacity), an unbreakable quantum ontology, and a new paradigm for self-organization and emergence.

Keywords

Simulation, Self-Simulation, Self-Simulation Theory, Self-Simulation Principle, Self-Simulation Hypothesis, Reality Self-Simulation, Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, CTMU, Metaformal System

Introduction

In science and technology as well as popular culture, simulation is ubiquitous. A wide variety of processes are now being computationally simulated for purposes ranging from entertainment and scientific exploration to urban planning, drug design, and military and commercial flight training. These days, many apparently sane people are even looking about them with suspicion and wondering whether reality itself could be a simulation in which they have somehow been trapped, and if so, whether there is any possibility of escape.

By definition, a simulation is a model or imitation of an actual situation or process that fools an observer into thinking it is real given limited suspension of judgment. That is, it is similar enough to the original system or process to be “realistic” even while differing from it in some respects, preferably not so many as to destroy the illusion. But where the simulation concept is taken to the global limit – where we are considering the simulation of reality at large – illusion takes on a whole new meaning, converging on fundamental sensory and epistemological limitations.

Where it is the entire universe that is simulated, strange complexities and unexpected simplifications may arise. For example, although the simulation must differ from true reality in order to maintain its definitive artificiality, it is ideally indistinguishable from genuine reality for its inhabitants. In this sense, “artificially simulated reality” is an oxymoron; a “realistic” (convincing) artificially simulated reality must be real enough to make its resident observers regard it as genuine after all. Yet insofar as any simulated reality is embedded in all higher levels of reality, it may still be possible to discern ultimate reality within it.

The Simulation Hypothesis

The “Simulation Hypothesis” or “simulation theory” is a relatively new hypothesis with ancient roots, a modernization of the old idea that the physical world is merely a perceptual representation of a deeper level of reality. It posits that we inhabit an artificial system, e.g., a simulation programmed and running on a computer or other advanced digital construct possibly overseen by a higher intelligence (God, the devil, aliens, post-humans, etc.). Some variants involve consideration of how and when the technological capacity for reality-simulation evolves or emerges from base-level reality, and the assignment of likelihoods to the associated possibilities.

In the Western philosophical tradition, the simulation hypothesis can be traced back through the “evil demon” of Rene Descartes (Descartes, R., 1996), which he described as presenting “a complete illusion of an external world … devised to ensnare my judgement”, to Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Plato, n.d.) and beyond. In the Eastern tradition, it is foreshadowed in certain strains of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy and literature. But perhaps the first technical application of the modern version of the Simulation Hypothesis to an outstanding philosophical problem appeared in the paper “The Resolution of Newcomb's Paradox” (Langan, 1989), which features a reality-simulator capable of simulating the deterministic and nondeterministic aspects of real processes, including volition and cognition, in an otherwise paradoxical decision-theoretic scenario.

In addition to the Simulation Hypothesis, there exists a related trilemma with which it might sometimes be confused. This trilemma, called the “Simulation Argument”, is expressed as follows (Bostrom, 2003):

At least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) Any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); and (3) We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Whereas the Simulation Hypothesis forthrightly asserts that we live in an artificially simulated reality (subject to proof), the Simulation Argument is about the likelihood of living in an artificially simulated reality under specific evolutionary circumstances involving implicit technical assumptions. According to Bostrom (2008), “one can accept the simulation argument and reject the simulation hypothesis”. Thus, the Hypothesis and the Argument should not be confused.

However, the Hypothesis and the Argument share something in common: both are about artificial reality-simulations, and are thus distinguished from the true (artificially unsimulated) or ultimate reality in which they are implicitly assumed to exist. This raises a pair of questions. One question is ontological, having to do with the relationship between true reality and artificially simulated pseudo-reality, while the other question is epistemological, having to do with the possibility and means of distinguishing one from the other:

1. How do true reality and artificial simulation differ, and what if anything do they have in common?

2. Can the inhabitants of an artificial simulation distinguish it from true reality and vice versa (i.e., can real physically-embodied human beings distinguish the true reality they inhabit from an artificial one)?

To answer one or both of these questions, it seems that we require a sound definition of “true reality”, which to some extent entails a verifiable theory of reality. This “reality theory” must contain the required distinctions and a reliable means of applying them.

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Solutions for the Problems of Free Will, Good and Evil, Consciousness and God

For three chapters now, I've subjected you to merciless philosophical, neurobiological and mathematically-oriented disquisitions on free will, even arranging your involuntary participation in a virtual game show and a scientific experiment. As a reward for your long suffering, we'll now try to extract some momentous implications from the little thread we've got going. Specifically, we're going to show that free will definitely exists. Then we're going to explain that while this doesn't necessarily mean that human beings possess it in any immediate sense, there are good reasons to believe that they do. And then we're going to discuss a few important philosophical corollaries.

First, let's review the virtual reality game described in the last chapter. The point of introducing this 1- or 2-player Game was to provide a standard analytical framework for Newcomb's paradox and the Libet delayed-choice experiment. The Game has two control levels respectively inhabited by a “subject” and “programmer”. The subject inhabits a simulated world under the control of the programmer, who is able to fast-forward, reverse and replay the simulation at will. The first step toward winning the Game is to occupy the role of programmer and thereby gain control of the outcome (sadly, there are not yet any detailed instructions for doing this). The solitaire version requires that a lone player play both roles, making self-control, i.e. personal volition, the only possible object of the Game.

In addition, we defined a third “role”, that of the Game Designer who makes the rules that the player(s) must obey. These rules include the laws of causality that operate on each level, and the laws governing the relationships among control levels. Because the Designer in effect occupies a third control level, there are three control levels altogether. Control flows downward through these levels, from Designer to programmer to subject. Due to the quality and quantity of control associated with the role of Designer, the Designer has a clear theological analogue: God. In the context of the Game, denying the existence of the Designer would amount to asserting that despite the complex structural organization of the Game, it is random in origin.

Let's begin by reviewing a few historical viewpoints regarding the free will issue. First, we have the idea, dear to the hearts of most of us and especially to those who framed the U.S. Constitution and other rational codes of law and ethics, that human beings have free will. While we acknowledge that there are laws of causality that apply to everyone regardless of time or place – e.g. “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” – these are not sufficient to control our behavior, leaving us free to “make our own laws” when it comes to our personal preferences. This corresponds to the solitaire version of the Game, but with a tacit restriction on the fast-forward, reverse and replay options: they are usually considered to be exclusively “mental”, i.e. confined to our respective thought processes.

Then we have determinism, the idea that the laws of causality determine our every move. Determinism holds that we resemble billiard balls rolling around and colliding on a barroom pool table, bouncing off each other under the impulses imparted to us by environmental cue sticks. Like the cue sticks themselves, the internal impulses triggered in our minds and bodies by external stimuli are completely motivated by the laws of physics, reductively including the laws of genetics, biology and psychology. There is no causal gap in which free will can find a toehold. This corresponds to a version of the Game in which the Designer leaves no open controls for the programmer to use; the structure of the Game, as fixed by the Designer, absolutely controls the simulation and the subject. (While Laplace, widely considered the father of determinism, once remarked to Napoleon that a deterministic universe “has no need” of a Designer, he thereby left himself with no way to account for the mathematical laws of causality offered as a replacement.)

Juxtaposed to determinism is indeterminism or randomism, the idea that causality is only an illusion and that everything, including human behavior, is utterly random. This represents a bizarre mutation of the Game in which one or both of the following conditions hold:

1. The Designer is absent, dead, or out to lunch; the Game, and its rules of causality and interlevel control, exist solely by “chance”. An obvious drawback of this viewpoint is that it fails to account for the probabilistic laws of chance themselves.

2. The rules of causality do not exist at all; they are merely supposed to exist by the subject and break down where the subject's powers of self-delusion end, beyond which point chance rules openly. In other words, when a subject fancies that he is “making a decision”, he is really rolling the dice, and somehow, his sequential delusions of intent, action and outcome perfectly match the dice roll. This, of course, seems to give a whole new meaning to the term “improbable”.

In addition to free will, determinism and randomism, there is another doctrine worth considering: predestination. Predestination is the idea that God can look at a person, measure his or her tendencies towards goodness and/or badness, predict how the person will decide to behave in his or her particular setting, and consign that person's soul to heaven or hell on that basis. Where God's insight relies on the existence of laws that transform information on a person's innate tendencies and environmental conditions to information on behavior – these laws are ostensibly what He uses make His prediction – predestination amounts to determinism with a theological twist. Where God determines both the personality of the subject and the laws that determine his behavior, this boils down to the following scenario: God makes a person, sizes up His handiwork, says either (a) “Man, am I good!” or (b) “Screwed up again!”, and tosses His newest creation onto the pile marked “Heaven Bound” or “Born To Lose”. If you happen to be a Calvinist, this is your lot – or should that be lotto? – in life.

However, there is another strain of predestination, favored by (e.g.) the Roman Catholic Church, that does not rely on determinism. According to this version of the doctrine, God might instead do one of the following:

1. Scan the subject for freely-formed higher-order intent. As we recall, persistent higher-order intent is what the experimental subject generates in agreeing to participate in the Libet experiment and move his hand repeatedly at will. To capture the theological flavor of predestination, compare this to “what the subject generates in freely selling his soul to the devil and agreeing to commit a lifelong string of felonies and misdemeanors”.

2. Let the subject play out and determine his own simulation, then use the rewind control to back up to the subject's moment of birth and invisibly stamp him “Accepted” or “Rejected”. In this case, God is simply jumping forward in time to observe the subject's timeline, and then jumping back through time to affix the proper invisible label to its origin. This kind of predestination leaves room for free will.

Notice that where free will is absent, the mind is reduced to a mere byproduct of deterministic material reality. Consciousness, including the psychological sensation of intentionality and self-awareness in general, becomes a kind of meaningless sideshow compulsively played by our irrelevant “minds”, as we are forced to call them, to interpret that which they cannot affect. The idea that the mind is just a side effect of objective physical processes is called epiphenomenalism. One can, of course, split hairs over the question of whether the mind is truly intrinsic to our material brains and bodies, or just extra metaphysical baggage that is somehow tied to them by some kind of ethereal thread. But either way, if intentionality has nothing to do with the structure of reality, then matter and the laws of physics are all that really count. Our “minds” are just along for the ride.

We've enumerated the above scenarios to show that the cybernetic paradigm, involving feedback among layers of control, clarifies the distinctions among traditional approaches to volition. This is a bit surprising; while cybernetics is a respected branch of modern science, the position of the scientific establishment as a whole is evidently nowhere near as sophisticated. It is based on a naive understanding of causality which holds that with respect to anything not locked into a determinative causal relationship, randomness prevails. For example, modern physics characterizes reality on three scales: the overall cosmic scale, the macroscopic scale of ordinary objects, and the ultramicroscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles, to which it applies the rules of relativity, classical mechanics and quantum mechanics respectively (where relativity is understood as a classical theory). Unfortunately, the dichotomy between “classical” and “quantum” reality is essentially the same as that between causality and randomness or determinacy and indeterminacy. It thus effectively excludes all of the above scenarios except determinism and randomism, leaving the existence of free will with no apparent possibility of scientific explanation.

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Abstract

Solutions for problems arising at the limits of science and philosophy require ontological grounding. Quantum Mechanics (QM) is increasingly called upon as a source of insight regarding such problems, but is not itself well-understood. The fact that QM has many conflicting interpretations for which ontological status is claimed demands a “post-quantum” theory which clarifies its meaning, settles the differences among its interpretations, and facilitates the analysis and solution of otherwise intractable problems. Herein described as Quantum Metamechanics (QMM), this theory is a “meta-interpretative” mapping of QM and its various interpretations into a supertautological description of reality, the CTMU Metaformal System. By incorporating the CTMU, a true ontic identity supporting the self-identification and self-existence of reality, QMM provides QM with a valid ontology in terms of which its various interpretations can be evaluated and synergized.

Keywords

Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe; Quantum Mechanics; Quantum Metamechanics; QM; QMM; Ontology; Quantum Ontology; Metaformalization; Formal Quantization; Metacausation; Retrocausation; Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Introduction

As never before, scientists and philosophers are trying to solve “big questions” having to do with such imponderable concerns as the nature and extent of reality, the origin and nature of life, the nature of mind and consciousness, the origin of the cosmos, the nature of space, time, and causality, the essence of human existence and spirituality, so-called paranormal phenomena, and other matters seemingly resistant to mechanical, material, or physical explanation. Accordingly, science and philosophy have been gravitating toward the broad and highly successful theory of quantum mechanics (QM) as a source of insight. But despite its great theoretical and methodological utility, QM is as much a mystery as the questions themselves, and that of which the meaning is unclear is not itself a credible source of meaning. This has led to the search for a “post-QM” theory that properly explains QM itself and is thus better equipped to deal with metaphysical issues.

The purpose at hand is to identify the requirements of such a post-QM theory and then describe it in logical terms. Because this theory is necessarily a metatheory (or theoretical metalanguage) of QM, it is called Quantum Metamechanics or QMM.

Its purpose is to map QM, along with any valid hypothetical correlates designed to obviate or accommodate its apparently problematical features, into the CTMU Metaformal System (Langan, 2018), a comprehensive high-level formulation of the structure of reality independent of QM itself, and then to explicate their relationship and thereby synergistically relate the microscopic and macroscopic scales of reality to each other. Because the Metaformal System is a supertautological (intrinsically valid) reflexive model of reality predicated on its manifest intelligibility, QMM can be described as a reflexive application of model theory which reliably locates QM within the theater of being.

Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, QM itself is not an ontology. QM is a formal system standing apart from its universe, a mathematical apparatus incorporating such ingredients as linear algebra, Fourier analysis, and probability theory. Given the existence of certain measurements, QM merely yields statistical predictions of their outcomes. QM does not include definitions or attributions of being, existence, or reality. Assertions relating these concepts to QM reside elsewhere, usually in a more or less speculative interpretation of QM in an imperfect description of an incomplete set of observations labeled “physical reality”.

That ontological status has nevertheless been claimed for various interpretations of QM – that they are called “quantum ontologies” – reflects a widespread misunderstanding of the word “ontology”. In the minds of most scientists and philosophers, ontology consists of “claims about existence”, e.g., the kinds of object, relation, operation, and process that exist in the world, and related epistemological claims about the nature and limits of knowledge, e.g., what kinds of knowledge are possible under what conditions. But insofar as anyone can make any claim at all about anything one likes, this is a trivialization. If existence can be meaningfully attributed to anything at all, then a valid ontological language must exist, and it must consist of actual knowledge rather than mere “claims”.

Concisely, an ontology is a theoretical language that accounts for the nature and content of being (reality, existence) and logically supports its attribution on all scales and all levels of discourse. This carries certain requirements that QM cannot fulfill. Being is not an ordinary attribute, but the highest attribute of all; no lesser attribute can be meaningfully attributed to anything of which some kind or level of being, even if “purely conceptual”, is not already a property. Moreover, just as QM suggests, ontology is intimately related to epistemology, which deals with the nature and limits of knowledge. Because something must exist in order to be known or identified, while that which exists must be identifiable as a value or instance of the attribute “existence”, identifiability and existence must coincide.

While QM is considered by some to define the limits of physical measurement and thus of empirical identification, there are other things to be identified in the name of science – ideas, concepts, sensations, feelings, judgments, intentions, intuitions, and theories like QM itself, for example. It is simply not the case that abstract and subjective forms of existence and identity can be wholly supervened on “physical” objects and processes.

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Publisher’s Note

We have reprinted this interesting and productive discussion of the CTMU for didactic purposes. This dialogue took place in 1999–2000. Several brief references to third parties that were not relevant to the dialogue have been removed. There was no further correspondence until Fred posted a “critique” of the CTMU. The “critique”, including Chris’s response, has been reprinted in the last part of this book.

PART I

RFV: I’ve been meaning to begin a dialog with you that would help us both understand each other better. Bob Seitz1 thinks most highly of you and such a friend is the best recommendation a man can have in my book. I would be foolish not to know you better than I do with you being only an e-mail away.

What I’d like before attempting any major intellectual challenge like your CTMU – that I would like to get into later after I have some background – is to compare our perspectives on various topics without the public displays and distractions of being on the list. If you have any questions about my leanings on any topic, please let fly with questions and I’ll answer them as straight-forwardly or as stupidly as I happen to hold my opinions. I would like to discuss them in such a non-confrontational way – and slowly so that it sinks in. I will be as intellectually fair with you as it is possible for me to be. I do find it easy to acknowledge others ideas but that does not mean that I have none of my own that I would deny having had before a conversation. I am personally not nearly so worried about my own ideas as I once was, but naturally we all have some level of paranoia with regard to such things. I hope we can converse in such a way that you are always convinced of my good faith in this regard. Assurances are best proven rather than stated.

CML: Of course. I share and appreciate your willingness to progress towards mutual understanding. I know that some of my ideas look somewhat strange from a conventional viewpoint, but they’re not lightly formulated, and I always welcome a chance to explain the underlying logic.

RFV: If there’s a different agenda or different approach to this one that is better, then let’s do it! But in the mean time could we investigate one of the questions that I have that seems to involve a major difference of opinion between us.

I happen to think that one cannot “know” the world without data and that our most abstractly generalized notion of the world must be based on inductive reasoning from that data. Having developed a generalized notion or theory one can then deduce specifics that are warranted (and our theory is only warranted) to the extent that these deductions map to actualities. It is my impression that you hold a somewhat different opinion or place emphasis differently within such a scheme.

Teleological arguments are not something I think should be tossed out without consideration, but I do have much more skepticism with regard to them. However, I hold (what can only be called “faith”) that the ultimate physical theoretical solution will have a “necessity” about it which is very convincing – sor[t] of Einstein’s “God would have done it this way!”

CML: I agree that we can’t know the world without data. But since we necessarily receive and interpret these data mentally, they provide important clues about our mental structure. The idea that this mental structure shapes the phenomenal world has been known since Kant; the CTMU simply pushes Kant’s ideas to their logical conclusion, dealing directly with the relationship between mind and reality.

RFV: Could we just talk about this topic quite narrowly for a beginning. That is, unless you have a question of me or a different agenda.

CML: Sure! No problem.

RFV: Thanks in advance for whatever this engenders.

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Preface

The Daily Wire is a conservative media company with HQ in Nashville, TN. It was founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing. It’s a leading online publisher with a notable presence on Facebook, and it produces video podcasts for people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Candace Owens. It also repackages journalism from various news websites, usually with a conservative slant, and has released several feature-length films and two television series.

As the company has conservative leanings, there have been complaints that some of its content is unverified and that facts are twisted to fit its partisan perspective. But this is to be expected, as progressivists and their partisans always claim, usually on no evidence whatsoever, to have an exclusive lock on truth and reason. In fact, DW appears to be a respectable company.

I was interviewed by the DW on April 30 [2022] in Nashville. It must have cost the company several thousand dollars (including airfare, car fees, and overnight accommodations for my wife and me). They pressed me repeatedly to be interviewed on short notice by Michael Knowles, who conducted the interview in what seemed a very professional way. The idea was that Michael wanted to use the interview as the inaugural presentation in a special series he planned to introduce.

In the course of the interview, Gina and I met Michael, Jeremy (co-owner of the DW), and other members of the DW staff. Everyone claimed to love the interview, and not just a little. We expected to see it online within a couple of weeks.

But then it was pulled without explanation of any kind.

(…)

Excerpted from an article “High Strangeness at the Daily Wire” published on Chris Langan’s Ultimate Reality Substack.

Chris Langan's Ultimate Reality

High Strangeness at the Daily Wire

The Daily Wire is a conservative media company with HQ in Nashville, TN. It was founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing. It's a leading online publisher with a notable presence on Facebook, and it produces video podcasts for people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Candace Owens. It also repackages journalism from various ne…

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3 years ago · 90 likes · 32 comments · Chris Langan

The Interview

MK: Welcome to my extremely ethereal and trippy new set. I feel as though I am floating in a cloud here, in this all-white venue, and perhaps that is fitting for this first interview in a series of much longer, much more in-depth interviews. I’m so excited that my first guest is Christopher Langan, the smartest man in the world. I do not say that as a subjective statement or to flatter Chris. I mean that in as technical a way as possible. Chris has one of, if not the highest IQ ever recorded, somewhere between 190-195 and 210. And Chris is not here by way of some fancy, distinguished professorship at such and such brand name university, nor did Chris just get off of his private yacht, out of the south of France, and come here to leave his billion-dollar company. Chris came here from a farm in Missouri after a career as a bouncer at bars around New York.

Chris, thank you very much for coming on.

CML: Thank you for inviting me, Michael.

MK: I first stumbled onto you when I was eighteen years old, a freshman in college, and — listen, I barely got out of high school math. I barely got out of calculus.

CML: I barely got out of high school myself.

MK: That’s a good point. But I said, “This guy, he’s saying things that are really, really interesting, and so I want to learn more.” I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since then. I know that before we get into metaphysics, the existence of God, free will, politics, culture, and everything in between, I know people are going to be asking, “Why is the smartest man in the world not just buying and selling all of us all the time? Why is he living on a farm in the middle of Missouri?”

CML: Well, that’s a good question. And it’s that I was never actually interested in money. When I was a kid, my brothers and I, my family, we were not exactly the richest folks in town. We seldom had enough money to buy food or clothes, and so I immersed myself in books and reading and decided that what I wanted to do was pursue knowledge. It costs you nothing to pursue knowledge, really, provided you can sustain yourself while you’re in pursuit of it. So that’s what I did. I simply focused myself on, I want to know the truth about reality. I want to know what kind of world it is that I’m living in. And that’s what I went for. Now, as far as the making of money is concerned, one thing that I found out is that there are certain ingredients, certain advantages, that you need in order to become rich. Of course, it helps to be born with money —

MK: (laughs) That’s the easiest way.

CML:  — and it helps to have a lot of connections, the right kind of connections, and not to alienate the people who have all the money, because then they’ll exclude you and cancel you. That’s what they do. That’s what cancel culture is. Basically, people are being frozen out of the economy. And I found myself getting frozen out of the economy that way from an early age. I tried to go to college but ran into a couple of problems, personnel problems, on the faculties of the colleges in question, and that stopped me. Basically, when you can’t get a college education, you are canceled economically.

MK: Presumably though you show up to college. Even though you’ve got a tough upbringing and not any real advantages in terms of family or society you’ve got a higher IQ than anybody in the room. You’re obviously extremely smart, extremely self-educated, so you get into college. It should be a total breeze for you.

CML: Well, it was a total breeze for me, too much of a breeze for me. You ask the wrong kinds of questions of people who are full of themselves and think they have all the answers. Like in a calculus class, “Why don’t you explain what an infinitesimal interval is and how you can traverse from one end to the other?” and they’ll look at you as though you’ve got two heads.

MK: I ask that all the time. I ask my waiters.

CML: (laughs) Well, I got a very poor reaction out of that. There was a math instructor, Albert Leisenring, I think, who decided that I must be absolutely brain-dead. This guy was a very strange character. He was about six and a half feet tall. He’d come into class. Everybody would be waiting there for him. He’d make a late entrance. We’d be waiting for 10–15 minutes. He’d walk in with this great big stack and mimeograph sheets, and then he’d hand them out — walk around the room, methodically handing out these sheets to all of the students, and everybody would’ve a sheet in front of him. Then he’d walk up to the room, and symbol for symbol, everything that was written on the sheets would appear on the blackboard. Then he’d turn around and walk out. I was having a hard time with this. There were certain things that I didn’t quite understand — why he was doing them the way he was. So I kept on trying to track him down to his office. He was never in his office. I would wait in the hall for hours and hours but this guy never showed up. Finally, I caught him in his office and I said:

“Hi, Professor Leisenring, can I come in?”

“Well, I’m really kind of busy right now.”

“I just wanted to ask you one question. Why do you do this? Why are you taking a set-theoretical approach to calculus like this? They don’t seem to be compatible. On the one hand, calculus deals with change, whereas sets are static things. Why are you taking this particular approach to it?”

And he looks at me — Asperger’s victim, right? — and he looks down at his thing, “Well, some people just don’t have the mental firepower to be mathematicians.” What was I supposed to do? Hit the guy? I wanted to hit him.

MK: Right, right, but he says something that’s sort of pathetic almost to say.

CML: It is pathetic, but it basically told me a lot about how he sees the world, how he sees other people. I don’t want to take a course from a guy like that, and it offended me because I’d been a poor kid. I just came off a ranch. I’d been working all summer punching cows and there I was. I meet all these — there was a bunch of hippies in there —

MK: Right.

CML:  — basically New York hippies. Now, I wouldn’t call them hippies. These are basically affluent kids from New York. The place where I went was basically — that was the clientele, that was a student body. And they all were constantly talking, asking questions — bright for the most part, but I felt like a fish out of water. It was a culture shock for me. What is this? I’m used to being around a bunch of hay seeds. Cowboys — punching cows, going to the bar at night or whatever, drinking beer, and that was nothing like that. These kids were sitting around smoking pot, doing drugs, psychedelics —

MK: Now, just to clarify, when he says that not everyone has the power to be a mathematician — was this an admission of his own failure to explain his process, or is he calling you stupid?

CML: He was claiming that I didn’t have the intellectual firepower to be a mathematician, or at least that’s the way I interpreted it. And because I was used to being slighted in that way — I kind of grew up in a rough and tumble — if people feel intellectually threatened by you, you get a lot of this kind of thing up. So I assumed that that’s what was happening and I’ve never seen or heard anything after that that would lead me to believe anything different.

MK: So, you leave college, presumably you’re much more intelligent than anyone that you’re going to meet on the faculty or in the students. So you leave college — what is it about being a bar bouncer? What is it about that physical activity? Because presumably even without a college degree, you could have done some middling paper-pushing job and it probably wouldn’t have been very lucrative or fulfilling for you but, presumably you could have done something like that instead of a tough physical, potentially dangerous job, like your being a bouncer.

CML: I could have, but there are certain problems — for example, when I was in New York, I got a job in a grommet factory. It was Stimpson grommets. You had Grumman Aircraft there that got military defense contracts, and I think they were working on F-16’s at one point. And then there was Stimpson grommets, which produced aircraft rivets for airplanes. And I had this machine — the sound, the noise from this machine — wham! wham! wham! — no hearing protection, and no nothing was issued to anybody. I started losing my hearing and so forth, and I figured, Well, I can’t stand this anymore. I got to get out of here. I was about to leave, but I had a girlfriend, and she said, “No, I want you to stay.” So I figured, Okay, let me see if I can get another kind of job. So I went and took the civil service exam and was offered a job by the IRS. And that of course was a moral dilemma.

MK: That’s a fate worse than hell. (laughs)

CML: Exactly! How awful do I want to be as a person, you know? (laughs) And I decided that I needed to go home anyway, so I went back to Montana at that point. But basically then what I found out — I went back to New York when I was in my late twenties. That’s when I started doing the bar bouncing thing. I wasn’t making that much money. I was working for $40 a night, coming out of there bloody, with shirts ripped off my back. I couldn’t even pay for the shirts. So I figured, Okay, what I’ll do is I’ll take the civil service exam again. Now — I don’t want to sound insensitive, but at that point in New York, there was a protocol whereby you take the civil service exam, and if you are a minority, if you are non-white, you get 30 extra points.

MK: Well, there’s nothing insensitive in it and this is just a fact. It’s a fact of our law —

CML: They’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s called affirmative action of course. And when that happens — I’m applying to be, let’s say, a police officer, and all of these other guys, these non-white guys are looking also to be police officers. You learn that there’s a line of three thousand guys in front of you, so then you give up your idea of being a police officer, and you give up your idea of ever succeeding, getting a job on the basis of a civil service exam. Now, they do have white police officers in New York, but almost all those guys are connected. They’ve got some kind of uncle or acquaintance or somebody who’s on the police force that will put in a good word for them. I didn’t have anybody like that, and merit made no difference whatsoever. This is not a meritocracy we live in. You can take any number of these tests and outscore everybody else and get nothing and nowhere.

MK: And it’s especially true of civil service. It’s true in a lot of fields in the economy, but especially in civil service, that has been a pronounced issue for a long time. So, presumably during all this time though, you’re not just saying, as many people do when they leave college, whether they graduate or not, “Okay, well, that’s it. I’m never reading a book again. I’m done with all that book learning.” Something tells me that’s not your mindset, even as you’re doing these physical jobs.

CML: It certainly wasn’t. And I would go to a library, sales — and found a little bookstore that had some academic books in it, and just get whatever I could. I always had to, basically, read whatever I found. I couldn’t afford to order a book. Even back then, books were expensive. I couldn’t go to a bookstore and pay full price for a book, so I was constantly buying used books, which were — when they were textbooks  — used and therefore outmoded — the field advances, the book stays the same. But nevertheless, it’s got some of the stuff that I need in it and then I can absorb that. So that’s what I did. I just, basically, worked on my own ideas, trying to apply what I read in these books.

MK: Was there any field that attracted you in particular? I mentioned that I don’t have anything past high-school math, and even that I was pretty sketchy on. Math, physics, philosophy, theology?

CML: Well, when I was fourteen, I was working on a ranch in Wilsall, Montana, which is just across Bridgers from Bozeman. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bozeman, but anyway — I was punching cows, stacking hay, and irrigating on this ranch. I took two books with me. One of them was a book by Albert Einstein [Einstein, 1954] on the theory of relativity, and the other one was a book by Bertrand Russell [Russell, 1959] I would read these books — I was living in a covered wagon . They call it a sheep wagon these days, but literally — I’m not kidding — that’s what it was: a kerosene lamp in a sheep wagon, out in the middle of a field.

MK: Reading Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein —

CML: Reading Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, and it occurred to me, These two things really need to be put together. Then, once I decided that I started putting them together, and then I found out about Kurt Gödel and the undecidability theorem — and yes, absolutely. See, because reality isn’t just geometric, which is what Einstein thought it was, nor is it just linguistic. It’s a blend of the two. Russell saw it as being linguistic. Einstein saw it as being geometric. So I decided that reality must be logico-geometric, putting the two of them together, and of course, then I realized I’ve got to put together a theory — construct a theory in which reality is actually logico-geometric. That’s where the CTMU came from.

MK: The CTMU is the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. [Langan, 2002]

CML: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.

MK: This is your theory of everything.

CML: My theory of everything and it’s all in the name. If you take a good, close look at that, you’ve got a cognitive theory, and of course, you know a theory is a kind of language, theoretic language. Then you’ve got a cognitive-theoretic model. You’ve got a model, and then you’ve got a universe — you’ve got a language, you’ve got a universe, and then the model is the mapping between them. The CTMU says that those are all the same thing. All of those terms, all of those properties, are distributed everywhere over reality. Reality can have only one structure once you realize that and you implement it in theoretical form.

MK: So then, the question I asked you is kind of a stupid question, because I said which field was it that attracted you. And your answer is, “Yes.”

CML: (laughs) Well, I would have to say it would have to be logic and language, and then physics and mathematics. So those are the fields, and that’s what I thought I was conveying, but apparently I need to spell it out.

MK: You do! This is so important that you’re not just talking about this siloed aspect of thought, or this philosophy over here, language over here, math over here, physics over here, but you are presenting something that is universal.

CML: Correct. Absolute and universal. To get the absolute invariance, the absolute truths of reality, things that are true everywhere you go, no matter at what time you exist, or in what place you exist — it’s the same.

MK: So for those of us who have an IQ that’s a little bit lower than yours — I’ll admit it with no false modesty and no undue confidence.

CML: Well, IQ is not the last word on intelligence by any means. IQ is where you focus. You can focus, marshal all your intellectual energy, and focus it very tightly on one item that you’ve been presented with. Okay? Those tests contain items and you’re focusing on each one of those items. You’re not seeing anything else — and that’s what IQ is. But in addition to that depth and that focus, there is also aperture. Think of the mind as a kind of camera. What a lot of high IQ people have a lot of difficulty doing is widening their mental aperture. You’ve got to be flexible. You’ve got to be able to widen and narrow that aperture at will as you’re doing the depth perception too. So you’ve got the focus, depth of focus, the magnification as it were, plus the aperture. Most high IQ people, they have the magnification, but they don’t have the aperture.

MK: So then from the perspective — simultaneously, I suppose, both of depth and breadth here — if we’re talking about a theory of everything, the first question we have to establish: Does God exist?

CML: Yes.

MK: Simple as that.

CML: Reality has an identity. The identity is that as which something exists. As a matter of fact, when you say the word reality, you are naming an identity. You’re identifying something. (looks around and opens his arms) This. [referring to reality]

MK: I’m smiling because your answer on this is so beautiful. It just reminds me of Moses at the Burning Bush, and Moses at the Burning Bush says, “Who shall I tell the people that you are?” talking to God, and God says, “Tell them, ‘I am, that I am.’”

CML: That’s right.

MK: I am Identity Itself. I’m Being Himself.

CML: That’s exactly right and that’s what the CTMU says. It just comes up with the mathematical structure that you need to build a reality out of. So you come up with that identity and then you search it for its properties. Once you’ve built the preliminary framework, then you start deducing the properties of this identity and you find out that those properties match those of God as described in most of the world’s major religions.

MK: Just the theistic religions? I’m thinking of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or are you talking also of say —

CML: Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Vedism. Of course Hinduism and Buddhism have a God. Daoism — their central principle is the Way or the Dao, and they don’t see Dao as God. And then in Buddhism, of course, they are trying basically to achieve Śūnyatā or “emptiness.” A lot of Buddhists don’t even understand what that’s supposed to mean, but once again, there’s no God there — you can kind of read God implicitly. Some Buddhists — I’ve talked to Buddhists who actually think that there is a God in Buddhism of a sort. That concept of pure consciousness is what it is, and if you ask them, “Well, whose consciousness are you talking about?” they will point at themselves and say, “My consciousness.” In a way, they kind of attribute the existence of everything to themselves.

MK: I know a lot of people in Hollywood and Washington, DC, who do the same thing, actually.

CML: Well, that’s right and that’s why Buddhism is very fashionable among some of those people.

MK: (laughs) That’s a good point.

CML: When you look at what they’ve all got, you come down to the same thing. Everybody has the Dao or the Way — that’s the way reality works. Everybody has Śūnyatā, which is pure syntax — pure cognition with no instantiation, no content. Then you’ve got what the Abrahamic religions called God. It’s all the same thing. But — what are its properties? Are its properties such that you can deny the existence of God, or are its properties such that God definitely has to exist? The answer is God exists. Properties of the central substance and central principle of reality, those properties are attributed to God, including of course things like — you have the three O’s: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, but then you’ve also got consciousness — God has to be sentient.

MK: So we’re not just defining God out of existence. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, “God exists,” but they’ll give God such a weak and shallow definition that the God that they’re describing has no relation to the God that we conceive of. You’re saying God Himself is conscious and therefore personal?

CML: Yes. You can establish a personal relationship with God. We’re images of God. You know what an image is — it’s basically the product of a mapping. God maps himself into each human being. That’s a very personal thing that God is doing for us. And I don’t understand how anybody can say that it’s any different. We reflect the structure of the universe, each one of us. We’re carried by it, everything we do. We exist in a medium. What is that medium? Where did it come from? What holds it together? What is the unifying coherence, the source of coherence of that medium?

MK: Is your claim a pantheistic claim that God is the universe, or the universe is God, and that’s that? Or no — or is God outside of the universe and created —

CML: God is greater than — well, what is the universe?

MK: Damned if I know.

CML: Have you ever heard of the simulation hypothesis?

MK: Yes.

CML: Okay. Well, the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that the reality we see around us — physical reality — is simulated on some sort of an automaton or a computer.

MK: Yeah. Some aliens somewhere have just fooled us.

CML: Right, right, exactly — I’ll eat a piece of liquorice.

MK: (laughs) Before one launches into the simulation, one needs a little sustenance, you know.

CML: The idea is that you’ve got some kind of an automaton running. You’ve got a simulation running on it. And God — it’s more panentheistic. You know what panentheism is?

MK: I do. I think I do. That means that we are in God — let me know how I’ve gone wrong. We are in God and God is in us, and it is not merely that God in the creation are one and the same, but they are quite related. Is that something approaching panentheism?

CML: A little bit, yes. The idea is that you’ve got the physical universe that you see around you, but God is not confined to the physical universe. An ordinary pantheist thinks — assumes—that God is somehow confined to the universe, that there is just what we see around us and God is in every piece of it — God is distributed over it. But it’s a little bit more complex than that because this part of the universe that we see around us, cannot exist just by itself. Okay? There are certain things that it entails. And when you go into those entailments, that’s how you get to God. That’s how you get to the identity of reality. Now, to get back to the reality of Self-simulation, or at least that’s what I call it: Self­-simulation. [Langan, 2020] But to get back to the simulation hypothesis, we are living in the display of that simulation. In addition to the display, there is also a processing aspect, and God captures both of those things. He captures both the display and the processor.

MK: What do you mean? I hate to put it in —

CML: Well, I mean, okay — here’s the display. (looks around) You realize the display contains states. You see things, objects. States are static. That’s why they’re called states. Static. How do they change? Well, they have to be processed. Something has to be processing them, and in calculus, for example, those are tiny little infinitesimal intervals. But they’re not actually contained in the states themselves. They have a neighborhood, a little tangent space or what have you, where you can sort of draw little vectors that suggest that some kind of processing is going on, but the idea of being a state and being a process, those are two different things in the ordinary way of looking at it. It turns out that you can’t properly describe reality and causation at all, unless you put those things together somehow, and that’s what it takes God to do. Okay? God provides the processing functionality for your state. You have an internal state and an external state. You’re a material human being. To explain how that is changing through time and maintaining its coherence through time, even as it changes, that’s what you need God for.

MK: I certainly agree with that entirely. I might not be sophisticated enough to parse all of the quibbles that there might be, but broadly speaking as a Christian, so much of what you’re saying resonates as obviously true for me. The idea that, well, I’m a member of the body of Christ. The idea that God creates the world in this great act of love, this great act of charity.

CML: Self-love. Don’t forget you’re an image of God, so when loving Himself, God loves you, and you’re supposed to love God back.

MK: Right, and this ties into something like the Trinity, right? The idea that God is three persons in one divine unity. So all of this is making a lot of sense to me. So now, how do I make sense of consciousness?

CML: Well, ordinarily — you know what quantization is?

MK: You know I know the word. (smiles widely)

CML: You decide what the ultimate irreducible objects are, those are the quanta in terms of which your reason. It turns out that in order to quantize that theory that I was talking about — that theory of identity where you’ve got the display, and you’ve got the processor, and it’s handling both — it turns out that in order to handle both of those things, you need a certain kind of quantum. That quantum is called an identity operator. God is the identity, so obviously these little quanta, they’re doing things, they’re processing, so we can call them operators, right? They are identity operators. The identity operator, basically, takes input from the outside world, recognizes it, or accepts it using syntax, processes it, and then returns it to the world as an external state. So things come in, then they’re processed, there’s throughput — you could call that the subjective or internal state of the identity operator — and then it’s returned to the external universe.

MK: But are you attributing now —

CML: What I’m saying is that’s consciousness, and I’m saying that consciousness exists in every part of the universe, because those are the quanta.

MK: That’s what I’m asking. Are you telling me that this table is conscious?

CML: In that sense? Yes. Generically conscious, but it’s relying on our consciousness to do it. There’s levels of quanta. These are tertiary quanta. They’re all put together using physical localistic forces, but those are underdeterminative. They don’t fully determine what happens. Why? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example, tells you that the quantum rules are probabilistic, they don’t actually determine events. So what determines events? We do. We don’t know how we do it, but we do it. When everybody’s will is put together, we’re all creating the best possible universe we can for ourselves. And God is what harmonizes all of our different perspectives and makes things happen for all of us at the same time. And if we were doing things correctly, this would be the best of all possible worlds. Sadly however, we oftentimes make mistakes. And that’s what we have to get out of doing, but we can’t get out of doing it until we understand what reality is, what we are, and what the relationship between those two things is.

MK: Now you’ve mentioned two things that raise a new question for me. You mentioned this idea of simulation — just the simulation or Self-simulation — and you’ve mentioned us doing things. So then it would seem to me, we have to tackle the question, do we really do much of anything at all in the sense: do we have free will?

CML: Yes, we do.

MK: I’m glad to hear it. I always thought we did.

CML: Well, yes, we have to have free will. I was discussing with you earlier the idea of a fixed array — now, modern physics. Basically, you’ve got a bunch of quantum fields and superposition, and then those fields consist of little fluctuations, little quantum fluctuations, right? Where is the fixed array? We were talking about a manifold with a bunch of zero dimensional points, okay? Those two things are not compatible. Quantum field theory and that fixed array manifold, where you can parameterize all of the causal functions using the manifold: that doesn’t work. Those two things don’t fit together.

MK: When we were speaking about this earlier you put this into even more layman’s terms and I’ve somehow — it has already flown out of my head. Can you put that into more basic terms? What you’ve just said.

CML: But what is it you need to understand about this?

MK: Why are these two concepts you’re describing not reconcilable? What is the problem with these — ?

CML: I explained that to you already. Alright. It consists of zero dimensional points, limit points, or cuts. I told you what a Dedekind cut was, right? These limit points have zero extent. They’re exact locations, and that’s a cut. You’ve got something on one side of the point, and then you’ve got something on the other side of the point, and any line that you draw through the point itself is going to be cut by the point. So we call that a cut. Okay? And the cut is zero dimensional, which means that it has no extent at all. It’s an exact location. It’s precise. No extent. It’s not smeared out, okay? If you take all of those points and you add them together, you get zero. Because no matter how many times you add zero to itself, you just get zero. And because the manifold consists of those points, that’s what you have to do to find out the extent of the manifold. So, what this is telling you is that the manifold itself has zero extent. There’s nothing there. So the real manifold of classical physics is a paradoxical construct. Well, that’s why that doesn’t work with quantum field theory and the idea that things are quantum fluctuations and fields — as a matter of fact, that particular concept of the real manifold, that doesn’t work for anything at all. It’s a conceptual convenience. We can reason about reality in terms of it, and we can actually get to some very interesting conclusions using it, but it doesn’t work in the long run. Most causal functions of course are parameterized in terms of this manifold. In other words, you’ve got the x, y, and z axis, and the forces that exist, that cause things to happen, those forces are all directed along one of those axes. That’s what a force is. When you take away the points, those zero dimensional points, now, all of that disappears. The basis of causation has just fled the coop on you, right? Because you no longer have little points, the tails of the little vectors that point there, you can no longer parameterize your causal functions using those points and vectors. So what do you do to get causal functions? Well, it turns out you have to use something called advanced causation, and you combine that with ordinary retarded causation, and you get something else entirely. It’s called meta-causation in the CTMU. It’s referred to using two operations, one of which is called conspansion, and the other — sub-operation — which is called telic recursion.

MK: Because when we’re talking about free will — often the conversation, especially these days, becomes this sort of shallow discussion of, “Well, this caused this, and I’m going to describe a totally deterministic system, and so as a result of this causing this, causing this, causing this, you don’t have free will,” and you’re saying cause is actually more complicated than just — cause.

CML: That’s correct. In other words, talking about free will on those terms was otiose — means nothing. You can’t get anywhere with it. Reality is actually generative. It’s not just a fixed manifold. Everything is being created all the time. Not just our states — our states are being recreated, right? I can cross my legs. I can uncross my legs. That’s the changing state, but the medium around us is changing. When I look at you, I’m seeing Michael Knowles. I’m seeing you sitting there, but that means that I’m seeing your boundary. I’m seeing what distinguishes you from the external environment. There’s a medium around you. So I have to be regenerating that at the same time as I’m regenerating your state in my head. Okay? And when I say regenerating — there’s a reason I’m doing that — I could also say I’m recognizing Michael Knowles. I’m recognizing your state right now, but I’m also recognizing the state of the medium around you, because otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish you from the medium, and you wouldn’t exist at all.

MK: Right. Well, it’s sort of like with a little baby that has trouble recognizing the limits of things and recognizing what some individual object might be — the glass on the table — they have trouble distinguishing those things.

CML: Precisely. The baby has to learn to distinguish those boundaries, and it has to receive the right visual cues at the right age, so that it can actually learn how to do that.

MK: So now we’re at meta-causation. So what does meta-causation — how — ?

CML: Causation works from past to future. Meta-causation works from past to future and from future to past, in a closed loop, it’s called a conspansive cycle. Okay? So that’s basically what we have to do to quantization in order to make causality wor — and of course, when I say causality, I mean meta-causation. Because ordinary past-to-future causality parameterized by a fixed array — that doesn’t work.

MK: So I get past-to-future. This seems pretty simple. I pick up the glass of water. I put it over here, and now I remember two seconds ago that water was over here, and then I caused it to go over there. So how do you cause something to go from the future to the past?

CML: It can’t go anywhere unless there’s some place for it to go. That’s all I’m saying. In the universe, everything changes with time. In the theory of relativity, for example, all the points are events and that means that there’s a time parameter involved. So when you take that glass and you move it from there to there, you think that there’s a point right there where you’re going to move that glass. That’s false. The point to which you are going to move that glass is actually in the future. When you pick up that glass, it’s still in — you understand what I’m saying?

MK: Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And then getting back to God. Yes, we’re always trying to get back to God. God is outside of time and space.

CML: God distributes over time and space, and there’s some left over. Time and space is static. It’s a display. Imagine that you’re a little homunculus inside a computer display, like The Matrix, for example. Okay? God not only distributes over that, but there’s a whole other domain where God exists, and that’s the processing domain. That’s the non-terminal domain in the CTMU. We’re in the terminal domain. Right? And most physicists when they try to reason about the terminal domain, they reason under physical confinement: “Well, I can only look at physics, and I have to use what I know about physics, what I can observe about physics, to explain everything else that I explain.” So they have that kind of explanatory closure going right there.

MK: So speaking of this non-terminal domain. In a really basic question — I’m not going to ask you if I’m going to go to Heaven or Hell, but will I go to either Heaven or Hell?

CML: You will persist after you die. Where you go, depends on who Michael Knowles really is (both laugh) and you would know that better than anyone.

MK: Yeah, I hope I know that better than — but you’re telling me, I’m going somewhere.

CML: Yes.

MK: You’re confident of that? I don’t just evaporate. I don’t just turn into oblivion.

CML: Well, you can. If you displease God, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. God is going to cut you off and He is going to say, “I can’t see him anymore.” He’s going to turn away from you and then you won’t be able to reunite. Salvation will be impossible for you because salvation means that God has got to pull you back into Himself. But God doesn’t want to see you anymore. He doesn’t even know you exist. He knows your physical body is there, but He’s not interested anymore because you hate Him. You deny His existence, you offend Him, so He’s not going to look at you, right? So now what happens? Well, you’re dead. You still want to live. There’s something in you that still desperately wants to live, so it’s still going to be there. What happens now? Well, you try to create your own world for yourself, but if you’re a bad person, an evil person, what kind of world is that going to be? It’s going to be an evil world, and that’s what we call — Hell.

MK: This is what John Milton says in the mouth of Satan. He says, “The mind is its own place, and it can make a Hell of Heaven, or Heaven a Hell.”1 [paraphrase]

CML: Now you got it.

MK: It all reminds me of Dante, also. This idea of God turning away. At the very deepest part of hell is Satan frozen in a lake of ice of his own making because of the flapping of his own wings, because he’s apart from the warmth of God.

CML: Precisely.

MK: Okay.

CML: That’s the way it has to work.

MK: So we’ve gotten through death, judgment, Heaven and Hell, free will, and God.

CML: Not completely. There’s a lot more to be said.

MK: And we still have some time. I mean, fortunately on my usual show, there is about thirty seconds to come to any conclusion about anything, and thankfully I am not bringing Chris Langan into Nashville to talk for ten minutes. This is going to be a much longer discussion. So — for this discussion, would you like a cigar?

CML: (laughs) Sure, I haven’t smoked a cigar in a long time.

MK: Oh, excellent. You know, the body is a temple. The temple needs incense.

CML: Back in the day, I used to enjoy a cigar every now and then.

(CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS)

CML: Good cigar.

MK: I’m glad you like it. This is one of my favorite cigars that’s come out. You know, if you were on the Joe Rogan show, they would offer you something a little stronger, but (Chris laughs) we’re going to keep it to tobacco on this show, I think.

CML: I think I’ve seen a couple of — yeah, I’ve seen the Rogan show a couple of times. He was talking about some kind of drugs. At that point in his career, I think that’s all he was talking about.

MK: (laughs) Did you ever get into drugs? I’m not saying that just because you were around bars in New York, but even the drugs that everyone says expand your mind, and anything like that?

CML: Well, you couldn’t really grow up in the era when I grew up, around the kind of people I was surrounded with, without trying some drugs — I don’t have a substance abusive tendency in my body. I just don’t have any bad habits except for this. (reaches for liquorice)

MK: (laughs) This is again liquorice and candy.

CML: Oh man, I love that stuff. It’s addictive.

MK: (laughs) It is.

CML: But I have to hide it from myself. I don’t have any in the house right now.

MK: So you never — because I would always have people tell me, especially in college, they’d say, “Michael, you have to drop acid. You have to smoke this. You have to take mushrooms. It’s going to expand your mind,” and I thought, My mind — my brain, such as it is, is pretty much all I got. I’m not exactly the captain of the football team, and if some drug messes up my brain, I’m sunk.

CML: That’s correct. But of course, what they say is that some of these medications can actually be good for you in terms of — you may have certain things, certain mental routines that are destructive and that aren’t good for you that can be interdicted by psychedelics, for example.

MK: What’s your take on it?

CML: My take is that could very well be true. You know, the psychedelics could open up a gap between your temporal consciousness and your non-terminal consciousness, right? Your mind is an extended stratified thing. We’re just using our terminal consciousness right now, but there are other aspects to your consciousness. You can actually get certain kinds of insights and communications if you just open up a gap. You understand? Let them come in and fill the gap and then you can see them as they would ordinarily —

MK: So the things that people see when they’re on psychedelics — I usually write them off and I tell people, “You are just hallucinating,” but you’re saying maybe that’s not all it is. They might be seeing something real.

CML: Well, once again, what is reality? Is reality just stuff out there. No, reality has a mental aspect, right? And once you admit that basically everything has a metal aspect, then of course what’s going on in your mind is real. It takes on a kind of reality. It’s not the same as physical reality. It is nevertheless real.

MK: Are angels and demons real?

CML: Yes — yes.

MK: I think so too. Is there a fear that if you take some of these drugs, you might be letting in the wrong guys.

CML: That’s a problem, isn’t it? And that’s a problem that I think a lot of people have encountered. You have to be a certain kind of person to be able to handle these drugs and not be sucked under by them, okay? Because once your mind is messed with in that way — it’s weakened, you’re not exactly in control anymore — something else can come in and grab it. And if you open up that gap that I was talking about, what can come into that gap might not be good for you.

MK: God is real. Angels are real. Demons are real. Is the Devil real?

CML: Oh yes. Yes. Well, it has to be. We were talking about Michael Knowles being surrounded by the medium — you’ve got a boundary. Well, God has a boundary too. He’s got a very tight boundary. He’s a perfect — He’s perfect. He can’t take anything resembling imperfection. He can’t take it into Himself because that would be a contradiction, okay? So, God needs an antithesis in order to be properly defined. What is that antithesis? Anti-God or Satan. So it definitely exists. Now, Satan isn’t coherent because he basically hates existence. Nevertheless, he gains coherence through human beings, through secondary telors as they’re called in the CTMU. In other words, Satan can nucleate power structures, for example, things like corporations and governments, where you’ve got people in there that can be acquired as resources. And there’s a kind of skeleton, a corporate organization, a governmental organization, that’s holding them together, holding them in place, that can be exploited by Satan.

MK: So you’re not describing Manichaeism. You’re not saying there’s God and the opposite of God, and there’s some maybe equivalence between the two. You’re saying that God — obviously there is an antithesis — Christ has an anti-Christ — but it’s incoherent. Are you saying that the Devil sort of lacks substance, that’s why he needs the humans?

CML: I’m saying the Devil lacks coherence. Coherence is what brings everything into superposition with itself. In other words, it allows — this is going to sound a little bit paradoxical — something to communicate non-locally with itself. All of its possible states are in superposition. They exist all at once. And this is pretty much inescapable.

(…)

References

Selected articles and papers

Langan, C. M. (1989) The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox. Noesis, № 44.

Langan, C. M. (1999) Introduction to the CTMU. Ubiquity, Vol. 1, № 1.

Langan, C. M. (2002) The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory. Princeton, MO: Mega Foundation Press. Originally published in Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Double Issue, Vols. 1.2-3.

Langan, C. M. (2003) Cheating the Millennium: The Mounting Explanatory Debts of Scientific Naturalism. In W. A. Dembski (Ed.) Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.

Langan, C. M. (2017) An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 13, № 2, pp. 313-330.

Langan, C. M. (2018a) Metareligion as the Human Singularity. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 14, № 1, pp. 321-332.

Langan, C. M. (2018b) The Metaformal System: Completing the Theory of Language. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 14, № 2, pp. 207-227.

Langan, C. M. (2019) Introduction to Quantum Metamechanics (QMM). Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 15, № 1, pp. 265-300.

Langan, C. M. (2020) The Reality Self-Simulation Principle: Reality is a Self-Simulation. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 16, № 1, pp. 466-486.

Other authors

Descartes, R. (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited by J. Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Einstein A. (1920) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.

Einstein A. (1954) Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers.

Frankl, V. A. (1959) Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Gödel, K. (1962) On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Translated by B. Meltzer. New York: Basic Books.

Russell, B. (1959) The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Russell, B. (1961) History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. London: Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Internet sources

At the time the book went to press, the following links worked.

Aristotle (350 B.C.E) The Internet Classics Archive.

Milton J. (1674) Paradise Lost. Book One. Poetry Foundation.

Langan, C. M. (2022) High Strangeness at the Daily Wire. Chris Langan’s Ultimate Reality.

Plato (1946) The Republic. [written 360 B.C.E] The Internet Classics Archive. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.

Plotinus (1952) The Six Enneads. [written 250 A.C.E.] The Internet Classics Archive. Translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page.

Thomas Aquinas (2020) Summa Theologiae. [written between 1265 and 1273] Aquinas Institute, Inc.

Publisher’s note

On April 20, 2022, the Mega Foundation Patreon page was deleted, along with Chris Langan’s very popular CTMU Patreon page. This was done without warning. In fact, there were no violations or notices at either page. No discernable reason was given for the deplatforming, and no material was identified as having violated community standards. Patreon retained all donations and did not refund patrons. Chris Langan described these illegal actions on Facebook and Substack.

***

May 03, 2022

Question: Were you banned [from Patreon] or was this a sudden decision?

Answer: All of our pages – both mine and the Mega Foundation’s – were removed suddenly and without warning.

I requested an explanation. Someone from the Patreon “Trust & Safety Team” wrote that on another platform (not Patreon itself), there was allegedly a “violation of community standards” involving “hate speech” and the “stereotyping of protected communities”.

Pointing out that banksters and political whores are not ordinarily considered “protected communities”, I requested the name of the platform and the offending comment. No response.

I requested that my unpublished content (scheduled and draft folders containing important writing on the CTMU) be returned to me. No response. There was a considerable amount of material, and it seems to have been permanently deleted.

It seems that a considerable amount of money may have been taken by Patreon for itself.

Do not, under any circumstances, trust Patreon as anything but an enemy of truth, intellectual freedom, and freedom of expression.

If what Patreon did to us is not considered a crime, it certainly should be. It’s the worst show I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet, ever.

The One True Ontology

May 02, 2019

During one of our group chats (Sunday, 2/10/2019), one participant asked me why the universe has to be intelligent. I received the distinct impression that as for himself (and whatever acadummies or “lay experts” may have had his ear), this participant thought otherwise.

Let’s go over this again. A comprehensive theory of reality must cover every part and aspect of reality. In particular, it must cover (1) the entity “reality”; (2) whatever it is that bestows existence on this entity – i.e., that operator which attributes the property “reality” to the object “reality”; and (3) the coupling operation itself. But this theory must also be monic, for otherwise, it would be dualistic or pluralistic and introduce absolute and therefore totally unexplained separations between the entity and the operator that could not be bridged (e.g., as Cartesian dualism, by partitioning reality as res cogitans and res extensa, introduces an absolute separation between mind and matter that cannot be bridged, which is why so many people now deplore the philosophical and scientific shortcomings of Cartesian dualism).

More generally, the separations between ultimate constituents in any non-monic, pluralistic theory cannot be bridged, as there is nothing of which they might consist beyond that which they are allegedly “separating”. It follows that a comprehensive theory of reality can make no absolute distinction between object, attribute, and attribution (1, 2, and 3 enumerated above); they all consist of the same essential “metasubstance”, namely, reality construed 3 ways: intensionally (as an attribute), extensionally (as an object of that attribute), and operationally or spacetime-relationally (as the coupling between the attribute and the object). In the CTMU, this 3-way equivalence is called “triality”.

So basically, we have a closed (self-attributive) system whose own existence requires the existence of nothing outside itself. In its perfect self-containment, this level of reality is “ultimate”; nothing outside it is needed by it or even intelligible to it, and every other intelligible kind of reality – that of matter, ideas, thought processes, you name it – must be carried by it and expressed in terms of it. In CTMU terms, the operations by which ultimate reality self-sufficiently identifies itself for itself in terms of itself include those old CTMU standbys conspansion and telic recursion, together comprising a generative metacausal identity mapping called mu-morphism (of which still more could be written, but that will suffice for now).

In the CTMU, intelligence is basically the capacity for self-identification. It thus includes the capacity for conspansion (a self-dual coupling of self-potentiation and self­­-actualization) and telic recursion, the “metacausal” selective process which links states in useful patterns that “complete causation” given its underdetermination by the general formulation of conspansion alone. Useful to what or whom, and for what purpose? We should all know the answer to this by now: useful to itself for its own primary (regressive, idempotently defined) “purpose”, namely, Self-identification in passive and (dual) active senses. Intelligence belongs to ultimate reality, and it also belongs to us insofar as we are embedded in and carried by ultimate reality.

Active self-identification is called “self-configuration”. In the CTMU, this process is generative; it actually creates something that did not previously exist, thus mirroring the ontic self-identification of ultimate reality, which we may call the “ontic identity” (a self-attributive / self-modeling identity operator). It follows that the universe is intelligently self-configuring. Because self-configuration is the creation of new states by the attributive and interpretative coupling of attributes and values thereof, i.e. by the “modeling” of simple and complex attributes in extensional reality, the universe is coherently and intelligently self-modeling. And this, you see, is what is special about human beings: they are images of the ontic identity which both mirror and facilitate its overall intelligence or self-modeling capacity. Conspansive telic recursion and its associated bells and whistles is how the universe economically and efficiently determines its own evolution just as its profound self-containment requires it to do.

There is an older concept that resembles what I have just described. It is called “Prime Mover” or the “Self-causing Cause”. Obviously, this entity is idempotent under causal regression; in order for it to make sense, causation must be stratified into higher and higher orders of attributive coupling of arbitrary depth and extent. This stratification is mirrored by the “tower of metalanguages”; beginning at the object level of concrete tangible reality, a first-order object-language L describes and controls the object universe U; a metalanguage M controls the attributive coupling of the object language L to the object-universe U; a higher-level metalanguage M′ controls the attribution of the meta­language M to the metauniverse or “metaobject domain” consisting of first-order L | U couplings, and so on.

The reader will notice that all of the terms used above are recursively defined, i.e., comprise a set of interlocking definitions. And it is this interlocking set of definitions that comprises the ontic identity, which thus takes the form of a language. But of course, we’re not talking about just any language; we’re talking about the logically idempotent metacausal language M, previously described as an “intrinsic (trialic) ontic language”. To call something intrinsic, e.g. “intrinsic geometry”, is simply to call it self-defined (self-calling, recursively defined in terms of its own objects and properties); it is essentially “self-similar” in the sense that it is composed entirely of itself. So that’s really what the CTMU is: it is the comprehensive, unadulterated story of a reality which is composed of itself and bears self-recognized attributes assigned to itself by itself through secondary telors, including human beings.

In other words, we have a language, or complex attribute, that describes an ultimate, ontically closed system whose own existence requires the existence of nothing outside itself. This system and language is called the CTMU, aka Logos, aka God. Logico-mathematically speaking, it is a done deal, and has been for years. While I hate to seem immodest, honesty requires that the situation be described something like this: If every single influential scientist, philosopher, and so-called “metaphysician” in academia were to disagree with anything I’ve written in any description of the CTMU, they could all be squashed by one fall of my foot.

Don’t like it? Then why don’t you try arguing with yourself about it? For example, you could say that reality is dualistic after all, with nothing in common between your two ultimate substances, which are therefore totally unrelated and can’t be in the same theory. Or you could say that there are really three ultimate substances, one of them being the medium or space in which the other two ultimate substances are separated, in which case they have this medium or space in common and therefore aren’t really ultimate after all. Or, again in bold defiance of the usual meaning of “ultimate”, you could assert that ultimate reality can depend on something outside itself for its existence, in which case ultimacy belongs not to it, but to the outside factor on which it depends. Or you could even say that reality “just exists” without further explanation, thereby aborting the explanatory imperative of science, philosophy, and theology along with any meaningful concept of being or causation. And onward you can go, hopping from ruse to paradox like a badly confused bullfrog.

Now, I can’t force anyone to acknowledge any of this reasoning, and neither can logic. People are free to “think” illogically until they run afoul of some set of physical facts which critically conforms to the logic and makes life extremely hard on violators. In fact, people have been thinking illogically about some things since the dawn of history, much to our detriment. But I hereby submit that if you are capable of shrugging off these facts, then you should find something other than the overall structure of reality about which to reason and talk. Ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics simply aren’t your bag, and it’s only a matter of time before logic – in the hands of someone who really knows how to use it – yanks your shorts down around your ankles and laughs.

Yes, the truth sometimes hurts. But one can’t apologize for it, because truth is its own defense. It does, after all, have its own dignity to protect.

Is Reality Arbitrary?

July 28, 2019

Here’s a question that was recently asked by someone in the Facebook CTMU Group.

Question: How arbitrary is reality, particularly at its origins?

Answer: As implied by ontic closure, ultimate reality is its own origin.

[Proof: If something is not real on any level of existence, then it does not exist at all and therefore cannot impact that which does exist. On the other hand, if something can affect or relate / be relevant to reality, then it must exist on some level, in which case it is real. This applies even to potential; as there is nothing outside of reality that is sufficiently real to serve as the origin or generative potential of reality, reality must include not only its own actualization, but its own origin and ontic potential. Reality is self-originating, self-potentializing, and self-actualizing.]

Any meaningful definition of God as the ultimate source of being and omnipresent Creator of reality requires that there be nothing deeper or more extensive than God. In other words, God can only be defined as Ultimate Reality, the Absolute, the metaphysical source of reality as we know it. This is a powerful constraint with respect to which God is not arbitrary, but the distributed origin of existence and therefore totally inescapable. As necessitated by ontic closure and developed through the CTMU Telic Principle, God is the source of God’s own existence, and in fact of everything real.

Are there additional constraints that prevent the Self­configuration of God – the structure of reality – from being completely arbitrary? Of course. These teleological, global existential constraints, encapsulated in the Telic Principle, are just the most general properties of God Himself … eternal properties of God identified by God and for God independently of space and time, which depend on them. Characterizing existence in general, they are wholly identifiable with ultimate reality – i.e., the Will of God – and therefore non-arbitrary.

God is totally Self-contained, perfectly Self-sufficient. He is pure recursion, pure Self-constitution. Without external medium, occupying no external extent, God contextualizes and gives rise to God, closing on Himself, alpha on omega. Time and space are merely internal dimensions on which He projects Himself in parallel through His self-images. God must Self-configure as Logos, the CTMU Metaformal System, in order to Self-identify, and nothing that well-structured could possibly be arbitrary.

In short, there are inescapable, unavoidable, non­-arbitrary criteria for existence in general, they are teleological, and they are identified with God, by God, for God. As for particular details of Self-regenerative temporal structure, they must be conducive to unbroken existence, which means self-reinforcing, which implies self-intelligibility. The criteria for existential intelligibility are clearly set forth in the CTMU.

Given satisfaction of the general teleological (CTMU) criteria for existence, freedom and variety are in principle unlimited. Generically, this freedom is that of God Himself; it is bounded only by His Self-invariance and can be used for His refinement and Self-edification. But locally, in a given world existing within Ultimate Reality, it belongs to the secondary telors which bind telesis in God’s name. As lower, more localized levels of identity, secondary telors bind telesis not just for themselves, but for the highest level of identity as its reflexive Self-images.

The Greek philosopher Plato was a student of Socrates, whose name is said to derive from the Greek word soter, meaning “savior”. The Middle Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–50 AD), known for having formed a synthesis of Greek philosophy and Judaism, also wrote about a pair of opposing principles called soteria, a principle of self-actualization and psychic integration which guides us toward truth, virtue, wisdom, and genuine happiness, and phthorá, a disintegrative force which tends to disrupt, disorder, and confuse, disharmonizing thoughts, passions, desires, and appetites to the point at which soteria is thwarted.

This eternal opposition is strongly recurrent across time and space. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the opposition of soteria and phthorá is expressed in the story of Osiris, symbolizing the integrated psyche, and Typhon the storm god, symbolizing phthorá. In Christianity, the figure of Christ personifies soteria, and Satan – the Deceiver, the Adversary – represents phthorá. In the CTMU, this opposition is reflected in the metaphysical logic of divine Self-­identification, and thus in the self-identification of secondary telors.

Secondary telors that bind telesis consistently with teleology, obediently to the Will of God and the general conditions for existence as embodied in the Telic Principle, are consistent with existence and therefore eligible for soteric retraction. That is, they are fit for continued existence when their bodies expire and their tertiary constituents are unbound, accompanying the retraction of secondary-level identity to a higher and ultimately the primary level. Having come from God and remained true to God, they remain with God.

Woe betide the rest. Unretractable, confined forever within the instant of secondary-tertiary uncoupling, trapped in the dark warrens of their misspent lives, they must be reduced and their identities torturously unbound.

(…)

References

Articles and papers

Langan, C. M. (1989) The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox. Noesis, № 44.

Langan, C. M. (1999) Introduction to the CTMU. Ubiquity, Vol. 1, № 1.

Langan, C. M. (2002) The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory. Princeton, MO: Mega Foundation Press. Originally published in Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Double Issue, Vols. 1.2-3.

Langan, C. M. (2003) Cheating the Millennium: The Mounting Explanatory Debts of Scientific Naturalism. In W. A. Dembski (Ed.) Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.

Langan, C. M. (2017) An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 13, № 2, pp. 313-330.

Langan, C. M. (2018a) Metareligion as the Human Singularity. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 14, № 1, pp. 321-332.

Langan, C. M. (2018b) The Metaformal System: Completing the Theory of Language. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 14, № 2, pp. 207-227.

Langan, C. M. (2019) Introduction to Quantum Metamechanics (QMM). Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 15, № 1, pp. 265-300.

Langan, C. M. (2020) The Reality Self-Simulation Principle: Reality is a Self-Simulation. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 16, № 1, pp. 466-486.

Other authors

Einstein A. (1920) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.

Feynman R. (1967) The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein L. (1933) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., Ltd.

Internet sources

At the time the book went to press, the following links worked.

[1] Association for Psychological Science, “Why Delaying Gratification is Smart: A Neural Link Between Intelligence and Self-control”

Related: Sage Journals, “Individual Differences in Delay Discounting: Relation to Intelligence, Working Memory, and Anterior Prefrontal Cortex”

[2] Academia.edu, “Gödel’s Ontological Proof”

[3] Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, “The Metaformal System: Completing the Theory of Language”

[4] Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, “Metareligion as the Human Singularity”

[5] “Glenn Greenwald to RT | “Silicon Valley oligarchs have no accountability’”

[6] Bible Gateway, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12, New International Version

[7] Bible Gateway, Matthew 5:33-37, New International Version

[8] Stanford University, “An Introduction to Philosophy”

[9] Technocracy News & Trends, “Military Is Developing ‘Cognitive Warfare’ Weapons”

[10] The Mises Institute, “The Great Reset, Part VI: Plans of a Technocratic Elite”

[11] Academia.edu, “Mental Consciousness – Truth or Illusion?”

Publisher's Note

FAQs About Reality contains Chris Langan’s answers to questions posted on Quora during the years he was active, 2016-2019. Langan was banned from Quora for his conservative worldview and uncompromising debate style. Although Langan never broke Quora’s rules or violated its terms of service, he was summarily deplatformed without warning. All of his posts were deleted or orphaned. With the help of members of the Mega Foundation and CTMU Community, the majority of his work on Quora was preserved in this volume.

G

GOD

Conformance to logic

85. God is who He says He is. He created the universe and us. What right do we have to expect Him to conform to our ideas of who He is or should be?

We may expect God to conform to our ideas of Who and What God should be precisely when they have achieved cognitive emergence in logical form, thus reversing the mapping by which God originally implanted them in the human mind. (Despite its concision and explicit invocation of logic, this answer is fully consistent with the New Testament and compatible scriptures.)

In other words, God does indeed tell us Who and What He is, and He does it with logic, which provides the only general means of verifying the message. This convergence of theological information and verification is no accident; unverifiable theological information is ultimately pointless, and God always has a point.

Obviously, any denial of what God tells us with logic is trivially false, and the deniers are illogical by definition. Such people and their opinions may be safely ignored for theological purposes.

May 9, 2017

Defining God

86. What is God according to Chris Langan? What does he think about the established religions such as Christianity or Islam?

God, best understood as Ultimate Reality, has (supertautological) structure which implies certain properties which are consistent with the definitions of God that occur in major world religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Simultaneously modeling the main scriptural components of these religions in this structure makes them theologically and ontologically consistent.

Theological and ontological consistency is limited to just those religions which can be modeled in this way.

January 12, 2018

Endomorphic images

87. In the CTMU, human beings are seen as endomorphic images of the mind of God. Can this mapping be described? We are very constrained local entities, so how does it work?

In the CTMU, the global identity of reality is explicitly stratified, and distributed morphisms are utilized. So (1) one needs to be very clear on the level of identity to which any given statement or mathematical symbol refers, and (2) one needs to allow for the distributed nature of certain morphisms, where by distributed we mean that the morphism applies to each point in a topological point set.

Notice the implication: the use of distributed morphisms implies that each point of any topological space subject to distributed morphism has internal structure. In the CTMU, this internal structure is called syntax; hence, the points are called syntactic operators.

Some syntactic operators cannot support full isomorphism to the global identity; hence, they are subject to syntactic restriction, and isomorphism is limited to some proper part or aspect of global syntax. But the points in which the syntax of the global identity is fully imaged are not restricted in this way. It follows that their syntax is isomorphic to global syntax. (This does not imply isomorphism with respect to external state.)

And now for a bit of advice. Typically, questions like this come from people who have not bothered to read available material on the CTMU. They are looking for fast answers, they are often confused, and many of them dislike work so much that they don’t even review the answers I’ve already posted on Quora. Unfortunately, this gives others the opportunity to post false or misleading answers, and Quora is sometimes very lax in letting such people misinform its readers.

Readers are therefore cautioned against blindly accepting any answer for any CTMU question on its face unless it comes from me or someone else whose knowledge of the theory can be verified by checking it against the available material, especially if it emanates from someone who has been guilty of misinterpreting and/or badmouthing the CTMU in the past.

September 28, 2018

Logical theology

88. What is logical theology? How does it relate to Chris Langan and the CTMU?

Logical theology consists of the theological (God-related) implications of the CTMU, a metaphysical formulation of logic.

Others have used this term to describe strains of theology that conform to their ideas of logic. However, (1) “ideas of logic” often deviate from any well-defined logico-mathematical structure known to logicians and mathematicians; (2) it is hard to derive theological implications from standard logic; and (3) problems arise when trying to employ standard logic on the metaphysical level of discourse required by theology.

Properly applied to theology, the CTMU solves problems 1–3.

May 23, 2018

Omnipotence

89. Do you accept that any god could not be omnipotent due to the logical paradoxes this creates?

In order to infer divine non-omnipotence from, for example, the paradoxical assertion that an omnipotent God could create a rock too heavy for God to lift, one must be able to show that God Himself is not responsible for the operative constraints on His power, as these take precedence over God’s self-imposed “inability” to lift the rock.

In other words, if God has tied His own hands by establishing prior constraints or commitments that prevent Him from lifting a given rock (or doing anything else), then the real measure of His power is the establishment of these prior constraints, and the real measure of His will is His own refusal to break them.

Human examples are easy to find. E.g., it would be misleading and ridiculous to accuse a smoker who successfully forbids himself to smoke one more cigarette of “lacking willpower”. In fact, willpower is exactly what such a person demonstrates.

As long as God Himself is responsible for any limitations on His own power, including even the structure of logic, this remains entirely consistent with divine omnipotence.

August 15, 2018

Proving God’s existence

90. Why is the physical world the best proof of God?

If you’re talking about the physical world alone, it is not the “best proof” of the existence of God. The reason is very simple but often overlooked: proof is a two-way street with a sender on one end and receivers on the other, and many receivers are defective. In particular, those who disbelieve in God typically attribute the physical world to a cosmogonic form of “randomness” (with respect to origination) and cite “logic” as their pretext for rejecting any claim to the contrary. They can receive no information through this blockage.

The physical world is indeed the (partial) basis of proof, but must be combined with logic and mathematics to constitute a proof that defeats the fake, hand-waving sort of “logic” brought to bear against it by atheists and materialists.

[date unknown]

91. Can Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) prove God’s existence by logic?

The answer is yes, and it is completely unequivocal. This is obviously not the forum in which to argue about it, as out of the 10 answers which have thus far been posted, at least 8 are saying no for entirely the wrong reasons.

If you want a meaningful debate about this, my advice would be to find a widely recognized authority on the subject and get him to express an opinion on the matter under his real name in the full light of day, with his reputation on the line just as mine is. That way, he or she has something to lose as well as something to gain, and I have something to gain as well as something to lose (that’s how fair debates are conducted).

Examples: Richie Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, or someone else of that ilk. (Your problem, of course, will be that these people have been ducking me for years, and don’t want me to publicly mop the floor with them. Which I can certainly do.)

May 7, 2017

92. How does Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) prove the existence of a god?

The CTMU proves the existence of God by (1) explicating the deep structure of reality, and (2) showing that this structure possesses attributes conventionally ascribed to God.

No qualified and well-reputed physicist, philosopher, mathematician, linguist, theologian, or other professional has ever demonstrated that the CTMU contains a single error, or that it is not what I’ve just said it is, or that it fails to do what I’ve just said it does. In all likelihood, at least part of the reason for this is that no qualified, well-reputed professional academic in any relevant field is intellectually capable of doing so and making it stick, at least under his or her real name in the full light of day.

After nearly 30 years since the first papers were published on this subject, sincere and well-motivated readers may consider the CTMU and its implications to be written in stone. Further clarifications will be forthcoming.

(Papers on the CTMU have, by the way, been published in peer-reviewed journals. It is hard to say why any CTMU critic would deny this. But two fairly obvious reasons are that the critic recognizes only a select subset of journals in specific fields – in a word, “academic snobbery” – or that the critic is simply trying to conceal his or her inability to understand the content, in which case he or she should not be making negative comments about it on social media sites.)

May 11, 2017

93. Would an atheist believe in God if he/she found proofs beyond a doubt of God’s existence?

No, and the reason is very clear: disbelief is a cognitive filter. In order to recognize a proof of the existence of God, one’s mind must be open to the possibility, and true atheists have closed their minds to any such intellectual content. Thus, they cannot “find” (or recognize) such a proof in the first place.

I have thirty years of relatively high-profile experience with this. The minds of most atheists are cognitive wind-up toys which absolutely cannot be swayed by any theory, model, or form of reasoning which even smells like it might confute their (anti)theological preconceptions. Wind them up by mentioning the possible existence of God, and their minds instantly spiral into an infinite loop.

The underlying conceptual mechanics are also very clear. Real atheists (as opposed to so-called “agnostic atheists” or agnostics with mere atheistic leanings) implicitly or explicitly subscribe to “metaphysical naturalism”, a self-reinforcing (and therefore academically dominant) worldview which oxymoronically excludes the metaphysical from its arbitrary physicalistic conception of reality and thus precludes any meaningful (metaphysical) definition of God. Obviously, the existence of X cannot be proven to anyone who refuses to let X be properly defined.

So you see, reasoning with true atheists on this matter is simply not in the cards. The only “atheist” who could possibly be convinced of the existence of God is one who unwittingly falls somewhere short of true atheism.

July 19, 2017

94. Is God really there? How can you prove it?

Proof is a logical operation. It follows that there is just one way to prove the existence of God: using logic. Unfortunately, the things with which standard logic ordinarily deals do not include God, Who resists being captured by it (because, in effect, God is by definition the One Who spans all that exists and thus does all the “capturing”). Therefore, logic must be adapted to the task in question, and reformulated on the metaphysical level of discourse. Proving the existence of God thus requires a system called the CTMU, which incorporates the required metaphysical formulation of logic.

[date unknown]

95. How does CTMU prove that God exists?

The CTMU proves that God exists by providing a valid framework for the overall structure of reality, and showing that this structure exhibits properties traditionally attributed to God.

Note: I see that someone is requesting a definition of God. In the CTMU, God is defined as Ultimate Reality, with a recursive base consisting of perceptual reality (the physical world) plus its regularities (patterns). “Ultimate” means, roughly, “idempotent with respect to containment and explanation”. This has been the CTMU definition of God for decades.

(Those with questions about the theory might try reading up a little, especially if you’re capable of handling appreciable abstraction – abstraction is the name of the game when it comes to metaphysical reasoning.

It may be hard to believe, but some people really can’t handle much of it at all. This evidently includes many people who use Quora, even some who claim to respect “science”.)

July 11, 2018

96. Is it possible to use science to prove or disprove the existence of God?

There are two kinds of science: mathematical and empirical.

The only statements that can be proven in the empirical sciences are (1) observation statements about things that can be directly observed with replication; and (2) statements that can be logically deduced from replicable observation statements.

Where God is defined as omnipresent, He cannot be directly observed in His entirety; and because nothing that is not omnipresent qualifies as God, God’s existence cannot be empirically verified using limited powers of observation. Because our powers of observation are limited not only by the cosmic horizon, but by the limits of quantum measurement expressed in terms of Heisenberg uncertainty, God’s presence goes beyond our observational limitations on the macroscopic and microscopic scales; His extent exceeds our ability to perceive it. Due to Hume’s Problem of Induction, which is related to the horizon and uncertainty problems, His existence cannot be logically deduced from limited observation statements alone.

This rules out the empirical sciences, leaving only the mathematical sciences to consider. But here we arrive at another set of problems, including the form of dualism whereby statements deduced from mathematical axioms cannot be globally attributed to any incompletely observable external universe to which those axioms might hypothetically apply. Again, the problem of induction rears its head; that the axioms of a theoretical language are found to apply in any given region of its universe does not mean that they necessarily apply everywhere.

It turns out that what is actually required is a higher-level proof system capable of generically relating theories, their universes, and their model-theoretic relationships, and thus of uniting the mathematical and empirical sciences. Called a “metaformal system”, it has a unique structure that was explicated decades ago as the CTMU, short for Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.

In other words, this is a well-solved problem, and has been for quite some time. If one likes, one can simply forget about the dozens of conjectural answers to this question and concentrate on this one alone. On the other hand, anyone who is unable to understand what I’ve just written, or doesn’t like the conclusions to which my answer leads – e.g., “God exists” – is free to keep on groping.

May 3, 2018

97. Is Chris Langan’s CTMU the first intellectual production to incontrovertibly prove God’s existence? Didn’t any earlier philosophers (e.g. Kant, Hegel) make cogent cases before him?

While many well-known philosophers have attempted, over the centuries, to “make cogent cases” for the existence of God, they all lacked a coherent and comprehensive metaphysical framework in which to do so.

As the CTMU is inarguably the required metaphysical framework, it alone can support the rehabilitation or restructuring of their arguments and carry the issue to its proper conclusion.

June 13, 2018

98. How can I explain the CTMU, the proof of God and the afterlife with metaphysical logic, to an atheist?

Science and human experience depend on the intelligibility of what science studies, and what people experience. This means that the integrity of science depends on an explanation for the intelligibility of physical reality.

The CTMU is a high-level formulation of logic designed to provide such an explanation. It answers questions like the following: What is it that makes reality identifiable? What features does reality possess that make science and human experience possible – what forms do they assume in the overall structure of the cosmos? How do these features manifest on all scales?

The nonoccurrence of irresolvable paradox in physical reality is a scientific fact. No scientist has ever managed to observe an irresolvable paradox; somehow, reality maintains its consistency under all circumstances. When a scientist sees what looks like an inconsistency in the structure of reality, the usual paradox-avoidance strategy is simply to make the paradox vanish by adjusting an existing theory, or finding a new one. But why should this work?

The undeniable fact is that science has no answers for questions like these, and mainstream philosophy has been of no help. Science lacks any cognitive framework in which the actual relationship between theory and content, knowledge and reality, epistemology and ontology, can be expressed, and its standard methodology does not permit this deficiency to be meaningfully addressed. In order to remedy this situation, it must be shown how and why reality is able to maintain its self-consistency and ontological integrity. This is what the CTMU does, and more.

I’ve scanned some of the answers below. Most are full of ignorance and derision, contain almost zero information on the CTMU, and are profoundly misleading. Readers are hereby advised to be on guard against the efforts of Quora’s ever-expanding troll population to mislead the unwary about a theory that its members, for all intents and purposes, are intellectually incapable of understanding. That a few of these people seem to know a smattering of scientific and/or philosophical terminology is beside the point, as they evidently have no idea how to properly apply it.

[The other parts of this question, which is actually several questions in one, are addressed in other answers I’ve posted on this site. A bit less misinformation out of you trolls, please.]

July 21, 2018

99. Can the CTMU prove God with roughly 80 symbols?

Of course, and easily. However, the definitions of those symbols might exceed that number, and even the term “symbol” might not be defined in quite the usual way.

August 21, 2018

Self-configuration

100. What created God according to Chris Langan?

God is eternal. He exists without respect to any external clock; clocks exist within God, not outside of him (basically, that’s why time is relative in General Relativity; this relates to something called “background freedom”, specifically from any external standard or metric). On His most general level of Being, God simply exists. All change in or evolution of the structure of God, known in the CTMU as “Self-configuration” (often through secondary telors), is strictly internal to God Himself.

February 28, 2018

Self-integrity

101. Does Rabbi Harold Kushner correctly imply that God cannot violate physics because God invented physics, and God does not destroy his creations usually?

Yes, given a sufficiently broad definition of “physics” which recognizes its necessary embedment in metaphysics. (With this qualification, the Rabbi is not the only one to have acknowledged such an implication.)

On the global level of nomological invariance, God does not break His own laws, for this would be to paradoxically violate His own will. The law that reality does not contain irresolvable paradoxes is certainly inviolable, as any violation would render reality self-inconsistent and therefore unintelligible, when in fact, we know reality to be intelligible by our very ability to identify it through direct observation with mutual perceptual corroboration.

The problem is to determine the exact form of the invariants that God, defined as the Ultimate Reality, must preserve for the sake of His own Self-integrity. It is important to note that these are not necessarily “laws of physics” as physics is ordinarily understood.

Fortunately, there is a metaphysical theory which permits such determinations, namely, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU).

[Note: The original form of this question was “Does (—) correctly imply that God cannot violate physics because God invented physics?” As for the part which has been added to the original question, I do not necessarily agree that God “usually does not destroy His creations”. He destroys them, with nonviolation of high-level Self-consistency, precisely when they persistently fail to serve His purposes, with the understanding that on the level of metaphysical invariance, His purposes are always served.]

October 21, 2017

Ultimate Reality

102. Is God ultimate reality?

Yes, beyond any shadow of doubt.

This answer can be logically justified with complete certainty in a unique “metamodel” of reality called the CTMU. It can be gainsaid by no other belief system (including Zen and other forms of Buddhism), as the CTMU is a reflexive model-theoretic extension of logic in which every intelligible belief system is by definition embedded, and which is as inviolable as predicate and propositional logic themselves. (Note that śūnyatā, whether regarded as an ontological feature of reality, a meditation state, or a phenomenological analysis of experience, has conceptual structure and is therefore subject to the demands of logic.)

In short, just as there can be no escape from ultimate reality, there can be no escape from God. Make peace with Him, or pay the price: dissolution and reabsorption, not necessarily without a very great deal of pain and regret in the “dissolution” phase (as deserved).

Good luck on the road to enlightenment regarding the true nature of being.

February 13, 2018

Worshipping God

103. How can it be wrong to worship God in other forms?

Not to worship God in totality is in effect to deny some aspects of God, which amounts to denying God, period.

October 31, 2017

Abstract

Based on the author's notes for a presentation to the Foundations of Mind group in October of 2017, this paper examines the role of metareligion in obtaining a favorable outcome for the human species as it approaches a Singularity with both Human and Technological aspects. For limited technical background, please consult two of the author's previous papers (Langan, 2002, 2017).

Keywords

Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe; CTMU; Dualism; Metareligion; Singularity

The Meaning and Purpose of Spirituality and Religion

Man has always craved knowledge of his own identity. Human identity is coherent, existing as a unified whole, without gaps or breaks that might interrupt the connection between its various parts and aspects. If human identity were ultimately pluralistic – e.g., dualistic, existing in two essential or fundamental parts – then the equally fundamental gap between the parts would destroy its continuity, rendering it dissociative and pathological.

To understand his own identity, man requires a coherent and therefore monic self- model reflecting its psychological coherence and relating it to all levels of reality. That is, man requires a valid interpretation of the human individual in society, and of the individual and society in reality at large. This interpretation must take the form of an unbroken correspondence spanning the extended relationship between man, as an inhabitant of reality, and reality in its most basic and universal form; man must see himself as an integral part of reality, and reality as an extension of his own being within a single unified ontology or metaphysics. In short, man and reality must share a common metaphysical identity.

Where metaphysics is a language expressing the relationship between mental and physical reality, spirituality can be understood as the metaphysical essence of human identity, and religion as its organizational manifestation. In its various benign forms, religion provides man with self-understanding and a sense of community … a model of the individual and his or her relationship to other people, society, and reality at large. Religion tells people who they are, and mankind what it is, by establishing their relationship to the global environment on the spiritual level; it is a binary relationship of man to his real environment, and where the global environment of each human being includes all others, the relationship of mankind to itself.

The spiritual model of self, the extended man-reality relationship required by religion, is thus a stratification of human identity from the individual to ultimate reality, the level of reality that cannot be explained in terms of anything prior to itself or any sort of exterior embedment. This follows from the fact that man is embedded in reality and thus shares all of its most general and ubiquitous properties, up to human limitations of structure and dynamics. Parallel to this degree of extension is the outward extension of self that is sought in certain Asian religious traditions; the self becomes ever more expansive as its hidden depths are plumbed.

But here we must note that the phrase “ultimate reality” is necessarily a partial description of God, incorporated in the (otherwise variously defined) identity of all viable monotheistic religions. Any God not incorporating ultimate reality could exist only in a properly inclusive reality partially beyond His influence and creative power, and would thus come up short in virtually every major strain of monotheism. On the other hand, this description holds regardless of any more specific properties incorporated in various definitions of God.

Dualism: Reality Torn in Two

In mainstream social and economic theory, a human being is understood as a mechanistic automaton driven by individual self-interest and governed by impersonal laws of nature and rules of behaviorism. Human automata are subject to conditioning on the basis of individual self-interest, which is a function of the individual's pleasure and happiness, freedom from want, pain, and sadness, and standards of biological fitness including survival and reproduction, all of which inhabit a standardized economy with a monetary metric. Man is thus simplistically viewed as an economic agent subject to monetary control, through centralization of which the entire future of mankind can in principle be mechanistically determined by the calculated pushing of buttons. Obviously, this dualistic view of man represents a complete negation of human dignity and sovereignty, reducing the human race to cattle. It is also incompatible with any kind of religion other than that referred to by Marx as an “opiate of the masses”.

Dualism is usually associated with the French philosopher René Descartes. Cartesian dualism, which has several more or less equivalent formulations, simply asserts the mutual exclusion of mind and matter on the strength of an apparent absence of a connection or overlap between them. On the other hand, avoiding it is not quite as simple, for this would seem to require a conceptual framework which differs in certain counterintuitive ways from our usual picture of the world. In order to avoid having to cope with these differences, it is much easier to simply detour around them, which puts one back on the main road and saves one from having to do any steep or lonely climbing.

The historical persistence of Cartesian dualism may have something to do with another innovation of Descartes, Cartesian analytic geometry (independently invented by Fermat), which utterly permeates the scientific landscape. Analytic geometry defines and depicts space in such a way that it excludes anything which cannot be completely represented as a set of coordinates defined along a linear trajectory, with or without various objective properties attached. In particular, the mental and spiritual aspects of conscious subjects are excluded from physical spaces and thus separated from the objective, observable contents thereof.

Whereas religion must connect human beings to all levels of human identity up to and including reality at large (the entirety of which is understood to be spanned by the presence, knowledge, and creative power of God), thus in effect defining the human soul by way of the connection, Cartesian dualism cuts the soul in two, setting man adrift from physical reality and pitting science and religion against each other. Dualism fundamentally divides the world, leading to a seemingly endless sequence of futile attempts to patch it back together.

In short, Cartesian dualism is inconsistent with the spiritual connectivity demanded of religion, and thus makes religion inconsistent with empirical and mathematical science. Neither can be expressed in terms of the other, and we arrive at the variant of Cartesian dualism referred to (first by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997) as “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). Yet science and religion both claim truth, and therefore have a common requirement: conformance to logic, i.e., to the structure of truth. Thus, restoring the coherence and consistency of religion requires its embedment in a high-level formulation of logic (truth-structure) which also accommodates the theoretical, observational, and methodological aspects of science.

Spirituality and the Crisis of Human Identity

Dualism has precipitated a dualistic and therefore dissociative crisis of human identity which, by impeding the spiritual level of human self-identification, amounts to a crisis of spirituality. This crisis has metastasized into the socio-political and economic realms, where philosophical dualism has been cynically and sometimes catastrophically exploited. Even as people are assured that their interests are of primary importance by government, corporate, and institutional leaders, they are more often viewed and treated as common and therefore disposable stimulus-response machines, of no greater value than other readily available forms of matter.

Societies are cybernetic; they are control-and-communication feedback loops in which top-down control tends to increase over time. Absent religious opposition, governments increasingly behave like malevolent egregores, using secrecy, disinformation, indoctrination, coercion, and conditioning to control their citizens. Even religion itself may be used to such ends; for example, ecumenical and interfaith conferences and councils nominally dedicated to a millennial religious reformation or synthesis may be controlled by those preferring to shape human identity rather than comprehend it … to “remodel” man at their administrative or personal convenience. Secular control, facilitated by mutual suppression of divergent ideologies, masquerades as religious unification in the absence of coherent scientific, philosophical, or theological opposition.

Unfortunately, organized religion finds itself without a counterargument. Present approaches to religion and religious scripture instantiate dualism on the level of both theory and model; a scriptural language, subjectively internalized by adherents, is set apart from its objective content. The minds which endow the language with meaning are set apart from material reality, and somewhat oxymoronically, the intervening gap is spanned by a separative model or interpretative mapping. That the model itself is implicitly associated with mind, and that mind is thus present on both ends of the mapping, goes unrealized and unacknowledged.

As one might expect by its dependence on those who fund and control it, academia has been recruited to their cause. The dominant worldview in academia is another form of dualism called naturalism, a term which is synonymous in some contexts with atheism and secularism. Methodological naturalism excludes the supernatural or metaphysical from the content and methodology of science, while metaphysical naturalism oxymoronically excludes metaphysics from all of existence, presumably on the strength of some unspecified (and in fact, logically impossible) “physical ontology” which lets existence be confined to the physical or observable realm.

Obviously, neither kind of naturalism is consistent with spirituality and religion. Human beings invest religion with positive feelings, emotions, and expectations based on truth-claims which require it to have real-world content related to the formation and actualization of human purpose and destiny. Religion must therefore describe not a mere object of hope, but a verifiable basis of hope. Naturalism, being dualistic, excludes human identity from reality, depriving the spiritual imperative of coherent self-identification.

As metaphysical naturalism (physical monism) undermines spiritual cohesion, religion declines. The separation of church and state, originally meant to safeguard the freedom of the people to worship as desired, now often seems to be misinterpreted as freedom of the state from religious competition for the hearts and minds of the populace. In other words, Jefferson's “wall of separation” seems to have been misconstrued as yet another expression of Cartesian dualism, portending and falsely justifying an anti-religious secular pseudo-theocracy which threatens to displace true spirituality from its previous role in human self-identification and the formation of human destiny.

Dual Singularities

For present purposes, a “singularity” is a point at which a system must undergo a directional break, jump through a limit, or be redefined in order to survive regardless of how it may evolve before or after. Accordingly, it can be understood as a kind of systemic destiny, an inevitable convergence of possible paths or trajectories of systemic evolution. Paths converge on points, and where such a point marks a sharp change in the smooth overall trajectory of a system, it comprises a kind of systemic “metapoint” which can be seen as marking a systemic mutation or change of inertia. This provides a tentative mathematical conceptualization of “singularity” for social systems.

The related forms of dualism thus far discussed – Cartesian dualism, naturalism, NOMA, and so on – are opposed to the human need for a coherent spiritual identity. This implies a bifurcation or divergence, a human evolutionary choice between two possible adaptations or destinies respectively corresponding to the anthropic and technological aspects of an impending “singular” transformation. Each possible destiny corresponds to the dominance of one aspect over the other, and may be associated with its own conventional type of singularity.

On one side is the Human Singularity, a mass realization of the expansive spiritual identity of the human species. Basically, this is the mass spiritual awakening that we have been led to expect by, e.g., certain currents in “New Age” thought. The prototype for this kind of singularity is the Omega Point of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, representing an evolutionary terminus and divine spiritual unification event through which mankind, and reality itself, will achieve “Christ-Consciousness” and be forever transformed. (After its introduction by Teilhard, the concept was developed by various authors, ironically including a few science-oriented, ostensibly tech-minded authors like Frank Tipler and David Deutsch.)

On the other side is the Tech Singularity, seminally formulated by the celebrated mathematician John von Neumann as the approaching juncture at which “technological progress will become incomprehensively rapid and complicated”, prior to which “the ever-accelerating progress of technology … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity [italicized for emphasis] in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue” (Ulam, 1958). In short, von Neumann foresaw an uncontrollable technological quickening, a sudden acceleration of complexity followed by the transformation (or extinction) of humanity.

Most discussions of the Tech Singularity have been naive to the point of disingenuity, boiling down to starry-eyed encomiums to the power of human intelligence to inventively couple with reality on the physical level of being using technological marvels both real and imagined, including implants, prosthetics, genetic engineering, virtual realities, and above all, a merging of human intelligence with AI. The problem with such discussions is that they seem to inhabit a socioeconomic and political vacuum, whereas in fact, the singularity concept is fraught with worrisome complications involving economic and sociopolitical factors apart from which it cannot be properly evaluated.

The Human and Tech Singularities relate to each other by a kind of duality; the former is extended and spacelike, representing the even distribution of spiritual and intellectual resources over the whole of mankind, while the latter is a compact, pointlike concentration of all resources in the hands of just those who can afford full access to the best and most advanced technology. Being opposed to each other with respect to the distribution of the resources of social evolution, they are also opposed with respect to the structure of society; symmetric distribution of the capacity for effective governance corresponds to a social order based on individual freedom and responsibility, while extreme concentration of the means of governance leads to a centralized, hive-like system at the center of which resides an oligarchic concentration of wealth and power, with increasing scarcity elsewhere due to the addictive, self-reinforcing nature of privilege. (Note that this differs from the usual understanding of individualism, which is ordinarily associated with capitalism and juxtaposed with collectivism; in fact, both capitalism and collectivism, as they are monopolistically practiced on the national and global scales, lead to oligarchy and a loss of individuality for the vast majority of people. A Human Singularity is something else entirely, empowering individuals rather than facilitating their disempowerment.)

The existence of two possible singularities presupposes a point of bifurcation or divergence beyond which the evolutionary momentum of mankind must carry it. Presently, all of the momentum belongs to the Tech Singularity; it is preferred by the financial, corporate, and governmental interests which drive the general economy. This momentum is reinforced by the seeming unavailability of alternatives, i.e., the nonexistence of any other track onto which society might be steered in order to escape an oligarchical AI lockdown. It is one thing for humankind to awaken en masse to its impending enslavement through a seemingly inevitable Tech Singularity; it is quite another to have a superior alternative clearly in view.

In order to reach any alternate destination whatsoever, humanity must understand what has been driving it toward the Tech Singularity. At this point, the reason is clear: the virtually automatic concentration of wealth and power, which has been observed to occur under both capitalism and socialism, fractionates humanity into an overclass and an underclass between which all else is crushed out of existence as though by the jaws of a vise. That is, the top and bottom levels of society become the jaws of a vise which, due to the screwing down of the upper jaw against the anvil-like lower jaw, crushes the middle class and all meaningful competition out of existence, thus normalizing the hive through the economic, physical, and psychological standardization of its drones and workers.

For reasons that should by now be evident, let us call this process a “parasitic divergence” – i.e., an organized divergence of humanity into a parasitic overclass and a relatively impoverished underclass serving as its mind-controlled host, mirroring the gruesome effects of certain obligate parasites on the organisms they attack – and acknowledge that it is driven by the self-reinforcing and therefore accelerating acquisition of wealth, power, and technological control by the rich. Left to run away with itself, this process ultimately leads to a “singular” concentration of wealth and power … a kind of sociopolitical-economic “black hole” that never stops gravitating. As the top jaw of the vise grows smaller, denser, and stronger, the bottom jaw grows larger and weaker; and as human utility becomes increasingly concentrated, every significant increase in the wealth of the overclass translates into a greater amount of misery for the underclass, arbitrarily diminishing the net utility of mankind.

Parasitic divergences have occurred many times in history, but the present one is different. Due to the double whammy of globalization and powerful surveillance and coercion technology, the one now in progress is geographically ubiquitous and quite possibly irreversible. If humanity is to save itself from the insectile, hive-like future associated with a Tech Singularity, the Human Singularity must prevail, empowering mankind to exert sufficient control over the production, distribution, and application of technology to prevent its unlimited oligarchical abuse. To bring this about, it is not enough to merely distribute a cognitive avoidance mechanism out of which the moneyed elite can buy and bribe their way as usual, given the absence of a well-defined alternative direction in which humanity can proceed; rather, an alternative direction must be defined and universally distributed in cognitive and attitudinal form.

In short, in order to have a meaningful mass awakening, the content of the awakening must be defined and distributed to the members of humanity, thus immunizing them against parasitic mind control. Because this content must be spiritual, the involvement of religion is unavoidable.

Twenty First Century Metaphysics as Metareligion

Thus are we presented with an existential choice of singularities … a choice on which our future certainly depends. These dual singularities, Human and Tech, respectively correspond to spiritual monism, the self-dual unification of humanity in a common spiritual identity spanning all of reality, and physical or material monism, the terminal mechanization and de-spiritualization of human identity. For the sake of humanity, spirituality must triumph; yet religion as we know it is not only under withering attack by the forces of secularism, but lacks the conceptual wherewithal to overcome Cartesian dualism and reunite with the scientific and technological aspect of reality.

Religions evolve in coupling with cultures, conventions, and morals that come into real-world conflict with each other and/or the state, with the result that religions themselves conflict in all of these ways. Obviously, a mass spiritual awakening requires a means of resolving these conflicts. Suggestions include segregating religions, allowing or encouraging a single religion to become everywhere dominant, playing different religions off against each other in a strategy of mutual containment, merging religions by syncretism (collecting their respective beliefs and rituals under one aegis), and eliminating religion entirely. But there is another more promising option: unifying internally consistent religions in a well-structured metareligion, i.e., a theological relationship among religions which provides their valid truth claims with logical support.

By virtue of the functionality of this relationship, its structure is that of a language. Like theories of science, religions themselves are languages; specifically, they are scriptural and doctrinal languages taking as their content a single shared reality including not only the physical universe, but subjective beliefs, codes of behavior, and notions of the sacred arising therein. This implies that a metareligion is a comprehensive metalanguage of religious languages. However, to exceed the limitations of dualism and couple with science, this religious metalanguage must also be scientific in bearing. In fact, it must bring spirituality and science into contact on all scales of reference. How is this to be accomplished?

All intelligible languages include logic as a syntactic ingredient, which means that ostensibly independent languages share common syntax and are merely parallel aspects of one all-encompassing language, namely logic itself. This implies that a sufficiently powerful formulation of logic comprises a common language for science and religion alike, and can thus function as a bridge between them and their respective symbolic and semiotic aspects. But standard predicate logic is itself understood as a dualistic language; although it links attributes and objects together in attributions, it does so on a weak and tentative basis. Whatever it attributes to real-world content can be ascertained only with respect to more or less arbitrary axioms and/or by empirical confirmation. What can be done to defeat this requirement, thus transforming linguistic dualism into linguistic self-duality?

Languages are conventionally defined as complex attributes of their universes of discourse. By definition, they are dualistically separated from their universes just as an attribute is abstractly separated from that to which it is assigned by predicate-logical quantification. Yet languages take their universes as content, which contradicts the dualistic premise that they are separate. Like all conventional languages, religious (scriptural and doctrinal) languages are dualistic and thus conflicted; they are implicitly held apart from their universes even while taking them as content. Similarly, standard theology – a metalanguage for the analysis and comparison of religions and religious conceptions of God – is dualistic as well, standing apart from the religious languages which form its content (and for that matter, from God). This implicit dualism renders standard religious and theological languages fundamentally incapable of expressing the spiritual unity of man and nature. To eliminate the dualistic separation of languages and their universes, dualism must be formally eliminated from the intrinsic structure of language.

The fact that all intelligible languages include logic as a syntactic ingredient implies that a sufficiently powerful formulation of logic comprises a common language for both science and religion, where “a sufficiently powerful formulation of logic” expresses logic on a metaphysical level appropriate to its application to reality as a whole. This amounts to the requirement that it be a supertautology, i.e., a metaphysical analogue of logical tautology which employs logic as the identificative syntax of a generic reflexive identification operator. Supertautology describes the structure of an ontological and epistemological metalanguage bearing description as “metaphysics” in the sense required for a true understanding of spirituality and religion.

As usually considered, there are just two basic kinds of science: empirical science, relying on causal inference described by general “laws of nature”, and mathematical (logical, linguistic) science, using substitution in formal (axiomatic or grammatical) systems. Although they operate in ways that are superficially dissimilar, they are nonetheless inseparable; the theoretical aspect of empirical science depends on formal inference, a mental process occurring in the minds of mathematicians and scientists who actualize it using brains which obey laws of causation. In order to deal with the mutual dependency relationship between mathematical and observational reality, we require a higher level of science which includes both empirical and mathematical science, but is more powerful than either in how it relates them.

Causal inference is interactive and linear; events are predicted from prior events occurring along timelines. Formal inference is derivational; specific relationships are substituted for more general ones (or vice versa) irrespective of temporal priority. A supertautology evolves self-dually or “metaformally”, in a way that couples formal and causal evolution. This is the proper mode of evolution of an ontological metalanguage capable of not only supporting causation, but of justifying existence, including its own existence, without the help of any other language. Metaformal inference, elsewhere referred to as “telic causation”, properly includes both formal and causal inference as aspects; thus, it supports both generative origination and causal evolution, and can be understood as a higher mode of inference embracing logical deduction, empirical induction, and metalogical reasoning about reality as a whole.

There already exists a branch of logic, model theory, that deals with the interpretation of empirical phenomena in theories and the mathematical structures of which they consist, but its standard formulation is dualistic. It now has a reflexive self-dual extension called the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU; Langan, 2002), or as some have called it in more traditional and religiously loaded terms, Logos, mainly in recognition of its status as a metaphysical formulation of logic. Technically, the CTMU is a reflexive, high-level kind of model theory designed to support the description of reality on the ontological level of discourse … the level on which reality exists independently of anything external.

On this level and all of those beneath, the supertautological structure of the CTMU is virtually unassailable. Just as standard logic requires no assumptions, neither does the CTMU; it requires only the cognitive and perceptual faculties that we are given from birth. And because the CTMU is intrinsically valid in a way that empirical science alone is not, it supports the expression and development of scientific truth in a self-dual (nondualistic) conceptual environment. As a metaformal ontology which replaces dualism with self-duality, the CTMU can be viewed as the outcome of what might be called the “Metaformalist Program” in the joint foundations of science and mathematics.

To model religious languages on the appropriate metaphysical level of logic and consistently express their interrelationships, the CTMU employs a trialic metalogical language which constitutes its own universe and its own model, and is thus capable of autonomously validating certain religious claims of truth and consistency. In effect, this language comprises the “metascripture” of a verific and potentially unificative metareligion. Its supertautological structure is that of a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL) exhibiting referential closure and thus reflecting the structure of the self-contained, self-sufficient reality in which we live. Encoding the relationship between man and Deity, humankind and the metaphysical structure of reality, it is the only valid basis for eliminating the existential confusion and religious conflict that threatens our world without sacrificing that which makes us human.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that an elementary formulation of the CTMU has elicited relatively little academic interest after nearly three decades since its introduction, it is natural to ask how it is likely to impact the intellectual environment. Perhaps the most profound change in our worldview will come from learning that living, breathing human beings are essential and logically necessary ingredients of reality, not just “emergent phenomena” which “supervene” on brute physical processes. In the CTMU, human beings comprise a class of entities with a very specific mathematical formulation and an essential role in the structure and dynamics of reality. Once this role is properly understood, the spiritual and scientific realms fall back together of their own gravity.

In academia – which suffers from closure and a preference for intellectual orthodoxy over profound conceptual innovation – this realization will be characteristically retarded. For mathematics and the hard sciences, it will probably be mostly business as usual, especially at first; this is because in their current forms, both already have places in the CTMU. That is, pure mathematics inhabits SCSPL syntax, while science inhabits the linear-ectomorphic semimodel of the CTMU as a physical limit (ignoring for now the relationship between the syntax and the limit). For “softer” and more amorphous sciences which do not enjoy rigorous mathematical theories that compensate for their lack of solid conceptual foundations, the benefits may be more readily felt, at least among those who have not been locked into academic naturalism. Philosophy and theology have the greatest potential to undergo more immediate change; at any rate, it will no longer be possible to rationally dismiss the metaphysical aspect of reality or its implications, or to concoct ad hoc rationalizations based on relativism and existential ambiguity. Meanwhile, the emergence of a common foundational language for all of these disciplines will probably be only gradually realized.

As for religion, believers of which often languish under the crushing weight of orthodoxy and peer pressure, a whole new level of courage and open-mindedness will be required. But fortunately, perhaps as an unintended consequence of the steady erosion of religious dogma, many minds have already opened enough to accommodate a greatly enriched understanding of spirituality. Let us hope that there are enough of them to help us attain the Human Singularity, and redeem mankind from its otherwise gloomy and potentially catastrophic future.

References

Gould, S. J. (1997) Nonoverlapping Magisteria. Natural History, Vol. 106, pp. 16–22 and 60-62.

Langan, C. M. (2002) The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory Princeton, MO: Mega Foundation Press. Originally published in Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Double Issue, Vols. 1.2-3.

Langan, C. M. (2017) An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 313–330.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959) The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by J. Huxley, introduction by B. Wall. New York: Harper.

Ulam, S. (1958) John von Neumann 1903–1957. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 64, Issue 3, pp. 1–49.

Introduction: Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis

In agreeing to write this essay, I have promised to explain why I find Darwinism unconvincing. In order to keep this promise, I will be compelled to acknowledge the apparently paradoxical fact that I find it convincing as well. I find it convincing because it is in certain respects correct, and in fact tautologically so in the logical sense; I find it unconvincing because it is based on a weak and superficial understanding of causality and is therefore incomplete. Explaining why this is so will require a rather deep investigation of the nature of causality. It will also require not only that a direction of progress be indicated, but that a new synthesis embracing the seemingly antithetical notions of teleology and natural selection be outlined. But first, some essential background.

It would be hard to imagine philosophical issues bearing more strongly on the human condition than the nature of life and the meaning of human existence, and it would be hard to imagine a scientific issue bearing more strongly on the nature and meaning of life than biological origins. Our view of evolutionary biology, whatever it happens to be at any particular juncture, tells us much of what we believe about who and what we are and why we are here, unavoidably affecting how we view (and ultimately, treat) ourselves and each other. Unfortunately, the prevailing theory of biological origins seems to be telling us that at least one of these questions, why are we here?, is meaningless1 … or at least this is the message that many of us, whether or not we are directly aware of it, seem to have received. As a result, the brightest hope of the new millennium, that we would see the dawn of a New Enlightenment in which the Meaning of it All would at last be revealed, already seems to have gone the way of an extravagant campaign promise at an inauguration ceremony.

The field of evolutionary biology is currently dominated by neo-Darwinism, a troubled marriage of convenience between post-Mendelian genetics and natural selection, a concept propounded by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1999) in his influential treatise On the Origin of Species. It has often been noted that the field and the theory appear to be inseparable; in many respects, it seems that evolutionary biology and Darwinism originated and evolve together, leading some to conclude that the field properly contains nothing that is not already accommodated by the theory.

Those attempting to justify this view frequently assert that the limitations of the theory are just the general limitations imposed on all scientific theories by standard scientific methodology, and that to exceed the expressive limitations of the theory is thus to transgress the boundaries of science. Others have noted that this seems to assume a prior justification of scientific methodology that does not in fact exist – merely that it works for certain purposes does not imply that it is optimal, particularly when it is evidently useless for others – and that in any case, the putative falsifiability of neo-Darwinism distinguishes it from any definition of science according to which the truth or falsity of such theories can be scientifically determined.2

Nevertheless, neo-Darwinism continues to claim exclusive dominion over the “science” of evolutionary biology.

Until the latter part of the 18^th century, the story was quite different. People tended to regard the matter of biological origins in a religious light. The universe was widely considered to have been freely and purposively designed and created by God as described in the Book of Genesis, and divine purpose was thought to be immanent in nature and open to observation and study. This doctrine, called teleology, drew rational support from traditional theological “arguments from design” holding that nature could only have been designed and created by a supreme intelligence. But teleology began to wane with the rise of British empiricism, and by the time Darwin published his theory in 1859, the winds of change were howling his anthem. Since then, the decline of teleology has accelerated to a point at which every supposedly universal law of nature is confidently presented as “irrefutable evidence” that natural events unfold independently of intent, and that purpose, divine or otherwise, is irrelevant to natural causation.

The concept of teleology remains alive nonetheless, having recently been granted a scientific reprieve in the form of Intelligent Design theory. “ID theory” holds that the complexity of biological systems implies the involvement of empirically detectable intelligent causes in nature. Although the roots of ID theory can be traced back to theological arguments from design, it is explicitly scientific rather than theological in character, and has thus been presented on the same basis as any other scientific hypothesis awaiting scientific confirmation.3

Rather than confining itself to theological or teleological causation, ID theory technically allows for any kind of intelligent designer – a human being, an artificial intelligence, even sentient aliens. This reflects the idea that intelligence is a generic quality which leaves a signature identifiable by techniques already heavily employed in such fields as cryptography, anthropology, forensics and computer science. It remains only to note that while explaining the inherent complexity of such a material designer would launch an explanatory regress that could end only with some sort of Prime Mover, thus coming down to something very much like teleology after all, ID theory has thus far committed itself only to design inference. That is, it currently proposes only to explain complex biological phenomena in terms of design, not to explain the designer itself.4

With regard to deeper levels of explanation, the field remains open.

Because neo-Darwinism is held forth as a “synthesis” of Darwinian natural selection and post-Mendelian genetics, it is sometimes referred to as the “Modern Synthesis”. However, it appears to fall somewhat short of this title, for not only is its basic approach to evolutionary biology no longer especially modern, but despite the fact that it is a minority viewpoint counterbalanced by cogent and far more popular alternatives including theistic evolution5 and ID theory (Robinson, 1995) it actively resists meaningful extension. Many of its most influential proponents have dismissed ID theory virtually on sight, declaring themselves needless of justification or remedial dialectic despite the many points raised against them, and this is not something that the proponents of a “modern synthesis” would ordinarily have the privilege of doing. A synthesis is ordinarily expected to accommodate both sides of a controversy regarding its subject matter, not just the side favored by the synthesist.6

Given the dissonance of the neo-Darwinist and teleological viewpoints, it is hardly surprising that many modern authors and scientists regard the neo-Darwinian and teleological theories of biological evolution as mutually irreconcilable, dwelling on their differences and ignoring their commonalities. Each side of the debate seems intent on pointing out the real or imagined deficiencies of the other while resting its case on its own real or imagined virtues. This paper will take a road less traveled, treating the opposition of these views as a problem of reconciliation and seeking a consistent, comprehensive framework in which to combine their strengths, decide their differences, and unite them in synergy. To the extent that both theories can be interpreted in such a framework, any apparent points of contradiction would be separated by context, and irreconcilable differences thereby avoided.

The ideal reconciliatory framework would be self-contained but comprehensive, meaning that both theories could be truthfully interpreted within it to the maximum possible extent, and consistent, meaning that irreconcilable differences between the theories could not survive the interpretation process. It would also reveal any biconditionality between the two theories; were they in any way to imply each other, this would be made explicit. For example, were a logical extension of neo-Darwinism to somehow yield ID-related concepts such as teleological agency and teleological causation, these would be seen to emerge from neo-Darwinist premises; conversely, were ID-theoretic concepts to yield ingredients of neo-Darwinism, this too would be explicated. In any case, the result would wear the title of “synthesis” far more credibly than neo-Darwinism alone.

Two Theories of Biological Causality

In order to talk about origins and evolution, one must talk about causality, and because causality is a function of the system called “nature”, one must talk about nature. Theories of biological origins and evolution like Neo-Darwinism and ID theory are both theories of causality restricted to the context of biological origins and evolution, and because causality is a function of nature, each points toward an underlying theory of nature incorporating an appropriate treatment of causality. That is, biological origins and evolution, being for scientific purposes instances of causation or the outcomes of causal processes, require definitions, theories and models of nature and causality. But these definitions, theories and models involve deeper and more complex criteria than meet the casual eye, and even to experts in science and philosophy, it is not entirely obvious how to satisfy them. This is why causality remains a controversial subject.

A cause is something that brings about an effect or result, and causality is the quality or agency relating cause and effect. Because there are different requirements for bringing about an event or situation, there are different kinds of causation. In common usage, a “cause” may be an event which causes another event, the reason or rationale for an event, an agent or the motive thereof, the means by which an event transpires, supporting conditions for an event, or in fact anything satisfying any logical or physical requirement of a resultant effect. Because causal relationships would seem to exist in a causal medium providing some sort of basic connection between cause and effect, the study of causation has typically focused on the medium and its connectivity … i.e., on the “fabric of nature”.

The kinds of causation that are required in order to explain natural changes or events were enumerated by Aristotle in the 4^th century BC. He posed four questions involving four types of causes:

1. What is changed to make the entity (Of what is it composed)?

2. What makes the entity change, and how?

3. What is the shape or pattern assumed by the entity as it changes?

4. What is the goal toward which the change of the entity is directed?

He respectively defined the answers to these questions as the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. With its explicit allowance for formal and final causation, Aristotle's classification ultimately implies the existence of a purposive, pattern-generating Prime Mover, and thus laid the groundwork for a teleological explanation of nature that went all but unchallenged for well over a millennium.

But when the Age of Reason (circa 1650–1800) had finished taking its toll on traditional Scholastic doctrines largely based on Aristotelian insight, only material and efficient causes retained a place in scientific reasoning … and in the hands of philosophers like Hume and Kant, even these modes of causation were laid open to doubt. Hume (1975) claimed that causal relationships are nothing more than subjective expectations that certain sequences of events observed in the past will continue to be observed in the future, while Kant (1965) went on to assert that causality is a category of cognition and perception according to which the mind organizes its experience of basically unknowable objects. Nevertheless, contemporary science retains its concern for material and efficient causes while letting formal and final causes languish in a state of near-total neglect.7

Distilled to a single sentence, the prevailing scientific view of nature and causality is roughly this: “Nature is associated with a space, generalizable to a spacetime manifold, permeated by fields under the causal influence of which objects move and interact in space and time according to logico-arithmetical laws of nature.” Despite its simplicity, this is a versatile causal framework with the power to express much of our scientific knowledge. But the questions to which it leads are as obvious as they are unanswered. For example, where do these laws reside? Of what are they composed? How and why did they originate? What are their properties? How do they function, and how are they sustained?8

In addition to generating questions about natural laws in general, the prevailing oversimplification of causality contains further gaps which have done as much to impede our understanding of nature as to further it.9

The associated problems are numerous, and they lead to yet another set of questions. For example, is causality formally and dynamically contained, uncontained or self-contained? What is its source, on what does it function, and what additional structure does it predicate of that on which it functions? What is its substance – is it mental, physical or both? How does it break down, and if it is stratified, then what are its levels? These questions lead in turn to further questions, and until all of these questions are answered at least in principle, no theory of biological causality stands on terra firma.

But before attempting to answer this question, let us have a look at the models of causality on which neo-Darwinism and ID theory are currently based.

Causality According to Intelligent Design Theory

Teleological causation is “top-down” causation in which the design and design imperative reside at the top, and the individual actualization events that realize the design reside at the bottom. The model universe required for teleological causality must therefore incorporate:

1. A source and means of design, i.e. a designer or designing agency.

2. A design stage in which designs are generated and/or selected.

3. An actualization stage in which designs become physically real from the viewpoints of physical observers.

4. A means or mechanism for passing from the design stage to the actualization stage.

If such a model universe permits these observers to empirically detect interesting instantiations of teleology, so much the better.

Particular teleological model universes that have been proposed include any number of celestial hierarchies and heavenly bureaucracies with God at the top giving the orders, angels of various ranks serving on intermediate levels as messengers and functionaries, and humans at or near the bottom; the Aristotelian universe, incorporating formal and final causation and embodying the telos of a Prime Mover; teleologically “front-loaded” mechanistic universes in which causation resembles clockwork that has been set in autonomous motion by a purposive, mechanically talented designer; and the panentheistic universe explicated by (among others) Alfred North Whitehead (1985), in which the teleological will of the designer is immanent in nature because in some sense, nature is properly contained within the designer. Although each has its strengths, these and other well-known teleological models are inadequate as formulated, failing to support various logical implications of requirements 1–4.

The model universe of ID theory, which can be regarded as a generalization of traditional teleological design theory with respect to causal agency, has essentially the same requirements. However, it also contains certain novel ingredients including a focus on intelligence, an emphasis on mathematical and information-theoretic concepts, and two novel ingredients called irreducible complexity and specified complexity.

Irreducible complexity, which is intended to describe biological systems and subsystems unlikely to have been produced by gradual (piece-by-piece) evolution, is by definition a property of any integrated functional system from which the removal of any one or more core components critically impairs its original function (Behe, 1998). Although proposed examples have drawn fire – such examples include the bacterial flagellum, the human eye, the blood clotting cascade, and even the conventional spring-loaded mousetrap – the concept has a valid basis with roots in logic, graph theory and other branches of mathematics and engineering.

Specified complexity, which is intended as a more general description of the products of intelligent causation, is by definition a property of anything that exhibits a recognizable pattern with a very low probability of occurring by chance. Whereas irreducible complexity is based on the sheer improbability of complex functionally-coherent systems, specified complexity adds an intelligence (rational pattern generation and recognition) criterion that lets functional complexity be generalized to a pattern-based form of complexity better suited to probabilistic and information-theoretic analysis (Dembski, 1998).

Specified complexity amounts to a relationship between three attributes: contingency, complexity and specification. Contingency corresponds to freedom and variety (as when there are many distinct possibilities that may be selectively actualized), complexity corresponds to improbability, and specification corresponds to the existence of a meaningful pattern which, in conjunction with the other two attributes in sufficient measure, indicates an application of intelligence. Wherever all three of these attributes are coinstantiated, specified complexity is present.

Contingency is associated with specificational and replicational probabilistic resources. Specificational resources consist of a set or class of distinct pre-specified target events, while replicational resources consist of chances for at least one of the specified target events to occur. The chance of occurrence of an instance of specified complexity is the chance that these two kinds of resource will intersect in light of total contingency.

For example, the total contingency of a 4-digit lottery consists of the set of all possible drawings over unlimited trials and is associated with the numbers from 0000 to 9999, the specificational resources consist of a subset of distinct pre-specified 4-digit winning numbers to be replicated (matched or predicted), and the replicational resources consist of the tickets purchased. The chance that the lottery will have at least one winner equals the probability of intersection of the set of winning numbers and the set of tickets, given that there are ten thousand distinctly-numbered tickets that might have been purchased.

More topically, the total contingency of a particular evolutionary context consists of all possible (productive or dead-end) lines of evolution that might occur therein, the specificational resources consist of instances of specified complexity or “intelligent design”, and the replicational resources consist of all possible lines of evolution which can occur within some set of practical constraints imposed on the context, for example time or space constraints tending to limit replication. The chance that an instance of specified complexity will evolve equals the probability of intersection of the set of instances and the set of constrained lines of evolution, given the multiplicity of all of the possible lines of evolution that could occur. Where this probability is extremely low, some form of intelligent design is indicated.

Specified complexity is a powerful idea that yields insight crucial to the meaning and satisfaction of requirements 1–4. First, probability estimates for instances of specified complexity are so low as to require that specificational and replicational resources be linked in such a way that such events can actually occur, in effect raising their probability. It must therefore be determined whether the satisfaction of this requirement is consistent with the premise that low probabilities can actually be calculated for instances of specified complexity, and if so, how and why this can be reliably accomplished. And next, it must be shown that the required relationship implies intelligence and design.

Up to its current level of detail and coherence, the model universe of ID theory does not necessarily conflict with that of neo-Darwinism with respect to causality, but rather contains it, requiring only that causality be interpreted in light of this containment.

Causality According to Neo-Darwinism

Neo-Darwinism is the application of Darwinian natural selection to modern (post-Mendelian) genetics, which indifferently assumes that genetic mutations occur due to “random” DNA copying errors. This short but revealing description contains a certain amount of useful information. First, it reveals that causality is being at least partially reduced to some (ontic or epistemic) form of randomness. Even more revealingly, the phrase natural selection explicitly implies that nature is selective. Indeed, the term natural alone is instructive, for it reflects a naturalistic viewpoint according to which existence is ascribed exclusively to the natural world, i.e. “nature”.

In practice, most scientists consider nature to consist of that which is physical, observable and amenable to empirical investigation as prescribed by the scientific method, in their adherence to which they see themselves as following a naturalistic agenda. This is in keeping with scientific naturalism, a worldview of which neo-Darwinism is considered representative. Scientific naturalism ascribes existence strictly to the physical or natural world consisting of space, time, matter and energy. Two strains of naturalism are sometimes distinguished, philosophical and methodological. While philosophical naturalism claims ontological force, methodological naturalism is epistemological in flavor, merely asserting that nature might as well equal the physical world for scientific purposes. But in either case, scientific naturalism effectively confines the scientific study of nature to the physical. So inasmuch as neo-Darwinism is exemplary of scientific naturalism, it is physical or materialistic in character (Pigliucci, 2000).

In the picture of causality embraced by scientific naturalism, processes are either random or deterministic. In deterministic processes, objects are affected by laws and forces external to them, while in random processes, determinacy is either absent or unknown. A process can be “random” due to ignorance, statistics or presumed acausality … that is, because epistemological or observational limitations prevent identification of its hidden causal factors, because its causal outcomes are symmetrically or “randomly” distributed in the large, or because it is presumed to be nondeterministic. The first two of these possibilities are basically deterministic, while the last is (unverifiably) nondeterministic. So a neo-Darwinist either takes a deterministic view of causality or sees it in terms of the dichotomy between determinism and nondeterminism, in either case relying heavily on the theory of probability.

In fact, given that natural selection is based on the essentially trivial observation that nature imposes constraints on survival and reproduction,10 neo-Darwinism boils down to little more than probability theory, genetics and a very simple abstract but nominally physical model of biological causality based on “survival and reproduction of the fittest” or some minor variant thereof. Thus, when its practitioners claim to have generated a prediction, it is generally not a deep secret of nature unearthed by means of advanced theoretical manipulation, but merely the result of applying what amounts to a principle of indifference11 to some question about mutation, adaptation, selection or reproduction, running the numbers, and tracking the implications through its simplistic model universe. If there were no such “theory” as neo-Darwinism, the same conclusion might have been reached with a straightforward combination of biology, genetics, chemistry, physics, a statistics calculator and a bit of common sense. This is why neo-Darwinism is so astonishingly able to absorb new effects and mechanisms the minute they come out of the core sciences.

Something else that neo-Darwinism seems to do with astonishing ease is absorb what appear on their faces to be contradictions. For example, many people, some might say a large majority, find it to some degree incredible that what amounts to a principle of indifference can be seriously offered as a causal explanation for the amazing complexity of the biological world, or for that matter any other part of the world. The fact that a principle of indifference is essentially devoid of information implies that neo-Darwinism yields not a causal explanation of biological complexity, but merely an open-ended simulation in which every bit of complexity delivered as output must have been present as input, any appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. This implies that neo-Darwinism per se, as distinguished from the core sciences from which it routinely borrows, adds precisely nothing to our knowledge of biological complexity or its source.

In order to deal with this seemingly inescapable problem, the proponents of neo-Darwinism have eagerly adopted the two hottest slogans in the theory of complex systems, self-organization and emergence. Self-organization is a spontaneous, extrinsically unguided process by which a system develops an organized structure, while emergence refers to those global properties (functions, processes) of composite hierarchical systems that cannot be reduced to the properties of their component subsystems … the properties in which they are more than the sums of their parts. But the fact that these terms have been superficially defined does not imply that they have been adequately explained. Actually, they remain as much of a mystery in complexity theory as they are in biology, and can do nothing for neo-Darwinism but spin the pointer toward another hapless and equally helpless field of inquiry.

Because scientific naturalism denies that existence of any kind is possessed by anything of a supernatural or metaphysical character, including a designing intelligence, the definitions, theories and models of nature and causality on which it implicitly relies must be “physical”, at least in name. However, as we have already noted and will shortly explain in detail, what currently passes for an understanding of causality in the physical sciences leaves much to be desired. In particular, since the kind of causality treated in the physical sciences is ontologically and functionally dependent on the origin and evolution of the cosmos, scientific naturalists trying to answer questions about causality are obliged to consider all stages of causation and generation all the way back to the cosmic origin, constantly testing their answers to see if they continue to make sense when reformulated in more fundamental terms.

Unfortunately, this obligation is not being met. One reason is the reluctance of those who most need an understanding of causality to admit the extent of their ignorance. Another is the seeming intractability of certain problems associated with the causality concept itself.

A Deeper Look at Causality: The Connectivity Problem

Because causal relationships would seem to exist in a causal medium providing some sort of basic connection between cause and effect, the study of causation has typically focused on the medium and its connectivity … i.e., on the “fabric of nature”. How does this fabric permit different objects to interact, given that to interact is to intersect in the same events governed by the same laws and thus to possess a degree of sameness? How can multiple objects each simultaneously exhibit two opposite properties, sameness and difference, with respect to each other?

Equivalently, on what underlying form of connectivity is causality defined? When one asserts that one event “causes” another, what more general connection does this imply between the events? If there is no more general connection than the causal connection itself, then causality is underivable from any logically prior condition; it is something that happens ex nihilo, the sudden synthesis of a connection out of nothing. As Hume maintained, causal relationships are mere accidental correlations of subjectively-associated events.

But it can't be quite that simple. In fact, Hume's characterization of causality as mere random correlation presupposes the existence of a correlating agent who recognizes and unifies causal correlations through experience, and the abstractive, experiential coherence or consciousness of this correlation-inducing agent constitutes a prior connective medium. So in this case, explaining causality requires that the subjective medium of experience, complete with its correlative “laws of causality”, be related to the objective world of real events.

Unfortunately, Hume's thesis includes a denial that any such objective world exists. In Hume's view, experience is all there is. And although Kant subsequently registered his qualified disagreement, asserting that there is indeed an objective outside world, he pronounced it unknowable, relegating causality to the status of a category of perception.12

This, of course, perpetuated the idea of causal subjectivity by continuing to presuppose the existence of an a priori subjective medium.

How can the nature of subjective causality be understood? As Kant observed, perception and cognition are mutually necessary; concepts without percepts are empty, and percepts without concepts are blind.13

It must therefore be asked to what extent perceptual reality might be an outward projection of cognitive processes, and natural processes the mirror images of mental processes.

This leads to another problem, that of mind-matter dualism.

The Dualism Problem

The Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal reality, respectively defined as those parts of reality14 which are dependent on and independent of perception, mirrors a prior philosophical viewpoint known as Cartesian (mind-matter) dualism. Associated with René Descartes, the polymath mercenary who laid the groundwork for analytic geometry by helping to develop the concept of coordinate spaces, this is a form of substance dualism which asserts that reality consists of two immiscible “substances”, mind and matter. Cartesian dualism characterizes a certain influential approach to the problem of mental causation: how does the mind influence the physical body?

Cartesian dualism leads to a problem associated with the connectivity problem we have just discussed: if reality consists of two different “substances”, then what connects these substances in one unified “reality”? What is the medium which sustains their respective existences and the putative difference relationship between them? One possible (wrong) answer is that their relationship is merely abstract, and therefore irrelevant to material reality and devoid of material influence; another is that like the physical epiphenomenon of mind itself, it is essentially physical. But these positions, which are seen in association with a slew of related philosophical doctrines including physicalism, materialism, naturalism, objectivism, epiphenomenalism and eliminativism, merely beg the question that Cartesian dualism was intended to answer, namely the problem of mental causation.

Conveniently, modern logic affords a new level of analytical precision with respect to the Cartesian and Kantian dichotomies. Specifically, the branch of logic called model theory distinguishes theories from their universes, and considers the intervening semantic and interpretative mappings. Calling a theory an object language and its universe of discourse an object universe, it combines them in a metaobject domain consisting of the correspondences among their respective components and systems of components, and calls the theory or language in which this metaobject domain is analyzed a metalanguage. In like manner, the relationship between the metalanguage and the metaobject domain can be analyzed in a higher-level metalanguage, and so on. Because this situation can be recursively extended, level by level and metalanguage by metalanguage, in such a way that languages and their universes are conflated to an arbitrary degree, reality can with unlimited precision be characterized as a “metalinguistic metaobject”.

In this setting, the philosophical dichotomies in question take on a distinctly mathematical hue. Because theories are abstract, subjectively-formed mental constructs,15 the mental, subjective side of reality can now be associated with the object language and metalanguage(s), while the physical, objective side of reality can be associated with the object universe and metauniverse(s), i.e. the metaobject domain(s). It takes very little effort to see that the mental/subjective and physical/objective sides of reality are now combined in the metaobjects, and that Cartesian and Kantian “substance dualism” have now been transformed to “property dualism”16 or dual-aspect monism. That is, we are now talking, in mathematically precise terms, about a “universal substance” of which mind and matter, the abstract and the concrete, the cognitive-perceptual and the physical, are mere properties or aspects.

Translating this into the scientific status quo is not difficult. Science regards causality as “objective”, taking its cues from observation while ignoring certain philosophical problems involving the nature of objectivity. But science also depends on theoretical reasoning, and this involves abstract analogues of causality to which science is equally indebted. To the extent that scientific theories accurately describe the universe, they are isomorphic to the universe; in order that nature be amenable to meaningful theorization, science must therefore assume that the basic cognitive ingredients of theories, and for that matter the perceptual ingredients of observations, mirror the corresponding ingredients of nature up to some minimal but assured level of isomorphism. Consistent theories of science thus require that physical and abstract causation be brought into basic correspondence as mandated by this necessity.

Abstract analogues of physical causation are already well-understood. Logically, causality is analogous to implication, an active or passive relationship between antecedents and consequents; theoretically, it is analogous to the application of rules of inference to expressions formulated within a theory; linguistically, it amounts to substitution or production according to the rules of a generative grammar; and mathematically, it amounts to the application of a rule, mapping, function, operation or transformation. In every case, the analogue is some form of recursive17 or iterative morphism to which a nonlogical interpretation may be attached.18

The object is therefore to understand physical reality in terms of such operations defined on an appropriate form of dual-aspect monism.

This leads directly to the structure problem.

The Structure Problem

A description or explanation of causality can only be formulated with respect to a particular “model universe” in which space, time and matter are defined and related to each other in such a way as to support the description. This relationship must account for the laws of nature and their role in natural processes. A little reflection should reveal that both neo-Darwinism and ID theory, as well as all other scientific theories, are currently deficient in this regard. At best, scientists have a very limited idea where the laws of nature reside, how they came to be, and how they work, and due to the limitations of their empirical methodology,19 they have no means of clarification.

We have already encountered Aristotle's four modes of causation: material, efficient, formal and final. These follow no special prescription, but are merely generic answers to questions about certain features of Aristotle's mental representation of nature … his model universe. There are as many additional modes of causation as there are meaningful questions regarding the structure and dynamics of a given model universe. For example, in addition to Aristotle's questions of what, who and how, what and why, we could also ask where (positional causation), when (order or timing of causation), by virtue of what (facilitative causation), and so forth. Thus, we could say that something happened because it was positioned in a medium containing its material cause and supporting its efficient cause, because the time was right or certain prerequisites were in place, because certain conditions were present or certain tools were available, et cetera.

On what kinds of model universe can a causality function be defined? Among the mathematical structures which science has long favored are coordinate spaces and differentiable manifolds. In differentiable coordinate spaces, laws of physics formulated as algebraic or differential equations may conveniently define smooth geometric curves which faithfully represent (e.g.) the trajectories of physical objects in motion. A model universe based on these constructs supports certain causal relationships to an impressive level of accuracy. However, it fails with respect to others, particularly those involving discrete or nonlocal20 changes or requiring high levels of coherence. In particular, it is incapable of modeling certain generative processes, including any generative process that might have led to its own existence, and beyond a certain point, its “continuity” attribute has eluded a completely satisfactory explanation.21

These and other difficulties have prompted some theorists to suggest model universes based on other kinds of mathematical structure. These include a new class of models to which the concepts of information and computation are essential. Called “discrete models”, they depict reality in terms of bits, quanta, quantum events, computational operations and other discrete, recursively-related units. Whereas continuum models are based on the notion of a continuum, a unified extensible whole that can be subdivided in such a way that any two distinct points are separated by an infinite number of intermediate points, discrete models reflect the fact that it is impossible to describe or define a change or separation in any way that does not involve a sudden finite jump in some parameter. Discrete models reflect the rising investment of the physical sciences in a quantum-theoretic view of reality, and the increasing dependence of science on computer simulation as an experimental tool.22

Discrete models have the advantage that they can more easily incorporate modern cybernetic concepts, including information, computation and feedback, which conduce to an understanding of reality as a control and communication system. In the context of such models, informational and computational reductionism is now pursued with a degree of enthusiasm formerly reserved for attempts to reduce the universe to matter and energy. However, certain difficulties persist. Discrete models remain dualistic, and they still cannot explain their own origins and existences. Nonlocality is still a problem for them, as are the general-relativistic spacetime deformations so easily formulated in continuum models. Because they allow the existence of discrete gaps between events, they tend to lack adequate connectivity. And in the shadow of these deficiencies, they can illuminate the interrelationship of space, time and object no more successfully than their continuum counterparts.

The unregenerate dualism of most discrete models demands particular attention. As we reasoned above, solving the problem of dualism requires that the mental and physical aspects of reality be brought into coincidence. Insofar as information and computation are essentially formal and abstract, reducing the material aspects of nature to information and computation should bring the concrete and the abstract, the material and the mental, into perfect coincidence. But because most discrete models treat information and computation as objective entities, tacitly incorporating the assumption that bits and computations are on the same ontological footing as particles and collisions, their mental dimension is overlooked. Because making no explicit provision for mind amounts to leaving it out of the mix, mind and matter remain separate, and dualism persists.

Is there another alternative? The model-theoretic perspective, which simultaneously juxtaposes and conflates subjective languages and their objective universes, suggests that reality embodies an ontic-nomothetic medium with abstract and physical aspects that are respectively related as syntax is related to language. For example, because scientific observation and theorization must be consistent, and logic is the backbone of consistency, the syntax of every scientific theory must incorporate logic. In the case of a geometric theory of physical reality like classical mechanics or relativity theory, this amounts (by model-theoretic implication) to the requirement that logic and geometry literally coincide. But where geometry is a property of “physical” spacetime, so then is logic, and if logic resides in spacetime, then so must logical grammar. This leads to the requirement that physical dynamics be objectively reconciled with the formal grammar of logic and logic-based theories, ultimately including abstract causality in its entirety.

Obviously, conventional continuum and discrete models of reality fail to meet this requirement. As far as they and those who embrace them are concerned, the physical world is simply not answerable to any theory whatsoever, even logic. According to the standard empirical doctrine of science, we may observe reality but never impose our conceptions upon it, and this means that theory – even a theory as necessary to cognition and perception as logic – is always the beggar and never the master at the scientific table. The reason for this situation is clear; scientists need a means of guarding against the human tendency to confuse their inner subjective worlds, replete with fantasy and prejudice, with the factual external world conventionally studied by science.

But there is a very clear difference between logic on one hand, and fantasy and prejudice on the other. While science never needs the latter, it always needs the former. By excluding logic from nature, mainstream science has nothing to gain and everything to lose; in not attributing its own most basic requirements to its subject matter, it is cheating itself in a crucial way. Whether or not a theory which fails to predicate on its universe the wherewithal of its own validity turns out to be valid, it can be neither more nor less so for its false and subtly pretentious humility. On the other hand, failing to attribute these requirements to its universe when its universe in fact exhibits them, and when its universe would in fact be unintelligible without them, can ultimately cost it every bit of truth that it might otherwise have had … particularly if its methodology is inadequate to identify the problem and mandate a remedy.

Because they fail to provide definitive answers for questions about causality, conventional continuum and discrete models of reality devolve to acausality or infinite causal regression. No matter what causal explanations they seem to offer, one of two things is implied: (1) a cause prior to that which is cited in the explanation, or (2) random, spontaneous, acausal emergence from the void, no explanation supposedly required. Given the seeming absence of alternatives to determinism or randomness, or extrinsic23 and null causation, how are meaningful causal explanations to be completed?

The Containment Problem

A certain philosophically controversial hypothesis about causality presently rules the scientific world by fiat. It asserts that physical reality is closed under causal regression: “no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain.”24

That is, if a physical event has a cause, then it has a physical cause. Obviously, the meaning of this principle is strongly dependent on the definition of physical, which is not as cut and dried as one might suppose.25

It also contradicts the obvious fact that causality is an abstraction, at best indirectly observable through its effects on matter, which functions independently of any specific item of material content. How, then, does this principle manage to maintain its hold on science? The answer: false parsimony and explanatory debt. Concisely, false parsimony is when a theory achieves deceptive simplicity in its native context by sweeping its unpaid explanatory debts (explanatory deficiencies) into unkempt piles located in or between other areas of science.

It is an ill-kept secret that the scientific community, far from being one big happy family of smoothly-connected neighborhoods, consists of isolated, highly-specialized enclaves that often tend toward mutual ignorance and xenophobia. Under these circumstances, it is only natural to expect that when caught between an observational rock and a theoretical hard place, some of these enclaves will take advantage of the situation and “pass the explanatory buck”, neither knowing nor caring when or where it comes to rest as long as the maneuver takes some of the heat off them and frees them to conduct business as usual. While the explanatory buck-passing is almost never productive, this can be conveniently hidden in the deep, dark cracks and crevices between disciplines. As a result, many pressing explanatory obligations have been successfully exiled to interdisciplinary limbo, an intellectual dead zone from which they cannot threaten the dominance of the physical causal closure thesis.

However, this ploy does not always work. Due to the longstanding scientific trend toward physical reductionism, the buck often gets passed to physics, and because physics is widely considered more fundamental than any other scientific discipline, it has a hard time deferring explanatory debts mailed directly to its address. Some of the explanatory debts for which physics is holding the bag are labeled “causality”, and some of these bags were sent to the physics department from the evolutionary biology department. These debt-filled bags were sent because the evolutionary biology department lacked the explanatory resources to pay them for itself. Unfortunately, physics can't pay them either.

The reason that physics cannot pay explanatory debts generated by various causal hypotheses is that it does not itself possess an adequate understanding of causality. This is evident from the fact that in physics, events are assumed to be either deterministic or nondeterministic in origin. Given an object, event, set or process, it is usually assumed to have come about in one of just two possible ways: either it was brought about by something prior and external to it, or it sprang forth spontaneously as if by magic. The prevalence of this dichotomy, determinacy versus randomness, amounts to an unspoken scientific axiom asserting that everything in the universe is ultimately either a function of causes external to the determined entity (up to and including the universe itself), or no function of anything whatsoever. In the former case there is a known or unknown explanation, albeit external; in the latter case, there is no explanation at all. In neither case can the universe be regarded as causally self-contained.

To a person unused to questioning this dichotomy, there may seem to be no middle ground. It may indeed seem that where events are not actively and connectively produced according to laws of nature, there is nothing to connect them, and thus that their distribution can only be random, patternless and meaningless. But there is another possibility after all: self-determinacy. Self-determinacy involves a higher-order generative process that yields not only the physical states of entities, but the entities themselves, the abstract laws that govern them, and the entire system which contains and coherently relates them. Self-determinism is the causal dynamic of any system that generates its own components and properties independently of prior laws or external structures. Because self-determinacy involves nothing of a preexisting or external nature, it is the only type of causal relationship suitable for a causally self-contained system.

In a self-deterministic system, causal regression leads to a completely intrinsic self-generative process. In any system that is not ultimately self-deterministic, including any system that is either random or deterministic in the standard extrinsic sense, causal regression terminates at null causality or does not terminate. In either of the latter two cases, science can fully explain nothing; in the absence of a final cause, even material and efficient causes are subject to causal regression toward ever more basic (prior and embedding) substances and processes, or if random in origin, toward primitive acausality. So given that explanation is largely what science is all about, science would seem to have no choice but to treat the universe as a self-deterministic, causally self-contained system.26

And thus do questions about evolution become questions about the self-generation of causally self-contained, self-emergent systems. In particular, how and why does such a system self-generate?

The Utility (Selection) Problem

As we have just noted, deterministic causality transforms the states of preexisting objects according to preexisting laws associated with an external medium. Where this involves or produces feedback, the feedback is of the conventional cybernetic variety; it transports information through the medium from one location to another and then back again, with transformations at each end of the loop. But where objects, laws and media do not yet exist, this kind of feedback is not yet possible. Accordingly, causality must be reformulated so that it can not only transform the states of natural systems, but account for self-deterministic relationships between states and laws of nature. In short, causality must become metacausality.27

Self-determination involves a generalized atemporal28 kind of feedback between physical states and the abstract laws that govern them. Whereas ordinary cybernetic feedback consists of information passed back and forth among controllers and regulated entities through a preexisting conductive or transmissive medium according to ambient sensory and actuative protocols – one may think of the Internet, with its closed informational loops and preexisting material processing nodes and communication channels, as a ready example – self-generative feedback must be ontological and telic rather than strictly physical in character.29

That is, it must be defined in such a way as to “metatemporally” bring the formal structure of cybernetics and its physical content into joint existence from a primitive, undifferentiated ontological groundstate. To pursue our example, the Internet, beginning as a timeless self-potential, would have to self-actualize, in the process generating time and causality.

But what is this ontological groundstate, and what is a “self-potential”? For that matter, what are the means and goal of cosmic self-actualization? The ontological groundstate may be somewhat simplistically characterized as a complete abeyance of binding ontological constraint, a sea of pure telic potential or “unbound telesis”. Self-potential can then be seen as a telic relationship of two lower kinds of potential: potential states, the possible sets of definitive properties possessed by an entity along with their possible values, and potential laws (nomological syntax) according to which states are defined, recognized and transformed.30

Thus, the ontological groundstate can for most purposes be equated with all possible state-syntax relationships or “self-potentials”, and the means of self-actualization is simply a telic, metacausal mode of recursion through which telic potentials are refined into specific state-syntax configurations. The particulars of this process depend on the specific model universe – and in light of dual-aspect monism, the real self-modeling universe – in which the telic potential is actualized.

And now we come to what might be seen as the pivotal question: what is the goal of self-actualization? Conveniently enough, this question contains its own answer: self-actualization, a generic analogue of Aristotelian final causation and thus of teleology, is its own inevitable outcome and thus its own goal.31

Whatever its specific details may be, they are actualized by the universe alone, and this means that they are mere special instances of cosmic self-actualization. Although the word “goal” has subjective connotations – for example, some definitions stipulate that a goal must be the object of an instinctual drive or other subjective impulse – we could easily adopt a reductive or functionalist approach to such terms, taking them to reduce or refer to objective features of reality. Similarly, if the term “goal” implies some measure of design or pre-formulation, then we could easily observe that natural selection does so as well, for nature has already largely determined what “designs” it will accept for survival and thereby render fit.

Given that the self-containment of nature implies causal closure implies self-determinism implies self-actualization, how is self-actualization to be achieved? Obviously, nature must select some possible form in which to self-actualize. Since a self-contained, causally closed universe does not have the luxury of external guidance, it needs to generate an intrinsic self-selection criterion in order to do this. Since utility is the name already given to the attribute which is maximized by any rational choice function, and since a totally self-actualizing system has the privilege of defining its own standard of rationality,32 we may as well speak of this self-selection criterion in terms of global or generic self-utility. That is, the self-actualizing universe must generate and retrieve information on the intrinsic utility content of various possible forms that it might take.

The utility concept bears more inspection than it ordinarily gets. Utility often entails a subject-object distinction; for example, the utility of an apple in a pantry is biologically and psychologically generated by a more or less conscious subject of whom its existence is ostensibly independent, and it thus makes little sense to speak of its “intrinsic utility”. While it might be asserted that an apple or some other relatively non-conscious material object is “good for its own sake” and thus in possession of intrinsic utility, attributing self-interest to something implies that it is a subject as well as an object, and thus that it is capable of subjective self-recognition.33

To the extent that the universe is at once an object of selection and a self-selective subject capable of some degree of self-recognition, it supports intrinsic utility (as does any coherent state-syntax relationship). An apple, on the other hand, does not seem at first glance to meet this criterion.

But a closer look again turns out to be warranted. Since an apple is a part of the universe and therefore embodies its intrinsic self-utility, and since the various causes of the apple (material, efficient and so on) can be traced back along their causal chains to the intrinsic causation and utility of the universe, the apple has a certain amount of intrinsic utility after all. This is confirmed when we consider that its taste and nutritional value, wherein reside its utility for the person who eats it, further its genetic utility by encouraging its widespread cultivation and dissemination. In fact, this line of reasoning can be extended beyond the biological realm to the world of inert objects, for in a sense, they too are naturally selected for existence. Potentials that obey the laws of nature are permitted to exist in nature and are thereby rendered “fit”, while potentials that do not are excluded.34

So it seems that in principle, natural selection determines the survival of not just actualities but potentials, and in either case it does so according to an intrinsic utility criterion ultimately based on global self-utility.

It is important to be clear on the relationship between utility and causality. Utility is simply a generic selection criterion essential to the only cosmologically acceptable form of causality, namely self-determinism. The subjective gratification associated with positive utility in the biological and psychological realms is ultimately beside the point. No longer need natural processes be explained under suspicion of anthropomorphism; causal explanations need no longer implicitly refer to instinctive drives and subjective motivations. Instead, they can refer directly to a generic objective “drive”, namely intrinsic causality … the “drive” of the universe to maximize an intrinsic self-selection criterion over various relational strata within the bounds of its internal constraints.35

Teleology and scientific naturalism are equally satisfied; the global self-selection imperative to which causality necessarily devolves is a generic property of nature to which subjective drives and motivations necessarily “reduce”, for it distributes by embedment over the intrinsic utility of every natural system.

Intrinsic utility and natural selection relate to each other as both reason and outcome. When an evolutionary biologist extols the elegance or effectiveness of a given biological “design” with respect to a given function, as in “the wings of a bird are beautifully designed for flight”, he is really talking about intrinsic utility, with which biological fitness is thus entirely synonymous. Survival and its requisites have intrinsic utility for that which survives, be it an organism or a species; that which survives derives utility from its environment in order to survive and as a result of its survival. It follows that neo-Darwinism, a theory of biological causation whose proponents have tried to restrict it to determinism and randomness, is properly a theory of intrinsic utility and thus of self-determinism. Athough neo-Darwinists claim that the kind of utility driving natural selection is non-teleological and unique to the particular independent systems being naturally selected, this claim is logically insupportable. Causality ultimately boils down to the tautological fact that on all possible scales, nature is both that which selects and that which is selected, and this means that natural selection is ultimately based on the intrinsic utility of nature at large.

But in light of causal self-containment, so is teleology. Why, then, do so many supporters of teleology and neo-Darwinism seem to think them mutually exclusive?

The Stratification Problem

It is frequently taken for granted that neo-Darwinism and ID theory are mutually incompatible, and that if one is true, then the other must be false. But while this assessment may be accurate with regard to certain inessential propositions attached to the core theories like pork-barrel riders on congressional bills,36 it is not so obvious with regard to the core theories themselves. In fact, these theories are dealing with different levels of causality.

The scientific method says that experiments must be replicable, and this means that the same laws must govern the same kinds of events under the same conditions throughout nature. So where possible, the laws of nature are scientifically formulated in such a way that they distribute over space and time, the same laws applying under similar conditions at all times and places. Science also requires that the laws of nature be formulated in such a way that the next state of an object depends only on its present state, including all of the forces impinging on it at the present moment, with no memory of prior states required. Little wonder that science enforces these two conditions with extreme prejudice wherever possible, for in principle, they guarantee its ability to predict the future of any physical system from a mere knowledge of its current state and the distributed laws of nature.37

Science imposes yet further constraints on causality. One, the empirical discernability criterion of the scientific method,38 guarantees the recognizability of physical states by insisting that they be formulated in terms of first-order properties39 called observables that can be unambiguously measured in conjunction with physical objects. Another, which we have already encountered, is the locality principle, which says that there can be no “nonlocal” jumps from one point in a physical manifold to another non-adjacent point.40

This adds an adjacency or continuity constraint to the Laplacian ideal; the laws of nature must not only be formulated in such a way that the next state of an object depends only on its present state, but in such a way that successive states are “near” each other, i.e. so that smaller amounts of time and energy correspond to smaller distances. This proportionality of distance and effect permits the laws of causality to be consistently applied on the macroscopic and microscopic scales.

Of all the preconceived restrictions and unnecessary demands imposed on causality by science, the least questioned is the requirement that the relationship between physical states and laws of nature be one-way, with states depending on laws but not vice versa. Science regards the laws of nature as immutable, states as existing and transforming at their beck and call, and the directional dependency relationship between laws and states as something that has existed for all time. When the laws dictate that an event should happen, it happens; on the other hand, any event chancing to occur without their guidance is uncaused and totally “random”. This leads to the determinacy-versus-randomness dichotomy already discussed in connection with the containment and utility problems.

Due to these criteria, what science calls a “law of nature” is typically an autonomous relationship of first-order properties of physical objects, and so for the laws of state transformation that govern causation. There can be little doubt that science has succeeded in identifying a useful set of such laws. Whether or not they suffice for a full description of nature and causality (and they do not), they are an important part of the total picture, and wherever possible, they should indeed be tracked down and exploited to their full descriptive and prescriptive potential. But at least one caveat is in order: they should be regarded as explaining only that which they can be empirically and/or rationally shown to explain. As with any other scientific assertion, they must be kept pure of any metaphysical prejudice tending to artificially inflate their scope or explanatory weight.

It is thus a matter of no small concern that in pursuing its policy of causal simplification, the scientific mainstream seems to have smuggled into its baggage compartment a certain piece of contraband which appears, despite its extreme resistance to rational or empirical justification, to be masquerading as a tacit “meta-law” of nature. It states that every higher-order relationship of objects and events in nature, regardless of complexity or level of dynamic integration, must be strictly determined by distributed laws of nature acting independently on each of its individual components. Along with the other items on the neo-Laplacian wish-list of causal conveniences to which the scientific mainstream insists that nature be held, this criterion betrays a marked preference for a “bottom-up” approach to causation, suggesting that it be called the bottom-up thesis.41

The bottom-up thesis merely underscores something that we already know about the scientific mainstream: it wants with all of its might to believe that in principle, the whole destiny of the natural world and everything in it can be exhaustively predicted and explained on the basis of (1) a Laplacian snapshot of its current details, and (2) a few distributed laws of nature from which to exhaustively develop the implications. So irresistible is this desire that some of those caught in its grip are willing to make a pair of extraordinary claims. The first is that science has completely explained some of nature's most complex systems in terms of microscopic random events simply by generically classifying the microscopic events that might possibly have been involved in their realization. The second is that observed distributions of such events, which they again call “random”, prove that no system in nature, regardless of its complexity, has ever come into being from the top down.

The genotype-to-phenotype mapping is a case in point. Many neo-Darwinists seem to have inferred that what happens near the endpoints of this mapping – the seemingly random mutation of genotypes and the brutal, deterministic competition among phenotypes – offers more insight regarding nature and causality than does the delicate, exquisitely complex ontogenic symphony performed by the mapping itself. In response to the observation that the theoretical emphasis has been lopsided, one hears that of course neo-Darwinists acknowledge the involvement of intermediate processes in the emergence of biological complexity from strings of DNA. For are not genes converted to proteins, which fold into functional forms and interact with other molecules to alter the timing of gene expression, which can lead to cytodifferentiation, pattern formation, morphogenesis and so on, and is this whole self-organizational process not highly sensitive to developmental interactions with the environment?

Unfortunately, where the acknowledged processes and interactions are still assumed to be micro-causal and deterministic, the acknowledgement is meaningless. In fact, the higher-order structure and processing of complex biological systems has only been shoveled into an unkempt pile sexily labeled “emergent phenomena” and bulldozed across the interdisciplinary divide into complex systems theory. And thus begins a ramose paper trail supposedly leading to the final owners of the explanatory debt, but instead looping, dead-ending or petering out in interdisciplinary limbo. The explanatory buck is thereby passed into oblivion, and the bottom-up thesis rolls like righteous thunder over any voice daring to question it.

In fact, the top-down and bottom-up approaches to causality are not as antithetical as they might seem. In the bottom-up view of causality, states evolve according to laws of nature in a temporal direction preferred by the second law of thermodynamics, which holds under the assumption that physical states are governed by laws of nature independent of state. But this assumption can hold only up to a point, for while the prevailing model universe supports only bottom-up causation, the situation is dramatically reversed with respect to cosmology. Because cosmological causal regression terminates with an ancestral cosmic singularity representing the whole of nature while omitting all of its details, standard cosmology ultimately supports only a top-down approach. The natural affinity of the cosmos for top-down causation – the fact that it is itself an instance of top-down causation – effectively relegates bottom-up causation to secondary status, ruling out the bottom-up thesis and thus making room for a new model universe supporting and reconciling both approaches.

It turns out that in a certain kind of model universe, the top-down and bottom-up approaches are to some degree mutually transparent.42

Two necessary features of such a model universe are (1) sufficient causal freedom to yield probabilistic resources in useful amounts, and (2) structural support for metacausal access to those resources. As it happens, a well-known ingredient of nature, quantum uncertainty, provides the required sort of causal freedom. But while nature exhibits quantum uncertainty in abundance and can thus generate probabilistic resources at a certain respectable rate, the prevailing model universe supports neither metacausal relationships nor sufficient access to these resources. In fact, it fails to adequately support even quantum mechanics itself.

The new model universe must remedy these shortcomings … but how?

Synthesis: Some Essential Features of a Unifying Model of Nature and Causality

Classical mechanics, inarguably one of the most successful theories in history, is often cited as a model of theoretical progress in the sciences. When certain problems arose that could not be solved within its conceptual framework, it was extended to create a metatheory in which it exists as a “limiting case”. In fact, this was done thrice in fairly rapid succession. The first extension created the Special Theory of Relativity, in which classical mechanics holds as a low-to-medium velocity limit. The second created the General Theory of Relativity, in the curved spacetime manifold of which the flat Minkowskian manifold of Special Relativity holds as a local limit. And the third created quantum mechanics, in which classical mechanics holds as a “decoherence limit”.43

Indeed, whenever a theory is extended by adjoining to it one or more new concepts, this creates a metatheory expressing the relationship between the adjoint concept(s) and the original theory.

The model universe of neo-Darwinism is just a special-purpose refinement of the continuous coordinate spaces of classical mechanics, and its causal limitations are shared by neo-Darwinism and most other scientific theories. This is because most sciences, not including certain branches of physics and engineering, have been unable to absorb and utilize the relativistic and quantum extensions of the classical model, each of which suffers in any event from many of the same difficulties with causality. It follows that another extension is required, and since neo-Darwinism holds true within a limited causal domain, it must hold in this extension as a limiting case (minus its inessential philosophical baggage). In other words, causality must become the objective, distributive limit of metacausality.

Such an extension has already been described (Langan 2002b), and it embodies solutions for all of the problems discussed in this paper. Concisely, it embeds physical reality in an extended logico-algebraic structure, a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL. SCSPL incorporates a pregeometric44 conspansive manifold in which the classical spacetime manifold is embedded as a limiting configuration. SCSPL brings formal and physical causality into seamless conjunction by generically equating the laws of nature with SCSPL syntax, and then contracting the semantic, model-theoretic correspondence between syntax and state (or laws and observables)45 so that they coincide in syntactic operators, physical quanta of self-transducing information. Through properties called hology (syntactic self-similarity) and triality (space-time-object conflation), total systemic self-containment is achieved. In particular, the system is self-deterministically closed under causation.

SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, a higher-order process46 of which causality is the physical limit (as required). In standard causality, physical states evolve according to laws of nature; in telic recursion, syntax-state relationships evolve by maximization of intrinsic utility. The temporal phase of telic recursion is conspansion, a dual-aspect process coordinating formal/telic and physical modes of evolution. By virtue of conspansive duality, SCSPL simultaneously evolves like a (metacausal, telic-recursive) generative grammar and a physical dynamical system, at once implementing top-down and bottom-up causation. Conspansion involves an alternation between self-replication and self-selection, thus constituting a generalization of Darwinian evolution in which specificational and replicational probabilistic resources are rationally linked. In this way, neo-Darwinist and design-theoretic (bottom-up and top-down) modes of causality become recognizable as complementary aspects of a single comprehensive evolutionary process.

From a formal standpoint, SCSPL has several unique and interesting features. Being based on logic,47 it identifies itself with the logical syntax of its perceptual universe on grounds of logical-perceptual isomorphism. This eliminates the conventional model-theoretic distinction among theory, universe and theory-universe correspondence, contracting the problematic mapping between abstract and concrete reality on the syntactic (nomological) level. This brings the physical world into coincidence with its logical counterpart, effecting dual-aspect monism and putting logical attributes on the same explanatory footing as physical attributes. SCSPL thus adjoins logic to nature, injecting48 nature with the abstract logical infrastructure of perception and theorization and endowing physical reality with the remedial conceptual apparatus demanded by the problems, paradoxes and explanatory deficiencies straining its classical descriptions. At the same time, it adjoins nature to logic in the form of perceptual categories and necessary high-level properties including closure, comprehensiveness, consistency and teleo-nomological coherence, thus opening logical routes to physical insight.

SCSPL offers yet further advantages. In defining nature to include logic and cognition, it relates physics and mathematics on a basic level, thus merging the rational foundations of mathematics with the perceptual foundations of physics and letting each provide crucial support for the other. By affording an integrated conceptual framework for prior conflicting extensions of classical reality, it sets the stage for their ultimate reconciliation. And its cross-interpretation of the cognitive and physical aspects of nature renders the universe self-explaining and self-modeling, thus effecting self-containment on the theoretic and model-theoretic levels. That is, SCSPL self-containment effects not just causal and generative closure, but closure under the inverse operations of explanation and interpretation, thus permitting nature to physically model and teleo-nomologically justify its own self-configurative determinations. In SCSPL, natural laws and physical states are seen as expressions of the intrinsic utility of nature by and for nature.

The reflexive self-processing and (telic) self-configuration functions of SCSPL imply that nature possesses generalized functional analogues of human self-awareness and volition, and thus a generalized capacity for utilitarian self-design. The self-design and self-modeling capacity of nature suggests that the universe is a kind of stratified “self-simulation” in which the physical and logico-telic aspects of reality can be regarded as respectively “simulated” and “simulative” in a generalized quantum-computational sense. This makes SCSPL relevant to self-organization, emergence and other complexity-theoretic phenomena increasingly attractive to the proponents of neo-Darwinism and other causally-challenged theories. At the same time, the fact that SCSPL evolution is both nomologically coherent and subject to a rational intrinsic utility criterion implies that the universe possesses properties equivalent to generalized intelligence, suggesting the possibility of an integrated SCSPL approach to the problems of consciousness and evolution.

The overall theory which logically extends the concepts of nature and causality to SCSPL and telic recursion, thereby merging the perceptual manifold with its cognitive and telic infrastructure, is known as the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, and its approach to biological origins and evolution is called Teleologic Evolution.49

Based on the concept of telic-recursive metacausation, Teleologic Evolution is a dynamic interplay of replication and selection through which the universe creates itself and the life it contains. Teleologic Evolution is a stratified process which occurs on levels respectively associated with the evolution of the cosmos and the evolution of life, thus permitting organic evolution to mirror that of the universe in which it occurs. It improves on traditional approaches to teleology by extending the concept of nature in a way eliminating any need for “supernatural” intervention, and it improves on neo-Darwinism by addressing the full extent of nature and its causal dynamics.

Due to their implicit reliance on different notions of causality, teleology and evolution were once considered mutually exclusory. While teleology appears to require a looping kind of causality consistent with the idea that ends are immanent in nature (even in beginnings), evolution seems to require that mutation and natural selection exhibit some combination of nondeterminacy and linear determinacy. In contrast, the phrase Teleologic Evolution reflects their complementarity within a coherent self-configurative ensemble identifying nature with its own utilitarian self-actualization imperative. In the associated metacausal extension of physical reality, the two central processes of evolution, replication and selection, are seen to occur on at least two mutually-facilitative levels respectively associated with the evolution of the universe and that of organic life.50

Meanwhile, the intrinsic utility criterion of self-selection implies that nature, as rationally defined in the CTMU, possesses a generalized form of intelligence by which all levels of evolution are driven and directed, equating selection with specification and metacausally relating it to replication.51

Reality is united with its generative principle by the rational linkage between the domain and codomain of the teleological, meta-Darwinian level of natural selection.

Because nature consists of all that is logically relevant to perception, and logic consists of the rules of thought and therefore comprises an essential theory of cognition, the CTMU couples mind and nature in a way suggestive of Ouroboros divided and reunited … two intimately entwined constrictors, estranged centuries ago by mind-body dualism but now locked in a renewed embrace, each swallowing the other's entailments. Perhaps this reunion will deter the militant torch-bearers of scientific naturalism from further reneging on their explanatory debts and fleecing mankind of its millennial hopes and dreams after all. And if so, then perhaps mankind can snuff the rapidly dwindling fuse of its insidious ontological identity crisis while these hopes and dreams still have a fighting chance of realization, and the intrinsic utility of mankind is still salvageable.

References

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Langan, C. M. (2002) The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory. Princeton, MO: Mega Foundation Press. Originally published in Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Double Issue, Vols. 1.2-3.

Abstract

Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.

Introduction

Among the most exciting recent developments in science are Complexity Theory, the theory of self-organizing systems, and the modern incarnation of Intelligent Design Theory, which investigates the deep relationship between self-organization and evolutionary biology in a scientific context not preemptively closed to teleological causation. Bucking the traditional physical reductionism of the hard sciences, complexity theory has given rise to a new trend, informational reductionism, which holds that the basis of reality is not matter and energy, but information. Unfortunately, this new form of reductionism is as problematic as the old one. As mathematician David Berlinski (2001) writes regarding the material and informational aspects of DNA: “We quite know what DNA is: it is a macromolecule and so a material object. We quite know what it achieves: apparently everything. Are the two sides of this equation in balance?” More generally, Berlinski observes that since the information embodied in a string of DNA or protein cannot affect the material dynamic of reality without being read by a material transducer, information is meaningless without matter.

The relationship between physical and informational reductionism is a telling one, for it directly mirrors Cartesian mind-matter dualism, the source of several centuries of philosophical and scientific controversy regarding the nature of deep reality (Wozniak, 1992). As long as matter and information remain separate, with specialists treating one as primary while tacitly relegating the other to secondary status, dualism remains in effect. To this extent, history is merely repeating itself; where mind and matter once vied with each other for primary status, concrete matter now vies with abstract information abstractly representing matter and its extended relationships. But while the formal abstractness and concrete descriptiveness of information seem to make it a worthy compromise between mind and matter, Berlinski’s comment demonstrates its inadequacy as a conceptual substitute. What is now required is thus what has been required all along: a conceptual framework in which the relationship between mind and matter, cognition and information, is made explicit. This framework must not only permit the completion of the gradual ongoing dissolution of the Cartesian mind-matter divider, but the construction of a footworthy logical bridge across the resulting explanatory gap.

Mathematically, the theoretical framework of Intelligent Design consists of certain definitive principles governing the application of complexity and probability to the analysis of two key attributes of evolutionary phenomena, irreducible complexity (Behe, 1998) and specified complexity (Dembski, 1998). On one hand, because the mathematics of probability must be causally interpreted to be scientifically meaningful, and because probabilities are therefore expressly relativized to specific causal scenarios, it is difficult to assign definite probabilities to evolutionary states in any model not supporting the detailed reconstruction and analysis of specific causal pathways. On the other hand, positing the “absolute improbability” of an evolutionary state ultimately entails the specification of an absolute (intrinsic global) model with respect to which absolute probabilistic deviations can be determined. A little reflection suffices to inform us of some of its properties: it must be rationally derivable from a priori principles and essentially tautological in nature, it must on some level identify matter and information, and it must eliminate the explanatory gap between the mental and physical aspects of reality. Furthermore, in keeping with the name of that to be modeled, it must meaningfully incorporate the intelligence and design concepts, describing the universe as an intelligently self-designed, self-organizing system.

How is this to be done? In a word, with language. This does not mean merely that language should be used as a tool to analyze reality, for this has already been done countless times with varying degrees of success. Nor does it mean that reality should be regarded as a machine language running in some kind of vast computer. It means using language as a mathematical paradigm unto itself. Of all mathematical structures, language is the most general, powerful and necessary. Not only is every formal or working theory of science and mathematics by definition a language, but science and mathematics in whole and in sum are languages. Everything that can be described or conceived, including every structure or process or law, is isomorphic to a description or definition and therefore qualifies as a language, and every sentient creature constantly affirms the linguistic structure of nature by exploiting syntactic isomorphism to perceive, conceptualize and refer to it. Even cognition and perception are languages based on what Kant might have called “phenomenal syntax”. With logic and mathematics counted among its most fundamental syntactic ingredients, language defines the very structure of information. This is more than an empirical truth; it is a rational and scientific necessity.

Of particular interest to natural scientists is the fact that the laws of nature are a language. To some extent, nature is regular; the basic patterns or general aspects of structure in terms of which it is apprehended, whether or not they have been categorically identified, are its “laws”. The existence of these laws is given by the stability of perception. Because these repetitive patterns or universal laws simultaneously describe multiple instances or states of nature, they can be regarded as distributed “instructions” from which self-instantiations of nature cannot deviate; thus, they form a “control language” through which nature regulates its self-instantiations. This control language is not of the usual kind, for it is somehow built into the very fabric of reality and seems to override the known limitations of formal systems. Moreover, it is profoundly reflexive and self-contained with respect to configuration, execution and read-write operations. Only the few and the daring have been willing to consider how this might work … to ask where in reality the laws might reside, how they might be expressed and implemented, why and how they came to be, and how their consistency and universality are maintained. Although these questions are clearly of great scientific interest, science alone is logically inadequate to answer them; a new explanatory framework is required. This paper describes what the author considers to be the most promising framework in the simplest and most direct terms possible.

On a note of forbearance, there has always been comfort in the belief that the standard hybrid empirical-mathematical methods of physics and cosmology will ultimately suffice to reveal the true heart of nature. However, there have been numerous signals that it may be time to try a new approach. With true believers undaunted by the (mathematically factual) explanatory limitations of the old methods, we must of course empathize; it is hard to question one’s prior investments when one has already invested all the faith that one has. But science and philosophy do not progress by regarding their past investments as ends in themselves; the object is always to preserve that which is valuable in the old methods while adjoining new methods that refine their meaning and extend their horizons. The new approach that we will be exploring in this paper, which might be colorfully rendered as “reality theory is wedded to language theory and they beget a synthesis”, has the advantage that it leaves the current picture of reality virtually intact. It merely creates a logical mirror image of the current picture (its conspansive dual), merges the symmetric halves of the resulting picture, and attempts to extract meaningful implications. Science as we now know it is thereby changed but little in return for what may, if fate smiles upon us, turn out to be vast gains in depth, significance and explanatory power.

And on that note, I thank you for your kind attention and wish you a fruitful journey.

On Theories, Models and False Dichotomies

It has almost become embarrassing to point out that science is in a state of crisis … not because it is untrue, but because it has become a cliché too often accompanied by little or no remedial insight. For all of the magnificent achievements of science, its grander ambitions long ago succeeded in taxing its traditional models and organizational principles beyond their explanatory limits. In the search for ever deeper and broader explanations, science has reached the point at which it can no longer deny the existence of intractable conceptual difficulties devolving to the explanatory inadequacies of its fundamental conceptual models of reality. This has spawned a new discipline known as reality theory, the study of the nature of reality in its broadest sense. The overall goal of reality theory is to provide new models and new paradigms in terms of which reality can be understood, and the consistency of science restored as it deepens and expands in scope.

Mainstream reality theory counts among its hotter foci the interpretation of quantum theory and its reconciliation with classical physics, the study of subjective consciousness and its relationship to objective material reality, the reconciliation of science and mathematics, complexity theory, cosmology, and related branches of science, mathematics, philosophy and theology. But in an integrated sense, it is currently in an exploratory mode, being occupied with the search for a general conceptual framework in which to develop a more specific theory and model of reality capable of resolving the paradoxes and conceptual inconsistencies plaguing its various fields of interest (where a model is technically defined as a valid interpretation of a theory in its universe of reference). Because of the universal scope of reality theory, it is subject to unique if seldom-recognized demands; for example, since it is by definition a universal theory of everything that is real, it must by definition contain its rules of real-world interpretation. That is, reality theory must contain its own model and effect its own self-interpretative mapping thereto, and it must conform to the implications of this requirement. This “self-modeling” capacity is a primary criterion of the required framework.

The ranks of reality theorists include researchers from almost every scientific discipline. As the physical sciences have become more invested in a quantum mechanical view of reality, and as science in general has become more enamored of and dependent on computer simulation as an experimental tool, the traditional continuum model of classical physics has gradually lost ground to a new class of models to which the concepts of information and computation are essential. Called “discrete models”, they depict reality in terms of bits, quanta, quantum events, computational operations and other discrete, recursively-related units. Whereas continuum models are based on the notion of a continuum, a unified extensible whole with one or more distance parameters that can be infinitely subdivided in such a way that any two distinct points are separated by an infinite number of intermediate points, discrete models are distinguished by realistic acknowledgement of the fact that it is impossible to describe or define a change or separation in any way that does not involve a sudden finite jump in some parameter.

Unfortunately, the advantages of discrete models, which are receiving increasingly serious consideration from the scientific and philosophical communities, are outweighed by certain basic deficiencies. Not only do they exhibit scaling and nonlocality problems associated with their “display hardware”, but they are inadequate by themselves to generate the conceptual infrastructure required to explain the medium, device or array in which they evolve, or their initial states and state-transition programming. Moreover, they remain anchored in materialism, objectivism and Cartesian dualism, each of which has proven obstructive to the development of a comprehensive explanation of reality. Materialism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful nonmaterial aspect, objectivism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful subjective aspect, and although Cartesian dualism technically excludes neither, it arbitrarily denies that the mental and material, or subjective and objective, sides of reality share common substance.1

One might almost get the impression that the only two available choices are the classical model, to which quantum theory has been fastened with approximately the same degree of cogency as antlers on a jackrabbit, and the newer discrete models, which purport to be more in line with quantum theory but fall by the wayside en route to the new kind of quantum cosmology they portentously seem to promise. For such claims exhibit an unmistakable irony: classical reality is precisely that on which information and computation are defined! Like classical reality itself, a well-defined entity unable to account for its own genesis, information and computation are well-defined and non-self-generative aspects of reality as it is observationally presented to us at an advanced stage of its existence. So they invite the same questions as does classical reality: how, and by what, were they originally defined and generated? Without an answer to this question, little can be gained by replacing one kind of reality with the other.

Some may have felt, as they watched the history of Big Theories and New Paradigms unfold over the last few years, as though they were being forced to watch the same show, or read the same novel, a thousand times in tedious succession with no more than an occasional minor revision of plot or character. However, there is a third alternative which has thus far remained in the background. It provides exactly what is required in light of any thesis and antithesis: synthesis. This synthesis yields a new class of model(s)2 preserving the best features of both thesis and antithesis, continuum and quantum, uniting them through general and preferably self-evident principles. This paper presents this new class through a single example, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU).

Determinacy, Indeterminacy and the Third Option

Like the mathematics, science and philosophy whence they issue, classical continuum and modern discrete models of reality generally allow for exactly two modes of determinacy: external causality, and acausality or “randomness”. Given an object, event, set or process, it is usually assumed to have come about in one or both of just two ways:

1. Its existence owes to something prior and external to it.

2. It is uncaused and sprang forth spontaneously and pointlessly in a something-from-nothing, rabbit-out-of-the-hat sort of way, as if by magic.

A similar assumption is made with regard to its behavior: either it is controlled by laws that are invariant with respect to it and therefore existentially external to it (even though they control it through its intrinsic structure and properties), or it is behaving in an utterly aleatory and uncontrolled fashion. This has given rise to a dichotomy: determinacy versus randomness, or a total absence of causation versus causation by laws that are ultimately independent of the determined entity.

Determinacy and indeterminacy … at first glance, there seems to be no middle ground. Events are either causally connected or they are not, and if they are not, then the future would seem to be utterly independent of the past. Either we use causality to connect the dots and draw a coherent picture of time, or we settle for a random scattering of independent dots without spatial or temporal pattern and thus without meaning. At the risk of understatement, the philosophical effects of this assumed dichotomy have been corrosive in the extreme. No universe that exists or evolves strictly as a function of external determinacy, randomness or an alternation of the two can offer much in the way of meaning. Where freedom and volition are irrelevant, so is much of human experience and individuality.

But there is another possibility after all: self-determinacy. Self-determinacy is like a circuitous boundary separating the poles of the above dichotomy … a reflexive and therefore closed boundary, the formation of which involves neither preexisting laws nor external structure. Thus, it is the type of causal attribution suitable for a perfectly self-contained system. Self-determinacy is a deep but subtle concept, owing largely to the fact that unlike either determinacy or randomness, it is a source of bona fide meaning. Where a system determines its own composition, properties and evolution independently of external laws or structures, it can determine its own meaning, and ensure by its self-configuration that its inhabitants are crucially implicated therein.

If determinacy corresponds to an arrow of causation pointing to an event from a surrounding medium, then indeterminacy corresponds to no arrow at all (acausality), and self-determinacy to a looping arrow or complex of arrows involving some kind of feedback. But cybernetic feedback, which involves information passed among controllers and regulated entities through a conductive or transmissive medium, is meaningless where such entities do not already exist, and where no sensory or actuative protocol has yet been provided. With respect to the origin of any self-determinative, perfectly self-contained system, the feedback is ontological in nature and therefore more than cybernetic. Accordingly, ontological feedback bears description as “precybernetic” or “metacybernetic”. Indeed, because of their particularly close relationship, the theories of information, computation and cybernetics are all in line for a convergent extension … an extension that can, in a reality-theoretic context, lay much of the groundwork for a convergent extension of all that is covered by their respective formalisms.3

Ordinary feedback, describing the evolution of mechanical (and with somewhat less success, biological) systems, is cyclical or recursive. The system and its components repeatedly call on internal structures, routines and actuation mechanisms in order to acquire input, generate corresponding internal information, internally communicate and process this information, and evolve to appropriate states in light of input and programming. However, where the object is to describe the evolution of a system from a state in which there is no information or programming (information-processing syntax) at all, a new kind of feedback is required: “telic feedback”.

The currency of telic feedback is a quantifiable self-selection parameter, generalized utility, a generalized property of law and state in the maximization of which they undergo mutual refinement (note that generalized utility is self-descriptive or autologous, intrinsically and retroactively defined within the system, and “pre-informational” in the sense that it assigns no specific property to any specific object). Through telic feedback, a system retroactively self-configures by reflexively applying a “generalized utility function” to its internal existential potential or possible futures. In effect, the system brings itself into existence as a means of atemporal communication between its past and future whereby law and state, syntax and informational content, generate and refine each other across time to maximize total systemic self-utility. This defines a situation in which the true temporal identity of the system is a distributed point of temporal equilibrium that is both between and inclusive of past and future. In this sense, the system is timeless or atemporal.

A system that evolves by means of telic recursion – and ultimately, every system must either be, or be embedded in, such a system as a condition of existence – is not merely computational, but protocomputational. That is, its primary level of processing configures its secondary (computational and informational) level of processing by telic recursion. Telic recursion can be regarded as the self-determinative mechanism of not only cosmogony, but a natural, scientific form of teleology.

However, before taking these ideas any further, let’s attend a little orientation session based on the remarkably penetrating vision of John Archibald Wheeler, a preeminent scientist and reality theorist whose name is virtually synonymous with modern physics.

The Future of Reality Theory According to John Wheeler

In 1979, the celebrated physicist John Wheeler, having coined the phrase “black hole”, put it to good philosophical use in the title of an exploratory paper, “Beyond the Black Hole” (Wheeler, 1980), in which he describes the universe as a self-excited circuit. The paper includes an illustration in which one side of an uppercase U, ostensibly standing for Universe, is endowed with a large and rather intelligent-looking eye intently regarding the other side, which it ostensibly acquires through observation as sensory information. By dint of placement, the eye stands for the sensory or cognitive aspect of reality, perhaps even a human spectator within the universe, while the eye’s perceptual target represents the informational aspect of reality. By virtue of these complementary aspects, it seems that the universe can in some sense, but not necessarily that of common usage, be described as “conscious” and “introspective” … perhaps even “infocognitive”.

Wheeler, an eminent and highly capable representative of those familiar with the advantages and deficiencies of our current models of reality, did not arrive at the given illustration as an isolated speculation. In conjunction with several other Wheeler concepts, the Participatory Universe, Law without Law and It from Bit, the self-excited circuit amounts to a preliminary but well-considered program for describing the physical universe. According to its mandate, the true description of reality must possess two novel features not found in any dominant paradigm:

1. Global structural and dynamical reflexivity or “self-excited circuitry”, with perception an integral part of the self-recognition function of reality.

2. Matter-information equivalence, an identification (up to isomorphism) of concrete physical reality with information, the abstract currency of perception.

Together, these features constitute a cosmological extension of cybernetics, or equivalently, a metacybernetic extension of cosmology.

Wheeler characterizes these four concepts as follows:

The Self-Excited Circuit A participatory universe is a self-excited circuit in the sense that it implicates observers in (perceptual, ontological) feedback. It is a “logic loop” in which “physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics” (Wheeler, 1990a, p. 8).

The Participatory Universe The cognitive and perceptual processes of observers are integral to the self-excitative feedback of reality. This is asserted by the Participatory Principle (or Participatory Anthropic Principle), which Wheeler (1979) informally describes as follows:

Stronger than the Anthropic Principle is what I might call the Participatory Principle. According to it, we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers, because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy. … This participatory principle takes for its foundation the absolutely central point of the quantum: no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon [emphasis added].

Note that on some level of generality, the last sentence identifies observation with registration and thus implicitly equates human and mechanical recognition: “… an observed (or registered) phenomenon” [emphasis again added].

Law Without Law / Order from Disorder Concisely, nothing can be taken as given when it comes to cosmogony. In Professor Wheeler’s (1979) own words:

To me, the greatest discovery yet to come will be to find how this universe, coming into being from a Big Bang, developed its laws of operation. I call this “Law without Law” [or “Order from Disorder”]. … imagine the universe with all its regularities and its laws coming into being out of something utterly helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy and random … If you were the Lord constructing the universe, how would you have gone about it? It’s inspiring to read the life of Charles Darwin and think how the division of plant and animal kingdoms, all this myriad of order, came about through the miracles of evolution, natural selection and chance mutation. To me this is a marvelous indication that you can get order by starting with disorder.

It From Bit Reality educes and/or produces itself in the form of information residing in quantum events. As Wheeler summarizes in his paper “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” (1990a, p. 3-4): “… every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications…” He then goes on to discuss this concept at length, offering three questions, four “no’s” and five “clues” about the quantum-informational character of reality. The questions are as follows: (1) How come existence? (2) How come the quantum? (3) How come the “one world” out of many observer-participants? The no’s, seductive pitfalls to be avoided in answering the three questions, include No tower of turtles, No laws, No continuum, and No space, no time. And the clues, which light the way toward the true answers, include The boundary of a boundary is zero; No question? No answer!; The Super-Copernican Principle; “Consciousness” (including the quotes); and More is different.

We will now give a brief account of these questions, precautions and clues.4

How come existence? The ontological and cosmological thrust of this question is obvious; in some form, it has bedeviled philosophers from time immemorial. As interpreted by Wheeler, it leads to four inevitable conclusions:

(1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any pre-established continuum physical law. (2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum. (3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive. (4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

How come the quantum? Why is the universe made up of apparently propter hoc nondeterministic, but post hoc informational, quantum events? As Wheeler observes: “Quantum physics requires a new view of reality.” What, then, is the exact logical relationship between the quantum and the new view of reality it demands? What is this new view, and how does the quantum fit into it?

How come the “one world” out of many observer-participants? Insofar as the term “observer-participants” embraces scientists and other human beings, this question invites a quasi-anthropological interpretation. Why should a universe consisting of separate observers with sometimes conflicting agendas and survival imperatives display structural and nomological unity? Where observers are capable of creating events within the global unitary manifold of their common universe, why should they not be doing it strictly for themselves, each in his or her own universe, and never the twain shall meet? Where the observer-participant concept is generalized to include non-anthropic information-transducing systems, what is holding all of these systems together in a single unified reality?

No tower of turtles Borrowed from William James, this aphorism means “no infinite regress to ever-prior causal domains and principles”. To this we might equate an updated version of a well-known aphorism credited to Harry Truman: “The explanatory buck stops here”, where here refers to this reality that we actually inhabit and observe. To this Wheeler adds a crucial insight: “To endlessness no alternative is evident but loop, such a loop as this: Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics.”

No laws Wheeler states that the universe must have come into being without “a pre-existing plan … Only a principle of organization which is no organization at all would seem to offer itself ”. Or to reiterate: “The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any pre-established continuum physical law.”

No continuum The venerable continuum of analysis and mechanics is a mathematical and physical chimera. (Usually associated with the set of real numbers, a continuum is a unified extensible whole with a distance parameter that can be infinitely subdivided in such a way that any two distinct points are separated by an infinite number of intermediate points.) As Wheeler puts it: “A half-century of development in the sphere of mathematical logic has made it clear that there is no evidence supporting the belief in the existential character of the number continuum.” Some numbers, e.g. irrational ones like √2, cannot be precisely computed and therefore do not correspond to any physically meaningful location on a number line or physical trajectory; they have an abstract existence only.

No space, no time Again, “there is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.” On the submicroscopic level, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle turns spacetime into seemingly chaotic “quantum foam”, casting doubt on the connectivity of space and the ordinality of time. Wheeler quotes Einstein in a Kantian vein: ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live’, regarding these modes as derivable from a proper theory of reality as idealized functions of an idealized continuum: “We will not feed time into any deep-reaching account of existence. We must derive time – and time only in the continuum idealization – out of it. Likewise with space.”

The boundary of a boundary is zero In essence, this intuitive notion from algebraic topology says that closed structures embody a certain kind of “self-cancellative” symmetry. This can be illustrated in three dimensions by a tetrahedron, the simplicial “boundary” of which incorporates its four equilateral triangular faces. To find the boundary of this boundary, one would measure the clockwise- or counterclockwise-oriented edges around each face, thus measuring each edge of the tetrahedron twice in opposite directions. Because summing the measurements now cancels to 0 at each edge, the boundary of the boundary of the tetrahedron is zero. This property turns out to have extensive applications in physics, particularly the theory of fields, as regards the mutual “grip” of matter on space and space on matter (or less colorfully, the relationship of space and matter). In Wheeler’s view, its ubiquity “inspires hope that we will someday complete the mathematization of physics and derive everything from nothing, all law from no law.” Thus, it is closely related to law without law and so-called ex nihilo creation.

No question? No answer! In a quantum experiment, the measuring device and its placement correspond to a question, and the result to its answer. The existence of the answer, consisting of information on state, is predicated on the asking of the question (or the occurrence of the measurement), and the kind of answer received depends on the kind of question asked and the manner in which it is posed. The world is thus composed of measurement events in which information is exchanged by objects, one or both of which “ask a question” and one or both of which “give an answer”. Question and answer, the stimulation and observation of an event, cannot be separated on the ontological level, and they cannot be shielded from the influence of the environment. At the root of this criterion are quantum uncertainty and complementarity, the foundation-stones of quantum mechanics.

The Super-Copernican Principle Just as Copernicus displaced geocentricity with heliocentricity, showing by extension that no particular place in the universe is special and thereby repudiating “here-centeredness”, the Super-Copernican Principle says that no particular point in time is special, repudiating “now-centeredness”. Essentially, this means that where observer-participation functions retroactively, the participatory burden is effectively distributed throughout time. So although the “bit-size” of the universe is too great to have been completely generated by the observer-participants who have thus far existed, future generations of observer-participants, possibly representing modes of observer-participation other than that associated with human observation, have been and are now weighing in from the future. (The relevance of this principle to the Participatory Anthropic Principle is self-evident.)

“Consciousness” Wheeler emphasizes the difficulty of making a general distinction between the form of information processing characteristic of humans, and that characteristic of various complex systems and devices that may or may not be “conscious”. “The line between the unconscious and the conscious begins to fade …,” he states. “We may someday have to enlarge the scope of what we mean by a ‘who’.” The term who, he suggests, is too specific to man, life and consciousness; its anthropic connotations are anti-Copernican, while the concepts of life and consciousness are subject to revision as science advances. “It would seem more reasonable,” he suggests, “to dismiss for the present the semantic overtones of ‘who’ and explore and exploit the insights to be won from the phrases, ‘communication’ and ‘communication employed to establish meaning’.”

More is different The potential for complexity increases with cardinality; with large numbers of elements comes combinatorial variety and the potential for the sort of multilevel logical structure that typifies biological organisms and modern computers alike. This is a fundamental precept of complexity theory. Wheeler poses a question: “Will we someday understand time and space and all the other features that distinguish physics – and existence itself – as the … self-generated organs of a self-synthesized information system?”

Together, these pithy slogans, questions, precautions and clues add up to a call for a new strain of reality theory, a unified conceptual model for our thoughts and observations. How many of the models currently being held forth respond to this call? The answer, of course, is “almost none”. While some of them seem to address one or two of the questions and meet one or two of the criteria, none comes close to addressing and meeting all of them. What each model has been forced to give in order to meet any small subset of criteria has cost it dearly in terms of meeting the others. Thus, we have thesis and antithesis in the form of classical physics and discrete quantum models, but because the full depth of the relationship between the two is unfathomed, no synthesis. Virtually everybody seems to acknowledge the correctness of Wheeler’s insights, but the higher-order relationships required to put it all together in one big picture have proven elusive. The logical difficulty of answering all of the questions and meeting all of the criteria at once, in parallel, using integrated, logically tractable concepts, has simply been prohibitive.

Can this situation be redressed?

Some Additional Principles

Although insights regarding the ideal and/or perceptual basis of reality go back millennia, we may as well start with some their more recent proponents for the sake of continuity. First, Descartes posited that reality is mental in the sense of rationalism, but contradicted his own thesis by introducing mind-body dualism, the notion that mind and matter are irreducibly separate. The empiricist Berkeley then said that reality is perceptual in nature, a kind of intersect of mind and matter. This can be seen by mentally subtracting perception from one’s conception of reality; what remains is pure subjective cognition, but without any objective grist for the perceptual mill. (Although attempts to cognitively subtract cognition from reality are far more common, they are a bit like trying to show that a sponge is not inherently wet while immersing it in water, and can never be successful on the parts of cognitive entities.) Hume then attempted to do away with cognition and causation entirely, asserting that both mind and matter inhere in perception and exist apart from neither it nor each other.

In disposing of mind, Hume made another salient “contribution” to reality theory: he attempted to dispose of causation by identifying it as a cognitive artifact, supporting his thesis with the problem of induction.5 The problem of induction states that because empirical induction entails the prior assumption of that which it seeks to establish, namely the uniformity of nature, science is circular and fundamentally flawed. The problem of induction is very real; it is manifest in Heisenberg uncertainty and the cosmic horizon problem, finite limitations of scientific tools of microscopic and macroscopic observation, and is why no general theory of reality can ever be reliably constructed by the standard empirical methods of science. Unfortunately, many scientists have either dismissed this problem or quietly given up on the search for a truly general theory, in neither case serving the long-term interests of science. In fact, the problem of induction merely implies that a global theory of reality can only be established by the rational methods of mathematics, specifically including those of logic.

In response to Berkeley and Hume, Kant asserted that the unprimed cognition which remains when perceptual content is subtracted has intrinsic structure that exists prior to content; it comprises the a priori categories of perceptual or “phenomenal” reality (Russell, 1979). Unfortunately, subtracting perception according to Kantian rules yields more than unprimed cognition; it also yields noumena, absolute objects or “things-in-themselves”. On one side of the result is a perceptual isomorphism between the mind and phenomenal reality; on the other yawns a chasm on the far side of which sits an unknowable but nonetheless fundamental noumenal reality, which Kant evidently regarded as the last word in (sub-theological) reality theory.

However, Kant’s chasm is so deep and wide, and so thoroughly interdicts any mind-reality isomorphism, that it precludes causal efficacy and for that matter any other comprehensible principle of correspondence. This implies that noumena are both rationally and empirically irrelevant to cognitive and perceptual reality, and thus that they can be safely eliminated from reality theory. Whatever Kant had in mind when he introduced the concept of a noumenon, his definition essentially amounts to “inconceivable concept” and is thus an oxymoron. Whatever he really meant, we must rely on something other than Kantian metaphysics to find it (Langan, 2001b).

Thus far, we have managed to narrow reality down to the phenomenal reality studied by science, a combination of perceptual content and rational principles of cognition. A scientist employs empirical methods to make specific observations, applies general cognitive relationships from logic and mathematics in order to explain them, and comes off treating reality as a blend of perception and cognition. But this treatment lacks anything resembling an explicit justification. When a set of observations is explained with a likely set of equations interpreted therein, the adhesion between explanandum and explanation might as well be provided by rubber cement. I.e., scientific explanations and interpretations glue observations and equations together in a very poorly understood way. It often works like a charm … but why? One of the main purposes of reality theory is to answer this question.

The first thing to notice about this question is that it involves the process of attribution, and that the rules of attribution are set forth in stages by mathematical logic. The first stage is called sentential logic and contains the rules for ascribing the attributes true or false, respectively denoting inclusion or non-inclusion in arbitrary cognitive-perceptual systems, to hypothetical relationships in which predicates are linked by the logical functors not, and, or, implies, and if and only if. Sentential logic defines these functors as truth functions assigning truth values to such expressions irrespective of the contents (but not the truth values) of their predicates, thus effecting a circular definition of functors on truth values and truth values on functors. The next stage of attribution, predicate logic, ascribes specific properties to objects using quantifiers. And the final stage, model theory, comprises the rules for attributing complex relations of predicates to complex relations of objects, i.e. theories to universes. In addition, the form of attribution called definition is explicated in a theory-centric branch of logic called formalized theories, and the mechanics of functional attribution is treated in recursion theory.

In sentential logic, a tautology is an expression of functor-related sentential variables that is always true, regardless of the truth values assigned to its sentential variables themselves. A tautology has three key properties: it is universally (syntactically) true, it is thus self-referential (true even of itself and therefore closed under recursive self-composition), and its implications remain consistent under inferential operations preserving these properties. That is, every tautology is a self-consistent circularity of universal scope, possessing validity by virtue of closure under self-composition, comprehensiveness (non-exclusion of truth), and consistency (freedom from irresolvable paradox). But tautologies are not merely consistent unto themselves; they are mutually consistent under mutual composition, making sentential logic as much a “self-consistent circularity of universal scope” as any one of its tautologies. Thus, sentential logic embodies two levels of tautology, one applying to expressions and one applying to theoretical systems thereof. Predicate logic then extends the tautology concept to cover the specific acts of attribution represented by (formerly anonymous) sentential variables, and model theory goes on to encompass more complex acts of attribution involving more complex relationships.

Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe. In this sense, it is closely related to sentential logic. In particular, sentential logic has four main properties to be emulated by reality theory. The first is absolute truth; as the formal definition of truth, it is true by definition. The other properties are closure, comprehensiveness and consistency. I.e., logic is wholly based on, and defined strictly within the bounds of, cognition and perception; it applies to everything that can be coherently perceived or conceived; and it is by its very nature consistent, being designed in a way that precludes inconsistency. It is the basis of mathematics, being the means by which propositions are stated, proved or disproved, and it is the core of science, underwriting the integrity of rational and empirical methodology. Even so-called “nonstandard” logics, e.g. modal, fuzzy and many-valued logics, must be expressed in terms of fundamental two-valued logic to make sense. In short, two-valued logic is something without which reality could not exist. If it were eliminated, then true and false, real and unreal, and existence and nonexistence could not be distinguished, and the merest act of perception or cognition would be utterly impossible.

Thus far, it has been widely assumed that reality theory can be sought by the same means as any other scientific theory. But this is not quite true, for while science uses the epistemological equivalent of magic glue to attach its theories to its observations, reality theory must give a recipe for the glue and justify the means of application. That is, reality theory must describe reality on a level that justifies science, and thus occupies a deeper level of explanation than science itself. Does this mean that reality theory is mathematical? Yes, but since mathematics must be justified along with science, metamathematical would perhaps be a better description … and when all is said and done, this comes down to logic pure and simple. It follows that reality theory must take the form of an extended logic … in fact, a “limiting form” of logic in which the relationship between theory and universe, until now an inexhaustible source of destructive model-theoretic ambiguity, is at last reduced to (dual-aspect) monic form, short-circuiting the paradox of Cartesian dualism and eliminating the epistemological gap between mind and matter, theory and universe.

As complexity rises and predicates become theories, tautology and truth become harder to recognize. Because universality and specificity are at odds in practice if not in principle, they are subject to a kind of “logical decoherence” associated with relational stratification. Because predicates are not always tautological, they are subject to various kinds of ambiguity; as they become increasingly specific and complex, it becomes harder to locally monitor the heritability of consistency and locally keep track of the truth property in the course of attribution (or even after the fact). Undecidability (Gödel, 1962), LSAT intractability and NP-completeness, predicate ambiguity and the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, observational ambiguity and the Duhem–Quine6 are some of the problems that emerge once the truth predicate “decoheres” with respect to complex attributive mappings. It is for reasons like these that the philosophy of science has fallen back on falsificationist doctrine, giving up on the tautological basis of logic, effectively demoting truth to provisional status, and discouraging full appreciation of the tautological-syntactic level of scientific inquiry even in logic and philosophy themselves.

In fact, the validity of scientific theories and of science as a whole absolutely depends on the existence of a fundamental reality-theoretic framework spanning all of science … a fundamental syntax from which all scientific and mathematical languages, and the extended cognitive language of perception itself, can be grammatically unfolded, cross-related and validated. Tautology, the theoretical basis of truth as embodied in sentential logic, is obviously the core of this syntax. Accordingly, reality theory must be developed through amplification of this tautological syntax by adjunction of additional syntactic components, the principles of reality theory, which leave the overall character of the syntax invariant. Specifically, in order to fashion a reality theory that has the truth property in the same sense as does logic, but permits the logical evaluation of statements about space and time and law, we must adjoin principles of extension that lend meaning to such statements while preserving the tautology property.

According to the nature of sentential logic, truth is tautologically based on the integrity of cognitive and perceptual reality. Cognition and perception comprise the primitive (self-definitive) basis of logic, and logic comprises the rules of structure and inference under which perception and cognition are stable and coherent. So when we say that truth is heritable under logical rules of inference, we really mean that tautology is heritable, and that the primitive cognitive-perceptual basis of sentential logic thus maintains its primary status. By converting tautologies into other tautologies, the rules of inference of sentential logic convert cognitive-perceptual invariants into other such invariants. To pursue this agenda in reality theory, we must identify principles that describe how the looping structure of logical tautology is manifest in various reality-theoretic settings and contexts on various levels of description and interpretation; that way, we can verify its preservation under the operations of theoretic reduction and extension. I.e., we must adjoin generalized principles of loop structure to logical syntax in such a way that more and more of reality is thereby explained and comprehensiveness is achieved.

For example, take the sentential tautology X ∨ ~X (X or not-X). Applied to perception, this means that when something is seen or observed, it is not seen in conjunction with its absence; if it were, then two contradictory perceptions would coincide, resulting in a “splitting off” of perceptual realities. In effect, either the consciousness of the perceiver would split into two separate cognitive realities in a case of chain-reactive dissociation, or the perceiver himself would physically split along with physical reality. When X ∨ ~X is composed with other tautologies (or itself) by substitution, the stakes are exactly the same; any violation of the compound tautology would split perceptual and cognitive reality with disastrous implications for its integrity.7

After its tautological nature, the first thing to note about sentential logic in the context of reality theory is that against the spirit in which it was founded – it does, after all, represent the rules of the mental processes8 of cognition and perception, which would seem to endow it with a mental character from the start – it has a basic functional inadequacy: it seems to require an external logician to mentally read, understand and apply it. On the other hand, nature (or cognitive-perceptual reality) requires no external logician to apply the rules of logic. Therefore, the proposed tautology-preserving principles of reality theory should put mind back into the mix in an explicit, theoretically tractable way, effectively endowing logic with “self-processing capability”. This, after all, is exactly what it possesses in its natural manifestation, reality at large, and is an essential dimension of the closure property without which truth is insupportable. That is, reality must be able to recognize itself and impart this ability to its components as a condition of their existence and interaction.

Having explained the main technical issues in reality theory, we may now cut to the chase: the way to build a theory of reality is to identify the properties that it must unconditionally possess in order to exist, and then bring the theory into existence by defining it to possess these properties without introducing merely contingent properties that, if taken as general, could impair its descriptive relationship with the real universe (those can come later and will naturally be subject to empirical confirmation). In other words, the means by which the theory is constructed must be rational and tautological, while those by which it is subsequently refined may be empirical. Since we want our theory to be inclusive enough, exclusive enough and consistent enough to do the job of describing reality, these properties will certainly include comprehensiveness (less thorough but also less undecidable than completeness), closure, and consistency. To these properties, the “3 C’s”, we shall assign three principles that are basically tautological in form; that way, adjoining them to logic-based reality theory will preserve the tautology property of logic, rationally precluding uncertainty by the same means as logic itself. A theory of reality constructed in this way is called a supertautology.

Because our three principles correspond to the 3 C’s, and because they all begin with the letter M, we might as well call them the “3 M’s”: M=R, MAP and MU, respectively standing for the Mind Equals Reality Principle, the Metaphysical Autology Principle, and the Multiplex Unity Principle. The M=R principle, a tautological theoretical property that dissolves the distinction between theory and universe and thus identifies the real universe as a “self-reifying theory”, makes the syntax of this theory comprehensive by ensuring that nothing which can be cognitively or perceptually recognized as a part of reality is excluded for want of syntax. MAP tautologically renders this syntax closed or self-contained in the definitive, descriptive and interpretational senses, and in conjunction with M=R, renders the universe perfectly self-contained in the bargain. And MU tautologically renders this syntax, and the theory-universe complex it describes, coherent enough to ensure its own consistency (thus, the “C” corresponding to MU actually splits into two C’s, consistency and coherence, and we have four altogether). To each of these principles we may add any worthwhile corollaries that present themselves.9

Since it is the lot of every reality theorist to use properties of reality to explain reality, and these properties are recursively defined, we will sometimes implicitly or explicitly refer to various properties in the descriptions of other properties. This precludes a neat series of cumulative definitions, which is possible in any case only by taking for granted the content and wherewithal of theorization (unfortunately, one can take nothing for granted in reality theory). As we will see below, the recursive nature of the CTMU is unavoidable. Secondly, the CTMU is developed “backwards” with respect to the usual deductive theories of science and mathematics, by first peeling away constraints and only then using the results to deduce facts about content. Most theories begin with axioms, hypotheses and rules of inference, extract implications, logically or empirically test these implications, and then add or revise axioms, theorems or hypotheses. The CTMU does the opposite, stripping away assumptions and “rebuilding reality” while adding no assumptions back.

The following principles are presented in three stages. The first stage includes the Reality Principle, the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility and the Principle of Syndiffeonesis, which may be considered preliminary to MAP, M=R and MU respectively (the order of presentation may differ slightly from that just given). The second stage consists of MAP, M=R and MU themselves, while the third stage consists of several auxiliary principles that can be viewed as their consequences.

The Reality Principle

Reality, i.e. the real universe, contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of an external reality (up to observational or theoretical relevance).10

While this characterization of reality incorporates a circular definition of relevance, the circularity is essential to the reality concept and does not preclude a perceptual (observational, scientific) basis. Indeed, we can refine the definition of reality as follows: “Reality is the perceptual aggregate including (1) all scientific observations that ever were and ever will be, and (2) the entire abstract and/or cognitive explanatory infrastructure of perception” (where the abstract is a syntactic generalization of the concrete standing for ideas, concepts or cognitive structures distributing over physical instances which conform to them as content conforms to syntax).

It should be noted that any definition amounts to a microscopic theory of the thing defined. The Reality Principle, which can be viewed as a general definition of reality, is a case in point; it can be viewed as the seed of a reality theory that we have now begun to build. In defining reality as self-contained, this “microtheory” endows itself with a simple kind of closure; it calls on nothing outside the definiendum in the course of defining it, and effectively forbids any future theoretical extension of this definition from doing so either (this becomes explicit in a related principle, the MAP).

But now back to the queue. Thus far, we have learned that reality is self-contained; it is everywhere the same as itself. What about all of its internal distinctions?

Syndiffeonesis

Reality is a relation, and every relation is a syndiffeonic relation exhibiting syndiffeonesis or “difference-in-sameness”. Therefore, reality is a syndiffeonic relation. Syndiffeonesis implies that any assertion to the effect that two things are different implies that they are reductively the same; if their difference is real, then they both reduce to a common reality and are to that extent similar. Syndiffeonesis, the most general of all reductive principles, forms the basis of a new view of the relational structure of reality.

The concept of syndiffeonesis can be captured by asserting that the expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax, i.e. the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium. It is from these rules that the relation derives its spatial and temporal characteristics as expressed within the medium. Thus, a syndiffeonic relation consists of a difference relation embedded in a relational medium whose distributed rules of structure and evolution support its existence.

Every syndiffeonic relation has synetic and diffeonic phases respectively exhibiting synesis and diffeonesis (sameness and difference, or distributivity and parametric locality), and displays two forms of containment, topological and descriptive. The medium is associated with the synetic phase, while the difference relation is associated with the diffeonic phase (because the rules of state and transformation of the medium are distributed over it, the medium is homogeneous, intrinsically possessing only relative extension by virtue of the difference relationships it contains). Because diffeonic relands are related to their common expressive medium and its distributive syntax in a way that combines aspects of union and intersection, the operation producing the medium from the relands is called unisection (ˆ).11 The synetic medium represents diffeonic potential of which the difference relationship is an actualization.

The above diagram might be compactly expressed as follows: syn(X ˆ Y) : diff(X,Y). For example, syn(nom_AX ˆ nom_BX) : diff(nom_AX, nom_BX) means that where nom_AX, nom_BX are sets of laws obeyed by the system X at different times, locations or frames of reference A and B within the system X, there exists a more basic set of laws (nom_AX ˆ nom_BX) in terms of which this difference may be expressed. This shows that on some level, general covariance must hold. This is not merely true “up to isomorphism with X”; even if more than one valid set of laws can be distinguished, any one of which might be active at any given location (A, B, …) within X [X_A ⊨ nom₁, X_B ⊨ nom₂, …, where numerical indices denote nomological distinctness], any distinguishable difference between these sets also requires a common syntax. Informational coherence is thus a sine qua non of recognizable existence; any system in which it were to fail would simply decohere for lack of anything to hold it together.

In other words, (1) where informational distinctions regarding a system X are regarded as instantiations of law, they can also be regarded as expressions conforming to syntax; and (2) the expression of differences requires a unified expressive syntax (or set of “laws”), and this syntax must distribute over the entire set of differential expressions (or “instantiations of law”). E.g., where X is a “perceptual intersect” consisting of generally recognizable objects, attributes and events, the laws of perception must ultimately be constant and distributed. Where a putative nomological difference exists for some pair of loci (A, B), reductive syntactic covariance applies due to the need for an expressive medium, and where no such difference exists for any pair of loci (A, B), syntactic covariance applies a fortiori with no need for reduction.

Syndiffeonic relations can be regarded as elements of more complex infocognitive lattices with spatial and temporal (ordinal, stratificative) dimensions. Interpreted according to CTMU duality principles, infocognitive lattices comprise logical relationships of state and syntax. Regressing up one of these lattices by unisection ultimately leads to a syntactic medium of perfect generality and homogeneity … a universal, reflexive “syntactic operator”.

In effect, syndiffeonesis is a metalogical tautology amounting to self-resolving paradox. The paradox resides in the coincidence of sameness and difference, while a type-theoretic resolution inheres in the logical and mathematical distinction between them, i.e. the stratificative dimension of an infocognitive lattice.12 Thus, reducing reality to syndiffeonesis amounts to “paradoxiforming” it. This has an advantage: a theory and/or reality built of self-resolving paradox is immunized to paradox.

So far, we know that reality is a self-contained syndiffeonic relation. We also have access to an instructive sort of diagram that we can use to illustrate some of the principles which follow. So let us see if we can learn more about the kind of self-contained syndiffeonic relation that reality is.

The Principle of Linguistic Reducibility

Reality is a self-contained form of language. This is true for at least two reasons. First, although it is in some respects material and concrete, reality conforms to the algebraic definition of a language. That is, it incorporates:

1. Representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations.

2. A set of “expressions” or perceptual states.

3. A syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive-deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition.

Second, because perception and cognition are languages, and reality is cognitive and perceptual in nature, reality is a language as well.

While there have been many reductionist programs in science and philosophy, the promised reduction is always to the same thing: a theoretical language. Because this is necessarily true, language is fundamental. The fact that most such theories, e.g. theories of physics, point to the fundamental status of something “objective” and “independent of language”, e.g. matter and/or energy, is quite irrelevant, for the very act of pointing invokes an isomorphism between theory and objective reality … an isomorphism that is subject to the Reality Principle, and which could not exist unless reality shared the linguistic structure of the theory itself.

Perhaps the meaning of this principle can be most concisely expressed through a generalization of the aphorism “whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent”: whereof that which cannot be linguistically described, one cannot perceive or conceive. So for the observational and theoretical purposes of science and reality theory, that which is nonisomorphic to language is beyond consideration as a component of reality.

As we have already seen, the Reality Principle says that reality contains all and only that which is real. As defined by this statement, the predicate reality is primarily a linguistic construct conforming to syntactic structure, where syntax consists of the rules by which predicates are constructed and interpreted. In this sense, reality amounts to a kind of theory whose axioms and rules of inference are implicitly provided by the logical component of the conceptual syntax in which it is expressed. The Principle of Linguistic Reducibility merely clarifies the issue of whether reality is a linguistic predicate or the objective content of such a predicate by asserting that it is both. Thus, where the reality predicate is analytically (or syntactically) self-contained, reality is self-contained. This can be expressed as follows: on the level of cognitive-perceptual syntax, reality equals reality theory. Where theory and universe converge, Occam’s razor and physical principles of economy become tautologies.

Because perception is a sensory intersect of mind and reality, perception is impossible without cognition, and to this extent the cognitive predicate reality equates to its perceptual content. On the level of cognitive and perceptual syntax, language is necessarily isomorphic to that which it describes; in a perceptual reality like that which exists around us, it is tautologically true that the basic language of cognition and perception is syntactically isomorphic to reality (though illusion and falsehood become possible on the semantic level). It follows that we can speak of reality in terms of generalized cognition and perception, where this phrase denotes conformance to cognition and perception on the syntactic level. In particular, generalized cognition is that process through which reality everywhere “recognizes” itself.

The Principle of Linguistic Reducibility provides a mandate to add an advanced form of language theory to the mathematical arsenal of reality theory. The reality-theoretic benefits of this addition are incalculable. In conventional physical theory, the fundamental entities are point particles, waves and more recently, strings; each class of object has its problems and paradoxes. In the CTMU, the fundamental objects are syntactic operators (units of self-transducing information or infocognition) that are not only capable of emulating all of these objects and more, but of containing the syntactic structures to which they must inevitably conform and resolving their characteristic paradoxes in the bargain. Because meaning equates to semantic connectivity and is thus linguistic in every sense of the term, the shift to a linguistic perspective is indispensable to teleology or any other form of meaning.

Now we know that reality is a linguistic self-contained syndiffeonic relation, although we still seem to be knowing it from an external vantage in a rather inspecific way. Where should we go next in search of clues? At this point, we could really use a MAP.

Syntactic Closure: The Metaphysical Autology Principle (MAP)

All relations, mappings and functions relevant to reality in a generalized effective sense, whether descriptive, definitive, compositional, attributive, nomological or interpretative, are generated, defined and parameterized within reality itself. In other words, reality comprises a “closed descriptive manifold” from which no essential predicate is omitted, and which thus contains no critical gap that leaves any essential aspect of structure unexplained. Any such gap would imply non-closure.

MAP, a theoretical refinement of the self-containment criterion set forth by the Reality Principle, extends the closure property of the definition of reality to the set of all real predicates. MAP effects closure on the definitive, descriptive, explanatory and interpretative levels of reality theory by making it take the form of a closed network of coupled definitions, descriptions, explanations and interpretations that refer to nothing external to reality itself. Another way to state this is that MAP, like the Reality Principle, requires that everything to which any reality-theoretic definition, description, explanation or interpretation refers be located within reality. This has the effect of making reality responsible for its own structure and evolution in the abstract and concrete senses. MAP requires a closed-form explanation on the grounds that distinguishability is impossible without it. Again this comes down to the issue of syntactic stability.13 To state it in as simple a way as possible, reality must ultimately possess a stable 2-valued object-level distinction between that which it is and that which it is not, maintaining the necessary informational boundaries between objects, attributes and events. The existence of closed informational boundaries within a system is ultimately possible only by virtue of systemic closure under dualistic (explanans–explanandum) composition, which is just how it is effected in sentential logic.

As an example of the tautological nature of MAP, consider a hypothetical external scale of distance or duration in terms of which the absolute size or duration of the universe or its contents can be defined. Due to the analytic self-containment of reality, the functions and definitions comprising its self-descriptive manifold refer only to each other; anything not implicated in its syntactic network is irrelevant to structure and internally unrecognizable, while anything which is relevant is already an implicit ingredient of the network and need not be imported from outside. This implies that if the proposed scale is relevant, then it is not really external to reality; in fact, reality already contains it as an implication of its intrinsic structure.

In other words, because reality is defined on the mutual relevance of its essential parts and aspects, external and irrelevant are synonymous; if something is external to reality, then it is not included in the syntax of reality and is thus internally unrecognizable. It follows that with respect to that level of reality defined on relevance and recognition, there is no such thing as a “real but external” scale, and thus that the universe is externally undefined with respect to all measures including overall size and duration. If an absolute scale were ever to be internally recognizable as an ontological necessity, then this would simply imply the existence of a deeper level of reality to which the scale is intrinsic and by which it is itself intrinsically explained as a relative function of other ingredients. Thus, if the need for an absolute scale were ever to become recognizable within reality – that is, recognizable to reality itself – it would by definition be relative in the sense that it could be defined and explained in terms of other ingredients of reality. In this sense, MAP is a “general principle of relativity”.14

The “no gaps” criterion of MAP permits no critical explanatory holes omitting any essential aspect of structure. What this means can best be illustrated by means of a recurrent fallacy: “The existence of the universe is given and therefore in no need of explanation.” The phrase is given is incomplete; it has hidden “loose ends” corresponding to that by which existence is given, the means by which it is given, and the reason for which it is given. If the source, means and reason are actually real, then they are inside reality, and the explanatory gap exists only in the mind of the claimant rather than in the self-explanatory network of reality itself.

On the other hand, omitting this phrase (is given) results in something like “the existence of the universe is inexplicable”. However, this amounts to the assertion that the universe has no identifiable basis or medium of existence, not even itself … i.e., that no explanatory function can be defined on the explanandum, and that the universe is somehow prohibited from serving as its own source, means, or reason. But this amounts to saying that the universe could only exist “by magic”, popping out of the apeiron with a spontaneity exceeding that by which a genuine magician might pull a magic rabbit out of a hat. For whereas magic rabbits can at least be said to originate by magic associated with magicians who pull them out of top hats into the bright light of reality, or to magically bootstrap themselves out of their own hats into their own realities, the universe would be denied any ontological basis or medium whatsoever … even a bootstrap.

Because questions like “why and how does reality exist (within the domain of existential potential supporting the possibility of existence)?” and “why does this reality exist instead of some other reality?”15 address the ontological or teleological levels of the structure of reality, and because these levels of structure are logically meaningful, they must have answers … even if those answers are determined, as some of them are, by the closure criterion itself.

Now we know that the closed, single-predicate definition of the Reality Principle is actually a closed descriptive manifold of linked definitions in principle containing the means of its own composition, attribution, recognition, processing and interpretation. But this is still somewhat automatonic. What about mind? Since it is through our minds that we understand anything at all, understanding remains incomplete until we understand more about the relationship between mind and reality. So, having equipped ourselves with a MAP, we now attend to the correspondence between the MAP and the terrain.

Syntactic Comprehensivity-Reflexivity: The Mind Equals Reality Principle (M=R)

The M =R or Mind Equals Reality Principle asserts that mind and reality are ultimately inseparable to the extent that they share common rules of structure and processing. The existence of a difference relation between mind and reality syndiffeonically presupposes a relational medium having the characteristics of both, and this medium has logical priority over the difference relation itself.

The M=R principle is merely a logical version of what empiricist philosophers long ago pointed out: we experience reality in the form of perceptions and sense data from which the existence and independence of mind and objective external reality are induced. Since any proof to the contrary would necessarily be cognitive, as are all “proofs”, and since the content of cognition is cognitive by embedment, no such proof can exist; such a proof would undermine its own medium and thereby cancel itself. On the other hand, the Reality Principle says that reality is self-contained with respect to recognition and control, and to the extent that recognition and control are “mental” (in the sense of being effected according to cognitive and perceptual syntax), so is reality. The M=R Principle entails comprehensivity by defining all of our perceptions, along with their syntax-level cognitive-syntactic infrastructure, as parts of reality regardless of decidability.16 When it comes to M=R, it is hard to resist a little play on words: M=R says that at the syntactic level of cognition and perception, “the MAP is the terrain.” Note that M=R goes beyond the mere Kantian isomorphism between phenomenal reality and the categories of thought and perception; it says that syntax and its content are recursively related, and in conjunction with the Reality Principle, that any supposed “content” not related to the rules of structure and evolution of reality is irrelevant. (Although this is a trivial observation insofar as “unrelated” and “irrelevant” are synonymous, it seems to have been largely ignored by many who should have known better.)

To put it another way: if the “noumenal” (perceptually independent) part of reality were truly unrelated to the phenomenal (cognition-isomorphic) part, then these two “halves” of reality would neither be coincident nor share a joint medium relating them. In that case, they would simply fall apart, and any integrated “reality” supposedly containing both of them would fail for lack of an integrated model. Where M (mind) is identified with cognition and R (reality) with physically-embodied information, M=R says that reality everywhere consists of a common substance, infocognition, having the dual nature of mind and (informational) reality.

The M=R property takes up where the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility leaves off in eliminating the distinction between theory and universe. By its light, the theoretical description of reality by human beings contained in reality amounts to reality describing itself. (Bearing in mind that a theory is a mental construct, this can be illustrated by simply replacing Mind and Reality in the above diagram by Theory and Universe, and Mind ˆ Reality by Theory ˆ Universe.) It thus makes the theory reflexive and thus inclusive enough by definition to describe the entire universe, including that which is rational, abstract and subjective, and that which is empirical, concrete and objective. The dissolution of this distinction can be viewed as a reduction.

So now we know that reality is more than just a linguistic self-contained syndiffeonic relation comprising a closed descriptive manifold of linked definitions containing the means of its own configuration, composition, attribution, recognition, processing and interpretation. It is also a self-processing theory identical to its universe.

Syntactic Coherence and Consistency: The Multiplex Unity Principle (MU)

The universe topologically contains that which descriptively contains the universe. MU, the minimum and most general informational configuration of reality, defines the relationship holding between unity and multiplicity, the universe and its variegated contents. Through its structure, the universe and its contents are mutually inclusive, providing each other with a medium.

In other words, we can equivalently characterize the contents of the universe as being topologically “inside” it (topological inclusion), or characterize the universe as being descriptively “inside” its contents, occupying their internal syntaxes as acquired state (descriptive inclusion). The universe generically includes its contents by serving as their syntactic unisect, while the contents contain the universe in a more specific sense involving specific event histories that become “entangled” by interaction. From the first viewpoint, the syntactic coherence of the overall medium enforces mutual consistency of contents, while from the second viewpoint, the coherent syntaxes of its contents contain and consistently recognize and transform the medium. Thus, the universe enforces its own consistency through dual self-containment.

MU expresses syndiffeonic symmetry of syntax and content on the spatiotemporal level of reality. Just as syndiffeonesis can be regarded as a paradox identifying difference with sameness, MU can be regarded as an ultimate form of paradox identifying spatiotemporal multiplicity and unity (the MU diagram is an explosion of the syndiffeonic relation diagram in which the stratification dimension is split into descriptive and topological strands or “temporal dimensions”). MU structure resolves the MU paradox in situ by dual stratification, providing closure as the open-ended informational stratification of type theory cannot. Because MU can thus be regarded as the resolution of the paradox it describes, its meaning, like that of syndiffeonesis, can be expressed as follows: reality is a self-resolving paradox.

MU, by the way, need not be regarded as the ultimate guarantor of consistency; that honor can safely go to the stability of perceptual reality itself. Quite simply, the syntactic stability of reality overrides any and all objections regarding the limitations of formal systems. MU merely describes how reality, considered as a reflexive SCSPL theory, achieves intrinsic stability in the course of evolving. Thus, it is not functioning as an algorithm guaranteed to terminate on consistency but not on inconsistency, and is therefore not in conflict with undecidability. The stability of reality affirms its consistency regardless of whether or not any lesser theory happens to be consistent.

MU serves as a unifying concept for a complex of ideas having to do with coherence and consistency in the reality-theoretic context, including hology and several CTMU duality principles.

The Principle of Hology (Self-composition)

Hology, a logical analogue of holography characterizing the most general relationship between reality and its contents, is a form of self-similarity whereby the overall structure of the universe is everywhere distributed within it as accepting and transductive syntax, resulting in a homogeneous syntactic medium. That is, because reality requires a syntax consisting of general laws of structure and evolution, and there is nothing but reality itself to serve this purpose, reality comprises its own self-distributed syntax under MU (which characterizes the overall relationship between syntax and content).

The hology property itself is distributed over reality. That is, the informational boundary of a coherent object (syntactic operator) is hologically multiplexed with respect to state (attribute and value) in order to define the descriptive interior of the operator as it participates in global self-processing without input. This multiplexing of possibilities is just the replication of the structure of the boundary over the interior of the boundary as a function of time. Again, the operator ultimately has nothing else in terms of which to express its spatiotemporal capacity.

Hology is implied by MAP because reality is closed under composition and attribution; it is implied by M=R because reality is composed of syntactic operators with generalized mental or cognitive functionality; and it is implied by syndiffeonesis and MU because it is an expression of the relationship between the global spatiotemporal medium and its contents.

Duality Principles

Duality is a ubiquitous concept in mathematics, appearing in fields from logic and the theory of categories to geometry and analysis. The duality relation is symmetric; if dualizing proposition A yields proposition B, then dualizing B yields A. In projective geometry, for example, the dualization operation consists of switching the terms “point” and “line” in propositions containing them, as in “Two non-coincident points determine a line” ← dualize → “Two non-parallel lines determine a point.” Re-stating this as “lines are functions of points” ← dualize → “points are functions of lines” reveals a duality relationship between functions and arguments. Thus, in vector algebra, the dual space V* of a vector space V is the space of all linear functionals on V (i.e. all linear maps from V to R), while V** is the space of all linear maps from V* to R.

An even more striking form of duality is encountered in graph theory, where the dual graph of a planar graph transforms faces to vertices and vertices to faces without disrupting its overall pattern of adjacencies. The boundary of each face is replaced by transverse edges converging on its dual vertex (and vice versa), and the adjacency relation is redefined accordingly. Where edges are given a temporal interpretation, interesting transformations can occur; e.g., circulations along facial boundaries become “vertex spins”, and motion along an edge can be characterized as an operation between the dual faces of its endpoints.

Duality principles thus come in two common varieties, one transposing spatial relations and objects, and one transposing objects or spatial relations with mappings, functions, operations or processes. The first is called space-object (or S-O, or S ⟷ O) duality; the second, time-space (or T-S/O, or T ⟷ S/O) duality. In either case, the central feature is a transposition of element and a (spatial or temporal) relation of elements. Together, these dualities add up to the concept of triality, which represents the universal possibility of consistently permuting the attributes time, space and object with respect to various structures. From this, we may extract a third kind of duality: ST-O duality. In this kind of duality, associated with something called conspansive duality, objects can be “dualized” to spatiotemporal transducers, and the physical universe internally “simulated” by its material contents.

M=R, MU and hology are all at least partially based on duality.

The Principle of Attributive (Topological-Descriptive, State-Syntax) Duality

Where points belong to sets and lines are relations between points, a form of duality also holds between sets and relations or attributes, and thus between set theory and logic. Where sets contain their elements and attributes distributively describe their arguments, this implies a dual relationship between topological containment and descriptive attribution as modeled through Venn diagrams. Essentially, any containment relationship can be interpreted in two ways: in terms of position with respect to bounding lines or surfaces or hypersurfaces, as in point set topology and its geometric refinements (⊃T) or in terms of descriptive distribution relationships, as in the Venn-diagrammatic grammar of logical substitution (⊃D) (Langan, 1999).

Attributive or TD duality is reflected in the fact that sets and logic are described by the same algebraic structure, Boolean algebra, which expresses their dual relationship in the relationship between its two operations. Expressed in set-theoretic terms, these operations are union and intersection (∪, ∩); in logical terms, they are OR and AND (∨, ∧). (∪, ∩) and (∨, ∧) are related as follows: the union (A ∪ B) of two sets A and B consists of all and only the elements that belong to either A or B or both (∀ x ∈ A ∪ B : x ∈ A ∨ x ∈ B), while the intersect (A ∩ B) of A and B consists of all and only the elements that belong to both A and B (∀ x ∈ A ∩ B : x ∈ A ∧ x ∈ B). This kind of duality is well known; it relates to the fact that every attributive statement defining a relation of predicates can be rephrased as a statement about sets (and vice versa).

But the relationship of set theory and logic is even more interesting than this, for each has a particular representational affinity for just one of these operations. That is, set theory tends to focus on objects (sets and elements), while logic tends to focus on attributes, or informational “boundary constraints” that objects must satisfy. Thus, set theory ultimately defines sets in terms of the objects they contain, while logic tends to define them “from the outside in” on the intersecting boundary constraints to which they conform. The difference hinges on the univalent not functor (∼), on which complementation and intersection, but not union, are directly or indirectly defined.

For example, while it is easy enough to identify an individual element or set by constructively naming or “enumerating” it, e.g. “X”, identifying its complement often requires that its name be used as the basis of a restrictive constraint that can be applied across an entire finite or infinite context in one attributive operation, e.g. “not-X”. The duality relationship holding between names and constraints is nicely captured by De Morgan’s Laws, ∼A ∩ ∼B = ∼(A ∪ B) and ∼A ∪ ∼B = ∼(A ∩ B), which express it by permuting the objective and attributive operations ∪ and ∩.

Because states express topologically while the syntactic structures of their underlying operators express descriptively, attributive duality is sometimes called state-syntax duality. As information requires syntactic organization, it amounts to a valuation of cognitive/perceptual syntax; conversely, recognition consists of a subtractive restriction of informational potential through an additive acquisition of information. TD duality thus relates information to the informational potential bounded by syntax, and perception (cognitive state acquisition) to cognition.

In a Venn diagram, the contents of circles reflect the structure of their boundaries; the boundaries are the primary descriptors. The interior of a circle is simply an “interiorization” or self-distribution of its syntactic “boundary constraint”. Thus, nested circles corresponding to identical objects display a descriptive form of containment corresponding to syntactic layering, with underlying levels corresponding to syntactic coverings.

This leads to a related form of duality, constructive-filtrative duality.

Constructive-Filtrative Duality

Any set that can be constructed by adding elements to the space between two brackets can be defined by restriction on the set of all possible sets. Restriction involves the Venn-like superposition of constraints that are subtractive in nature; thus, it is like a subtractive color process involving the stacking of filters. Elements, on the other hand, are additive, and the process of constructing sets is thus additive; it is like an additive color process involving the illumination of the color elements of pixels in a color monitor. CF duality simply asserts the general equivalence of these two kinds of process with respect to logico-geometric reality.

CF duality captures the temporal ramifications of TD duality, relating geometric operations on point sets to logical operations on predicates. Essentially, CF duality says that any geometric state or continuous transformation is equivalent to an operation involving the mutual “filtration” of intersecting hological state-potentials. States and objects, instead of being constructed from the object level upward, can be regarded as filtrative refinements of general, internally unspecified higher-order relations.

CF duality is necessary to show how a universe can be “zero-sum”; without it, there is no way to refine the objective requisites of constructive processes “from nothingness”. In CTMU cosmogony, “nothingness” is informationally defined as zero constraint or pure freedom (unbound telesis or UBT), and the apparent construction of the universe is explained as a self-restriction of this potential. In a realm of unbound ontological potential, defining a constraint is not as simple as merely writing it down; because constraints act restrictively on content, constraint and content must be defined simultaneously in a unified syntax-state relationship.

Conspansive Duality

This principle was to some extent adumbrated by the following wry quote attributed to Arthur Eddington (1933) regarding the expanding universe:

We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blur of intense agitation. And then nothing.

Eddington’s surreal vision accompanied a tongue-in-cheek proposal that the theory of the expanding universe might be replaced by a theory of the “shrinking atom” (1933, p. 90). It was thus a bit overdone for the sake of humor. Indeed, Eddington was not sufficiently interested in the idea to develop its implications beyond a very rudimentary level. However, it turns out that he was skirting the edges of an important duality principle.

Cosmic expansion and ordinary physical motion have something in common: they are both what might be called ectomorphisms. In an ectomorphism, something is mapped to, generated or replicated in something external to it. However, the Reality Principle asserts that the universe is analytically self-contained, and ectomorphism is inconsistent with self-containment. Through the principle of conspansive duality, ectomorphism is conjoined with endomorphism, whereby things are mapped, generated or replicated within themselves. Through conspansive endomorphism, syntactic objects are injectively mapped into their own hological interiors from their own syntactic boundaries.

In the language of TD and CF duality, this shifts the emphasis from spacetime geometry to descriptive containment, and from constructive to filtrative processing. As a result, new states are formed within the images of previous states. Nothing moves or expands “through” space; space is state, and each relocation of an object is just a move from one level of perfect stasis to another. This ties conventional motion, in which worldlines are constructively created by additions of state in Minkowski diagrams, to differential endomorphism, in which the internal descriptive potentials of attributes are cumulatively restricted.

A (Minkowski) spacetime diagram is a kind of “event lattice” in which nodes represent events and their connective worldlines represent the objects that interact in those events. The events occur at the foci of past and future light cones to which the worldlines are internal. If one could look down the time axis of such a diagram at a spacelike cross section, one would see something very much like a Venn diagram with circles corresponding to lightcone cross sections. This rotation of the diagram corresponds to conspansive dualization, converting a spatiotemporal lattice of worldlines and events to a layered series of Venn diagrams.

In a Venn diagram, circles represent sets through their definitive attributes. The attributes represented by the circles are synetic (syntactically distributed and homogeneous with respect to potential differences of state), and the attribute represented by a particular circle is uniformly heritable by the elements of the set represented by any circle inside it. In the spatiotemporal Venn diagram just described, the circular lightcone cross sections correspond to objects and events relating in just this way. Because quantum-scale objects are seen to exist only when they are participating in observational events, including their “generalized observations” of each other, their worldlines are merely assumed to exist between events and are in fact syntactically retrodicted, along with the continuum, from the last events in which they are known to have participated. This makes it possible to omit specific worldlines entirely, replacing them with series of Venn diagrams in which circles inner-expand, interpenetrate and “collapse to points” at each interactive generalized-observational event. This scenario is general, applying even to macroscopic objects consisting of many particles of matter; the higher definition of the worldlines of macroscopic objects can be imputed to a higher frequency of collapse due to interactive density among their constituent particles.

The areas inside the circles correspond to event potentials, and where events are governed by the laws of physics, to potential instantiations of physical law or “nomological syntax”. Where each circle corresponds to two or more objects, it comprises object potentials as well. That is, the circular boundaries of the Venn circles can be construed as those of “potentialized” objects in the process of absorbing their spatiotemporal neighborhoods. Since the event potentials and object potentials coincide, potential instantiations of law can be said to reside “inside” the objects, and can thus be regarded as functions of their internal rules or “object syntaxes”. Objects thus become syntactic operators, and events become intersections of nomological syntax in the common value of an observable state parameter, position. The circle corresponding to the new event represents an attribute consisting of all associated nomological relationships appropriate to the nature of the interaction including conserved aggregates, and forms a pointwise (statewise) “syntactic covering” for all subsequent potentials.

Notice that in this scenario, spacetime evolves linguistically rather than geometrodynamically. Although each Venn circle seems to expand continuously, its content is unchanging; its associated attribute remains static pending subsequent events involving the objects that created it. Since nothing actually changes until a new event is “substituted” for the one previous, i.e. until a new circle appears within the old one by syntactic embedment, the circles are intrinsically undefined in duration and are thus intrinsically atemporal. Time arises strictly as an ordinal relationship among circles rather than within circles themselves. With respect to time-invariant elements of syntax active in any given state (circle), the distinction between zero and nonzero duration is intrinsically meaningless; such elements are heritable under substitution and become syntactic ingredients of subsequent states. Because each circle is structurally self-distributed, nothing need be transmitted from one part of it to another; locality constraints arise only with respect to additional invariants differentially activated within circles that represent subsequent states and break the hological symmetry of their antecedents. Conspansion thus affords a certain amount of relief from problems associated with so-called “quantum nonlocality”.

Because the shrinkage of an object within its prior image amounts to a form of logical substitution in which the object is Venn-diagrammatically “described” or determined by its former state, there is no way to distinguish between outward systemic expansion and inward substitution of content, or between the associated dynamical and logical “grammars”. This is merely a restatement of attributive duality; topological containment relations among point-sets are equivalent to descriptively predicating truth of statements asserting containment, and on distribution relationships among state-descriptors. In conjunction with the intrinsic symmetry of externally undefined systems, attributive duality eliminates any possible logical or geometric distinction between the outward expansion of a self-contained universe as its contents remain static in size, and a logical endomorphism in which the universe remains static while the states of its contents are recursively substituted for previous states.

It has already been noted in connection with MAP that where the external dimensions of a system are undefined, no distinction as to size can be made beyond the size ratio of the system to its contents. Consider a simple arithmetical analogy: 1/2 = 1000/2000 = 1(10⁹⁹⁹⁹)/2(10⁹⁹⁹⁹) = (…). Where the numerator and denominator of a fraction are both multiplied by a given number, the value of the fraction does not change; it is independent of distinctions involving the size of the multiplier. Similarly, the intrinsic proportionality of a self-contained system is independent of distinctions involving any external measure. This implies that with respect to a self-contained universe for which no external measure exists, no distinction can be made between the expansion of the system with respect to its contents, and the shrinkage of its contents with respect to it. In fact, because that which is undefined cannot change – there is nothing definite with respect to which change would be possible – apparent expansion of the container cannot be extrinsically defined, but implies a conspansively-equivalent intrinsic shrinkage of its contents.

Thus, conspansive duality relates two complementary views of the universe, one based on the external (relative) states of a set of objects, and one based on the internal structures and dynamics of objects considered as language processors. The former, which depicts the universe as it is usually understood in physics and cosmology, is called ERSU, short for Expanding Rubber Sheet Universe, while the latter is called USRE (ERSU spelled backwards), short for Universe as a Self-Representational Entity. Simplistically, ERSU is like a set, specifically a topological-geometric point set, while USRE is like a self-descriptive nomological language. Whereas ERSU expands relative to the invariant sizes of its contents, USRE “conspands”, holding the size of the universe invariant while allowing object sizes and time scales to shrink in mutual proportion, thus preserving general covariance.

This has certain interesting implications. First, whereas it is ordinarily assumed that the sizes of material objects remain fixed while that of the whole universe “ectomorphically” changes around them, conspansion holds the size of the universe changeless and endomorphically changes the sizes of objects. Because the universe now plays the role of invariant, there exists a global standard rate of inner expansion or mutual absorption among the contents of the universe (“c-invariance”), and due to syntactic covariance, objects must be resized or “requantized” with each new event according to a constant (time-independent) rescaling factor residing in global syntax. Second, because the rate of shrinkage is a constant function of a changing size ratio, the universe appears from an internal vantage to be accelerating in its “expansion”, leading to the conspansive dual of a positive cosmological constant (Langan, 2001a).

Conspansive duality, the role of which in the CTMU is somewhat analogous to that of the Principle of Equivalence in General Relativity, is the only escape from an infinite ectomorphic “tower of turtles”. Were the perceptual geometry of reality to lack a conspansive dual representation, motion of any kind would require a fixed spatial array or ectomorphic “background space” requiring an explanation of its own, and so on down the tower. Conspansion permits the universe to self-configure through temporal feedback. Each conspanding circle represents an event-potential corresponding to a certain combination of law and state; even after one of these intrinsically atemporal circles has “inner-expanded” across vast reaches of space and time, its source event is still current for anything that interacts with it, e.g. an eye catching one of its photons. At the same time, conspansion gives the quantum wave function of objects a new home: inside the conspanding objects themselves. Without it, the wave function not only has no home, but fails to coincide with any logically evolving system of predicates or “laws of physics”. Eliminate conspansion, and reality becomes an inexplicable space full of deterministic worldlines and the weighty load of problems that can be expected when geometry is divorced from logic.

Where reality is characterized by dual-aspect infocognitive monism (read on), it consists of units of infocognition reflecting a distributed coupling of transductive syntax and informational content. Conspansion describes the “alternation” of these units between the dual (generalized-cognitive and informational) aspects of reality, and thus between syntax and state. This alternation, which permits localized mutual refinements of cognitive syntax and informational state, is essential to an evolutionary process called telic recursion. Telic recursion requires a further principle based on conspansive duality, the Extended Superposition Principle, according to which operators can be simultaneously acquired by multiple telons, or spatiotemporally-extensive syntax-state relationships implicating generic operators in potential events and opportunistically guiding their decoherence.

Note that conspansion explains the “arrow of time” in the sense that it is not symmetric under reversal. On the other hand, the conspansive nesting of atemporal events puts all of time in “simultaneous self-contact” without compromising ordinality. Conspansive duality can be viewed as the consequence of a type of gauge (measure) symmetry by which only the relative dimensions of the universe and its contents are important.

The Extended Superposition Principle

In quantum mechanics, the principle of superposition of dynamical states asserts that the possible dynamical states of a quantized system, like waves in general, can be linearly superposed, and that each dynamical state can thus be represented by a vector belonging to an abstract vector space. The superposition principle permits the definition of so-called “mixed states” consisting of many possible “pure states”, or definite sets of values of state-parameters. In such a superposition, state-parameters can simultaneously have many values.

The superposition principle highlights certain problems with quantum mechanics. One problem is that quantum mechanics lacks a cogent model in which to interpret things like “mixed states” (waves alone are not sufficient). Another problem is that according to the uncertainty principle, the last states of a pair of interacting particles are generally insufficient to fully determine their next states. This, of course, raises a question: how are their next states actually determined? What is the source of the extra tie-breaking measure of determinacy required to select their next events (“collapse their wave functions”)?

The answer is not, as some might suppose, “randomness”; randomness amounts to acausality, or alternatively, to informational incompressibility with respect to any distributed causal template or ingredient of causal syntax. Thus, it is either no explanation at all, or it implies the existence of a “cause” exceeding the representative capacity of distributed laws of causality. But the former is both absurd and unscientific, and the latter requires that some explicit allowance be made for higher orders of causation … more of an allowance than may readily be discerned in a simple, magical invocation of “randomness”.

The superposition principle, like other aspects of quantum mechanics, is based on the assumption of physical Markovianism.17 It refers to mixed states between adjacent events, ignoring the possibility of nonrandom temporally-extensive relationships not wholly attributable to distributed laws. By putting temporally remote events in extended descriptive contact with each other, the Extended Superposition Principle enables coherent cross-temporal telic feedback and thus plays a necessary role in cosmic self-configuration. Among the higher-order determinant relationships in which events and objects can thus be implicated are utile state-syntax relationships called telons, telic attractors capable of guiding cosmic and biological evolution.

Given that quantum theory does not seem irrevocably attached to Markovianism, why has the possibility of higher-order causal relationships not been seriously entertained? One reason is spacetime geometry, which appears to confine objects to one-dimensional “worldlines” in which their state-transition events are separated by intervening segments that prevent them from “mixing” in any globally meaningful way. It is for this reason that superposition is usually applied only to individual state transitions, at least by those subscribing to conservative interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Conspansive duality, which incorporates TD and CF components, removes this restriction by placing state transition events in direct descriptive contact. Because the geometric intervals between events are generated and selected by descriptive processing, they no longer have separative force. Yet, since worldlines accurately reflect the distributed laws in terms of which state transitions are expressed, they are not reduced to the status of interpolated artifacts with no dynamical reality; their separative qualities are merely overridden by the state-syntax dynamic of their conspansive dual representation.

In extending the superposition concept to include nontrivial higher-order relationships, the Extended Superposition Principle opens the door to meaning and design. Because it also supports distribution relationships among states, events and syntactic strata, it makes cosmogony a distributed, coherent, ongoing event rather than a spent and discarded moment from the ancient history of the cosmos. Indeed, the usual justification for observer participation – that an observer in the present can perceptually collapse the wave functions of ancient (photon-emission) events – can be regarded as a consequence of this logical relationship.

Supertautology

Truth, a predicate representing inclusion in a domain, is the logical property by virtue of which one thing may be identified and distinguished from another at any level of resolution. All theories aim at truth, and reality theory is no exception. With respect to science, there is a problem with truth: beyond the level of direct observation, it cannot be certified by empirical means. To blame are various forms of uncertainty, model-theoretic ambiguity, and the problem of induction: scientific generalizations are circular insofar as they are necessarily based on the assumption that nature is uniform. The problem of induction effectively limits certitude to mathematical reasoning.

This is hardly surprising, for truth is ultimately a mathematical concept. In logic, truth is defined by means of always-true expressions called tautologies. A logical tautology possesses three distinctive properties: it is descriptively universal, it is closed under recursive self-composition, and it is internally and externally consistent on the syntactic and semantic levels of reference. Since logic is the theory of truth, the way to construct a fully verifiable theory is to start with logic and develop the theory by means of rules or principles under which truth is heritable. Because truth is synonymous with logical tautology, this means developing the theory by adjoining rules which themselves have a tautological structure – i.e., which are universal, closed and consistent – and logically extracting the implications. A theory of reality constructed in this way is called a supertautology.

In a supertautological theory of reality, it is unnecessary to assume the uniformity of nature with respect to certain kinds of generalization. Instead, such generalizations can be mathematically deduced … e.g. nomological covariance, the invariance of the rate of global self-processing (c-invariance), and the internally-apparent accelerating expansion of the system.

Reduction and Extension

The greatest theoretical advances have typically been associated with two complementary processes, reduction and extension. The conceptual components of a theory are reduced to more fundamental components, and the theory extended by the emergence of new and more general relationships among them. The CTMU reduces reality to self-transducing information and ultimately to telesis, using the closed, reflexive syntactic structure of the former as a template for reality theory.

In science, everything requires an explanation … even explanations. Not only do observations demand explanatory theories, but theories require explanations of their own. Unfortunately, it is sometimes forgotten that until something has been explained in an explicable way, it has not been properly explained at all. If a theory is not self-explanatory, then it must be reduced to a more fundamental theory that explains it; otherwise, it merely relies on assumptions.

E.g., consider an explanation to the effect that “birds can fly because they have wings”. Without an explanation of atmospheric resistance, this explanation is incomplete; it contains no explanation of why or how wings enable flight, merely relying on the assumption that they do. Therefore, while it is true as far as it goes, it leaves out crucial supporting knowledge and cannot stand alone. Concisely, every theory T_i+1 that is not self-explanatory must be reducible to a more fundamental theory T_i ⊨ T_i+1 that explains and supports it, so that T_i, and this explanatory regress can only end with a self-explanatory theory T₀.

This fact is very frequently forgotten in evolutionary biology, where (e.g.) details of molecular structure and dynamics are used to explain organic phenomena. Although these details come from the more fundamental theories of quantum chemistry and physics, they will never constitute a satisfactory explanation of life until they incorporate not only an explanation of physics and chemistry, but reality at large. This is true because physical (observable) reality is not a complete model for physics and thus is not self-contained with respect to explanation – in this sense, any exclusively materialistic interpretation of physical theory is prima facie absurd – and because physics is a non-self-explanatory theory regardless of model. To explain organic phenomena using natural selection, one needs an explanation for natural selection, including the “natural selection” of the laws of physics and the universe as a whole.

Theoretical reduction involves a regressive unbinding of progressive informational constraints in order to achieve increasingly basic explanations. Closed theoretical signatures are ripped open and reduced to more basic concepts that can be reformed into more basic and expressive signatures. However, the informational part of the regress terminates where further reduction would compromise intelligibility; there can be no further reductive regress through increasingly fundamental theoretic strata once the requirements of regression, reduction, theorization and stratification have themselves been lost. Beyond this point, infocognition gives way to informational and cognitive potential, or telesis.

The process of reducing distinctions to the homogeneous syntactic media that support them is called syndiffeonic regression. This process involves unisection, whereby the rules of structure and dynamics that respectively govern a set of distinct objects are reduced to a “syntactic join” in an infocognitive lattice of syntactic media. Unisection is a general form of reduction which implies that all properties realized within a medium are properties of the medium itself.

Where emergent properties are merely latent properties of the teleo-syntactic medium of emergence, the mysteries of emergent phenomena are reduced to just two: how are emergent properties anticipated in the syntactic structure of their medium of emergence, and why are they not expressed except under specific conditions involving (e.g.) degree of systemic complexity?

The Principle of Infocognitive Monism

Where language consists of information and information has linguistic structure, the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility implies that information is as fundamental as language. Insofar as we cannot understand reality except in theoretical (linguistic, informational) terms, this permits us to cast reality as a “self-processing language”, or self-defining, self-explaining, self-modeling theory-universe ensemble, without fear of being proven wrong by some alternate theoretical reduction. However, the linguistic reduction of reality is superficially macroscopic. Just as a perfectly self-contained language must be self-processing (for lack of anything external to process it), so must the information of which it consists. This leads to the concept of self-processing information, and ultimately to a microscopic (quantum) theory of information.

It is easy to show that information is self-processing. Structure is attributive; the parts of any structure possess attributes that position them or otherwise define them relative to other parts. To be meaningful and thus informative, information must have structure; therefore, information must possess attributes. Attributive relationships, intrinsic or otherwise, must conform to the logical rules that govern attribution, i.e. to an attributive logical syntax incorporating the propositional and predicate calculi. So information can exist only in conjunction with attributive logical syntax. Because it necessarily incorporates attributive syntax, it has enough native self-processing capacity to maintain its intrinsic structure, which is precisely what it must do to qualify as “informational”.

Because cognition and generic information transduction are identical up to isomorphism – after all, cognition is just the specific form of information processing that occurs in a mind – information processing can be described as “generalized cognition”, and the coincidence of information and processor can be referred to as infocognition. Reality thus consists of a single “substance”, infocognition, with two aspects corresponding to transduction and being transduced. Describing reality as infocognition thus amounts to (infocognitive) dual aspect monism. Where infocognition equals the distributed generalized self-perception and self-cognition of reality, infocognitive monism implies a stratified form of “panpsychism” in which at least three levels of self-cognition can be distinguished with respect to scope, power and coherence: global, agentive and subordinate.

Ultimately, the conceptual shift from information to self-transducing information requires extensions of information-intensive theories including the theories of information, computation and cybernetics. The problem stems from the fact that as it is understood in these fields, information is a limited concept based on an engineering model in which the existence of senders, receivers, messages, channels and transmissive media is already conveniently given, complete with all of the structural and dynamical laws required to make them work together. Moreover, the bit structure specified in this model relates to the actual structure of information the way propositional logic relates to logic as a whole, including the predicate calculus and model theory. To wit, only a single level of structure and functionality is considered, and attribution is primarily limited to just a pair of central predicates common to both theories, True/False = 1/0. Just as sentential logic concerns itself only with the functorial relationships of sentential variables and ignores their content, information theory concerns itself only with the probabilities of symbols in message strings and ignores the details of syntactic and semantic structure and processing.

However, the most interesting part of the analogy is its logical extension. Just as sentential logic is naturally extended to encompass the levels of attribution associated with predicate logic and model theory, the theory of information can be naturally extended to encompass deeper levels of attribution … in fact, the same two levels adjoined to sentential logic.

Retooling the information concept consists of three steps. First, it must be equipped with the means of its own transduction or transformative processing. Where information transduction is (cognitively) recognized as generalized cognition, this amounts to replacing it with a dual-aspect quantum of reflexivity, infocognition, which embodies telic feedback. Second, its bit structure, a simplistic and rather uninspired blend of 2-valued propositional logic and probability theory, must be extended to accommodate logic as a whole, including (1) predicate logic, (2) model theory and (3) language theory, broadly including the theories of mathematical languages, metalanguages and generative grammars. After all, since information does nothing but attribute linguistically-organized predicates to objects in the context of models, its meaning involves the mathematics of predicates, languages and models. And third, it must be generalized to an ultimate ancestral medium, telesis, from which cognitive syntax and its informational content arise by specificative feedback as part of a unified complex … a recursive coupling of information and metainformation, or transductive syntax.

This retooling is accomplished by associating information with reflexive syntactic operators (units of coherent infocognition) in a reflexive linguistic structure, Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL), that incorporates its own model and is thus identical to its universe. SCSPL evolves by conspansion (material contraction qua spatial expansion), a structured grammatical alternation between a linguistic “output” phase (classical reality) consisting of the observable states or external relationships of syntactic operators, and a “production phase” that transforms one state to another.

This being said, there is a sense in which infocognitive monism well agrees with the thesis that bits are universal descriptors of reality: because the bit values 1 and 0 are analogous to the truth values of 2-valued logic, the fact that perceptual reality is described by 2-valued logic implies that it can be described in terms of bits. However, while reality at large is defined by relevance to perceptual reality in the relativistic sense, it does not consist of perceptual reality alone.

Telic Reducibility and Telic Recursion

Telic recursion is a fundamental process that tends to maximize a cosmic self-selection parameter, generalized utility, over a set of possible syntax-state relationships in light of the self-configurative freedom of the universe. An inherently “quantum” process that reflects the place of quantum theory in SCSPL, telic recursion is a “pre-informational” form of recursion involving a combination of hology, telic feedback and recursive selection acting on the informational potential of MU, a primal syndiffeonic form that is symmetric with respect to containment.

Where perceptual reality consists of infocognition (self-transducing information), explaining the genesis and evolution of reality amounts to explaining the genesis and evolution of infocognition. Because generalized cognition (information processing) is temporal, while information locates objects or message units in attributive spaces, information and cognition are respectively spatial and temporal in nature; infocognition is analogous to spacetime, and spacetime is infocognitive. It follows that perceptual reality consists not merely of infocognition but of spacetime, and that seeking an explanation of the genesis and evolution of reality amounts to seeking an explanation of the genesis and evolution of spacetime qua infocognition … i.e., to cosmology in the context of information transduction.

Cosmology, humanity’s grand attempt to explain the origin and nature of the universe, has traditionally amounted to the search for a set of “ultimate laws” capable of explaining not only how the universe currently functions, but how it came to be. Unfortunately, even were such a set of laws to be found, the associated explanation could not be considered adequate until the laws themselves were explained, along with the fundamental objects and attributes on which they act. This gives rise to what seems like an imponderable question: how can a set of laws, objects and attributes be explained except by invoking another set of laws in the form of an explanatory syntax that would itself demand an explanation, and so on ad infinitum?

The answer is hiding in the question. Laws do not stand on their own, but must be defined with respect to the objects and attributes on which they act and which they accept as parameters. Similarly, objects and attributes do not stand on their own, but must be defined with respect to the rules of structure, organization and transformation that govern them. It follows that the active medium of cross-definition possesses logical primacy over laws and arguments alike, and is thus pre-informational and pre-nomological in nature … i.e., telic. Telesis, which can be characterized as “infocognitive potential”, is the primordial active medium from which laws and their arguments and parameters emerge by mutual refinement or telic recursion.

In other words, telesis is a kind of “pre-spacetime” from which time and space, cognition and information, state-transitional syntax and state, have not yet separately emerged. Once bound in a primitive infocognitive form that drives emergence by generating “relievable stress” between its generalized spatial and temporal components – i.e., between state and state-transition syntax – telesis continues to be refined into new infocognitive configurations, i.e. new states and new arrangements of state-transition syntax, in order to relieve the stress between syntax and state through telic recursion (which it can never fully do, owing to the contingencies inevitably resulting from independent telic recursion on the parts of localized subsystems). As far as concerns the primitive telic-recursive infocognitive MU form itself, it does not “emerge” at all except intrinsically; it has no “external” existence except as one of the myriad possibilities that naturally exist in an unbounded realm of zero constraint.

Telic recursion occurs in two stages, primary and secondary (global and local). In the primary stage, universal (distributed) laws are formed in juxtaposition with the initial distribution of matter and energy, while the secondary stage consists of material and geometric state-transitions expressed in terms of the primary stage. That is, where universal laws are syntactic and the initial mass-energy distribution is the initial state of spacetime, secondary transitions are derived from the initial state by rules of syntax, including the laws of physics, plus telic recursion. The primary stage is associated with the global telor, reality as a whole; the secondary stage, with internal telors (“agent-level” observer-participants). Because there is a sense in which primary and secondary telic recursion can be regarded as “simultaneous”, local telors can be said to constantly “create the universe” by channeling and actualizing generalized utility within it.

Deterministic computational and continuum models of reality are recursive in the standard sense; they evolve by recurrent operations on state from a closed set of “rules” or “laws”. Because the laws are invariant and act deterministically on a static discrete array or continuum, there exists neither the room nor the means for optimization, and no room for self-design. The CTMU, on the other hand, is conspansive and telic-recursive; because new state-potentials are constantly being created by evacuation and mutual absorption of coherent objects (syntactic operators) through conspansion, metrical and nomological uncertainty prevail wherever standard recursion is impaired by object sparsity. This amounts to self-generative freedom, hologically providing reality with a “self-simulative scratchpad” on which to compare the aggregate utility of multiple self-configurations for self-optimizative purposes.

Standard recursion is “Markovian” in that when a recursive function is executed, each successive recursion is applied to the result of the preceding one. Telic recursion is more than Markovian; it self-actualizatively coordinates events in light of higher-order relationships or telons that are invariant with respect to overall identity, but may display some degree of polymorphism on lower orders. Once one of these relationships is nucleated by an opportunity for telic recursion, it can become an ingredient of syntax in one or more telic-recursive (global or agent-level) operators or telors and be “carried outward” by inner expansion, i.e. sustained within the operator as it engages in mutual absorption with other operators. Two features of conspansive spacetime, the atemporal homogeneity of IEDs (operator strata) and the possibility of extended superposition, then permit the telon to self-actualize by “intelligently”, i.e. telic-recursively, coordinating events in such a way as to bring about its own emergence (subject to various more or less subtle restrictions involving available freedom, noise and competitive interference from other telons). In any self-contained, self-determinative system, telic recursion is integral to the cosmic, teleo-biological and volitional (Langan, 2002a) levels of evolution.

The Telic Principle

Restricted to the teleological (“Why?”) level of explanation, MAP yields the Telic Principle: the universe configures itself according to the requirement that it self-select from a background of undifferentiated ontological potential or telesis. This requirement, amounting to a need for self-actualization and self-expression, is implicit in the MU form. The Telic Principle is responsible for converting potential to actuality in such a way as to maximize a universal self-selection parameter, generalized utility.

Teleology, the idea that the universe has a purpose which explains its existence and guides its evolution, some time ago began losing sway in the court of scientific opinion. Although it was at first assumed that a more neutral, less “theological” explanation for the existence of man and the universe would come along to fill the resulting explanatory void, it eventually became evident that no such replacement was conveniently falling out of the equations; some amount of higher-level interpretation would be required in any case. This marked the rise of the so-called Anthropic Principle, which now comes in several flavors including “weak”, “strong”, “final”, and that favored by Wheeler, “participatory”.

The initial (weak) version, the Weak Anthropic Principle or WAP, begins with the trivial if somewhat Bayesian point that our cosmological observations of the universe reveal a capacity for life “because” a life-bearing universe is the only kind of universe in which there are living beings able to make cosmological observations. But while this seems to imply that there exists a domain of many universes in which such a universe can be passively distinguished by the circumstantial constraint that it contain living observers, the WAP offers no ready explanation for such a domain. Indeed, to those not convinced of its virtues, the WAP almost seems to add an unnecessary dose of explanatory red ink to the cosmological ledger.

The Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) eliminates much of this red ink by making a more extreme claim, asserting that the existence of intelligent life is not just a circumstantial selection principle, but a sine qua non of cosmic existence. In effect, this limits the set of possible universes to just those which are capable of producing life. However, this leads to problems. How can the idea that living observers are necessary for the existence of the universe be squared with the idea that objective reality is essentially independent of observation and those who observe it? And how does intelligent life, which seems to have evolved billions of years after the universe was born, play any kind of causal role in cosmology? Is some sort of “time travel” occurring? Selection is one thing; retroactive self-generation is quite another.

It has often been remarked that the anthropic principles employ circular reasoning. I.e., they seem to take that which they purport to explain, the observable fact that the universe is “fine-tuned” to support life, as a premise, asserting that living beings observe the universe to be friendly to life “because” life is present in the universe to make this observation. In other words, we are here to observe the universe, and the universe is here to let us observe it, because we are here to observe the universe! Unfortunately, the anthropic principles lack something that they would need to make this work: a circular model to which their loop-like reasoning can be consistently mapped. Quite simply, the type of causal circularity they suggest is at odds with the “arrow of time” and other aspects of the prevailing non-circular models of time and space.

Because circular arguments are self-justifying and resistant to falsification, it is frequently assumed that tautology and circular reasoning are absolute theoretical evils. But this is far from the case, for logic and mathematics are almost completely based on circularity. Truth and logical tautology, recursion and iteration, algebraic and topological closure … all involve it to some degree. The problems arise only when circular reasoning is employed without the assurance of full mathematical generality, incorporating false claims of universality on (what may be) non-universal premises.

Unfortunately, not even valid tautologies are embraced by the prevailing school of scientific philosophy, falsificationism. While non-universal tautologies are rightly forbidden due to their resistance to falsificative procedures that would reveal their limitations, universal tautologies are pronounced “scientifically uninteresting” for much the same reason. But in fact, science could exist in no way, shape or form without them. The very possibility of a scientific observation is utterly dependent on the existence of tautological forms on which to base a stable, invariant syntax of perception. This raises the possibility that falsificationist thinking has accidentally obscured the true place of tautological reasoning in cosmology.

If the universe is really circular enough to support some form of “anthropic” argument, its circularity must be defined and built into its structure in a logical and therefore universal and necessary way. The Telic principle simply asserts that this is the case; the most fundamental imperative of reality is such as to force on it a supertautological, conspansive structure. Thus, the universe “selects itself” from unbound telesis or UBT, a realm of zero information and unlimited ontological potential, by means of telic recursion, whereby infocognitive syntax and its informational content are cross-refined through telic (syntax-state) feedback over the entire range of potential syntax-state relationships, up to and including all of spacetime and reality in general.

The Telic Principle differs from anthropic principles in several important ways. First, it is accompanied by supporting principles and models which show that the universe possesses the necessary degree of circularity, particularly with respect to time. In particular, the Extended Superposition Principle, a property of conspansive spacetime that coherently relates widely-separated events, lets the universe “retrodict” itself through meaningful cross-temporal feedback. Moreover, in order to function as a selection principle, it generates a generalized global selection parameter analogous to “self-utility”, which it then seeks to maximize in light of the evolutionary freedom of the cosmos as expressed through localized telic subsystems which mirror the overall system in seeking to maximize (local) utility. In this respect, the Telic Principle is an ontological extension of so-called “principles of economy” like those of Maupertuis and Hamilton regarding least action, replacing least action with deviation from generalized utility.

In keeping with its clear teleological import, the Telic Principle is not without what might be described as theological ramifications. For example, certain properties of the reflexive, self-contained language of reality – that it is syntactically self-distributed, self-reading, and coherently self-configuring and self-processing – respectively correspond to the traditional theological properties omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. While the kind of theology that this entails neither requires nor supports the intercession of any “supernatural” being external to the real universe itself, it does support the existence of a supraphysical being (the SCSPL global operator-designer) capable of bringing more to bear on localized physical contexts than meets the casual eye. And because the physical (directly observable) part of reality is logically inadequate to explain its own genesis, maintenance, evolution or consistency, it alone is incapable of properly containing the being in question.

Some Background

A review of the standard computational theory of language may prove useful. Computation theory recognizes two general types of automata, transducers and acceptors. Transducers convert input to output, while acceptors classify or “recognize” input consisting of strings of symbols without necessarily producing output.

A finite transducer is a 5-tuple (Σ, Q, Γ, δ, ω) where Σ is a finite nonempty input alphabet, Q is a finite nonempty state set, Γ is a finite nonempty output alphabet, δ : Q × Σ → Q is the state transition function, and ω : Q × Σ → Γ is the output function. To this we can add a start state q₀. Finite transducers ultimately rely on mechanical laws to function, transforming informational input to informational output by transforming their own states.

A finite acceptor is a 5-tuple (Q, Σ, δ, q₀, A), where Q is a nonempty finite set of internal states, and Σ is an alphabet, q₀, is the start state, and A ⊆ Q is the set of accepting states. The range of the transition mapping δ determines the type of acceptor; it is deterministic if δ: Q × Σ → Q, and nondeterministic if δ: Q × Σ → 2^Q (where 2^Q represents the power set of possible states). A deterministic finite acceptor (Q, Σ, δ, q₀, A) accepts a string x ∈ Σ* iff δ(q₀, x) ∈ A. A language is the set of strings accepted by a given automaton or class of automata.

Languages are generated by grammars. In the computational theory of language, a generative (or phrase structure) grammar G is a 4-tuple (N, T, P, σ) consisting of:

1. A finite set N of nonterminals.

2. A finite nonempty set T of terminals, with N ∩ T = ∅ and N ∪ T = A (the total alphabet of the grammar).

3. A finite set of productions P ⊂ ((N ∪ T)*\T*) × (N ∪ T)* consisting of nonterminal arguments and their possibly terminal transforms.

4. An element σ of N called the starting symbol.

The implementation of such a grammar is a deductive process leading from the general to the specific; starting from the most general symbol σ (which stands for “sentence”), increasingly specific productions lead to a terminal configuration. The production (x, y), often written x → y, signifies replacement of x by y, or equivalently, the substitution of y for x. Where A* denotes the set of all strings or “words” in A, and A*\T* denotes the complement of T* in A*, a word w ∈ (A*\T*) generates another word w′ if w = w₁ X w₂, w′ = w₁ X′ w₂, and X → X′ is a production.

The theory of generative grammars classifies them according to the least powerful acceptor that can recognize the languages they generate. Type 0 grammars generate unrestricted languages requiring a universal computer (Turing machine) with unlimited memory; type 1 grammars generate context-sensitive languages requiring a linear-bounded automaton with memory proportional to word length; type 2 grammars generate context-free languages requiring a pushdown automaton with a memory stack in which a fixed number of elements are available at any point; and type 3 grammars generate regular languages requiring a finite deterministic automaton with no memory.

There is an obvious parallel between the states and state transitions of automata, and the strings and productions of a grammar. An automaton processes input strings through its internal states, expressing them in terms of its own “internal language”. Indeed, a physical automaton in the act of processing an input string can be seen as a dynamic linguistic stratification incorporating the input language, the mutable programming of the automaton (including assembly and machine code), its hard-wired architecture, the nomological language consisting of the laws of physics according to which the hardware functions, and any “metaphysical” level of language necessary to define and maintain the laws of physics themselves. Since each language in this sequence is expressed in terms of the next one after it, the languages form a “descriptive nesting” in which the syntax of each distributes over all of those preceding it.

The syntax of a language consists of its grammar and the structure of its expressions. That is, a syntax is a compilation of the spatial (structural) and temporal (grammatical, transformational) rules of the associated language; its rules are invariant, general, and distributive with respect to the entire set of expressions comprising the language. This concept is as meaningful for automata as it is for the languages they process, applying to every level of the linguistic stratification just described. For example, where the concept of general covariance expresses the general and distributive nature of the laws of physics, these laws can be regarded as a “syntax” unto themselves, and so can the more general mathematical laws applying to the various mathematical structures to which the laws of physics implicitly refer.

Physics and mathematics are usually viewed not as languages, but as theories. Even though they are necessarily expressed in terms of language, they are usually considered “more specific”. But like automata, they too meet linguistic criteria. For instance, mathematical theories have syntaxes consisting of axioms and rules of inference, and various derived expressions such as definitions, theorems and corollaries. More generally, a theory is simply an informational construct that plays a direct definitive, descriptive or explanatory role with respect to something that needs to be defined, described or explained. Because theories consist of recognizable strings of symbols taking the form of statements and equations and obey “syntaxes” consisting of axioms, principles, hunches or rules of thumb, and in fact share their syntaxes with the objects of theorization up to descriptive isomorphism, they are languages. Indeed, the very requisites of theorization, namely perception and cognition, are languages in the sense that they consist of sensory or conceptual “expressions” and conform to logical and nonlogical syntaxes consisting of general rules of structure and operation, including (but not necessarily limited to) the physical structures and dynamics of our brains and nervous systems.

Let us quickly review some of the technical details of theoretical languages. A mathematical theory consists of propositions containing basic predicates and functions representing fundamental concepts. For example, set theory is based on the concept of membership (∈); geometry is strongly dependent on primitive concepts like angle and distance; and elementary arithmetic incorporates the more or less basic concepts of addition, multiplication and order (<). The symbols that stand for these concepts, sometimes called nonlogical constants, form the signature Σ of the theory. This signature includes symbols for relations, functions and individuals, each with an “arity” or valence. Beyond its signature, a mathematical theory contains variables (preassigned symbols denoting objects from a previously specified domain) for individuals represented by symbols like (x, y, z, …), logical symbols (logical constants) like (~, ∧, ∨, →, ⟷, =, ∃, ∀), and auxiliary technical symbols (Gellert et al., 1977).

An elementary language L_Σ (language of the predicate calculus) can be defined as a set of expressions or propositional forms incorporating these logical and nonlogical symbols and their syntactic rules. The terms of L_Σ are defined as follows:

1. Variables and constants for individuals are terms.

2. If F is an n-ary function symbol and t₁, …, t_n are terms, then Ft₁, …, t_n is a term.

3. A sequence of symbols is a term iff it conforms to 1 and 2.

The expressions of L_Σ are characterized thusly:

1. Where R is an n-ary function symbol and t₁, …, t_n are terms, then Rt₁, …, t_n is an atomic expression (i.e., an instance of attribution).

2. If A and B are expressions, then so are ~A, (A ∧ B), (A ∨ B), (A → B), and (A ⟷ B).

3. If A(x) is an expression containing the variable x, but not ∃ x or ∀ x, then so are ∃ x A(x) and ∀ x A(x).

4. A sequence of symbols is an expression only if formed in accordance with 1-3.

By nature, the languages of predicate logic are descriptive; their expressions describe relationships holding within various mathematical structures.18

It should now be clear that in order to define a theoretical language, one simply creates a syntax for it by extending the syntax of logic to accommodate the spatial and temporal relationships necessarily holding among its nonlogical constants under all (or at least most) logical circumstances within the intended scope of the theory. Like the syntax of logic itself, which is a theory of descriptive inclusion or “truth” based on the cognitive and perceptual need to distinguish that which is from that which is not, the syntax of a theoretical language is also based on ingredients and imperatives of cognitive and perceptual reality. We have already remarked on the equivalence of automata and languages; the states and state transitions of automata parallel the strings and productions of a grammar. To find the theoretical language describing any class of transducers, we need merely adjoin to the syntax of logic the nonlogical descriptors of their transductive structures and processes.

The primary transducers of the overall language of science are scientists, and their transductive syntax consists of the syntax of generalized scientific observation and theorization, i.e. perception and cognition. We may therefore partition or stratify this syntax according to the nature of the logical and nonlogical elements incorporated in syntactic rules. For example, we might develop four classes corresponding to the fundamental trio space, time and object, a class containing the rules of logic and mathematics, a class consisting of the perceptual qualia in terms of which we define and extract experience, meaning and utility from perceptual and cognitive reality, and a class accounting for more nebulous feelings and emotions integral to the determination of utility for qualic relationships.19 For now, we might as well call these classes STOS, LMS, QPS and ETS, respectively standing for space-time-object syntax, logico-mathematical syntax, qualio-perceptual syntax, and emo-telic syntax, along with a high-level interrelationship of these components to the structure of which all or some of them ultimately contribute. Together, these ingredients comprise the Human Cognitive-Perceptual Syntax or HCS.20

As every language user is aware, there is more to language processing than recognition and transduction. There is also communication. The concepts of language and communication are inseparable; languages are abstract structures through which communication is effected, and communication involves exchange of input and output by language users. Any time we have a syntax, a set of representative expressions conforming to it, and a set of language processors, we have a language and the possibility of meaningful communication among its processors. Where communication conveys information and information represents relationships, communication is about more than just the states of communicators; it can carry any information representing any kind of relationship. Accordingly, communicators not only accept and transduce language, but use it to represent to each other their views of the world.

The communication paradigm is perfectly general and holds on all scales. It applies not merely on the level of expressions exchanged by communicators, but even on the level of basic status information exchanged by the interactive processing elements of an automaton. That is, language processing itself can be regarded as a form of communication; in order to actualize a language through some form of processing, it must be intersected with a processing system that functions through operational communication among its parts. A universal machine, for example, is a “self-communication system” relaying information among its abstract components (indeed, communication is the very embodiment of the three basic operations of a universal computer, namely read, write and relocation). The structural and dynamical rules of language processors thus correspond directly to the syntaxes of languages; both kinds of system evolve by communicative intersection of syntax and state (or content). It follows that languages and automata can be treated on a par, and that since automata can be treated as self-communication systems, so can languages.

In the technical descriptions of automata and languages outlined above, a certain model of the world is implicit. Automata accept input from the outside world, transform it through their internal states, and (sometimes) return the result to the outside world when they are finished. Language and information are either inside or outside the automata, and they are inside only part of the time. The rest of the time, the information is presumably either lying around someplace else in the environment or en route from one place to another. But where communication happens on all scales, the distinction between inside and outside is not so clear. The languages communicated among language users and processors, and the languages embodied by users and processors themselves, occupy an overall medium with a unified communicative syntax largely indifferent to the distinction.

The laws that govern a system may be reposed in the space that contains its objects, or in the objects themselves. Classical physics reposes everything in space, applying spatial concepts like vectors and tensors to fields outside the objects. However, it is possible to apply a logical transformation which inverts this picture, turning it “outside-in”. This results in a “distributed subjectivization” in which everything occurs inside the objects; the objects are simply defined to consistently internalize their interactions, effectively putting every object “inside” every other one in a generalized way and thereby placing the contents of space on the same footing as that formerly occupied by the containing space itself. Vectors and tensors then become descriptors of the internal syntactic properties and states of objects. In effect, the universe becomes a “self-simulation” running inside its own contents.

This view, which is complementary to the conventional geometric one, is called transductive algebra. The “dual” relationship between geometry and transductive algebra is called conspansive duality. In conjunction with other principles including hology and SCSPL-infocognitive-telic reducibility, conspansive duality can afford fresh insight on the nature of reality and the physical world. One simply takes the conventional picture, turns it outside-in, puts the two pictures together, and extracts the implications. The relationship of this new picture to the old one is extensional rather than competitive, embedding the geometric model in a larger and more complete conspansive model uniting it with its dual model. In any case, all equivalent models are on an equal footing, and the only scientific hypotheses on which doubt could be shed as a result of this extension are those based on the fallacious assumption that the geometric model is the “whole story”.

Introduction to SCSPL

According to the Reality Principle, the universe is self contained, and according to infocognitive monism, it regresses to a realm of nil constraint (unbound telesis or UBT) from which it must refine itself. According to the Telic Principle, which states that the universe must provide itself with the means to do this, it must make and realize its own “choice to exist”; by reason of its absolute priority, this act of choice is identical to that which is chosen, i.e. the universe itself, and thus reflexive. I.e., “existence is everywhere the choice to exist.” Accordingly, the universe must adopt a reflexive form in which it can “select itself” for self-defined existence, with the selection function identical to that which is selected. This means that it must take a certain general or “initial” form, the MU form, which contains all of the requisites for generating the contents of reality. Due to hology, whereby the self-contained universe has nothing but itself of which to consist, this form is self-distributed.

One might at first be tempted to object that there is no reason to believe that the universe does not simply “exist”, and thus that self-selection is unnecessary. However, this is not a valid position. First, it involves a more or less subtle appeal to something external to the universe, namely a prior/external informational medium or “syntax” of existence; if such a syntax were sufficiently relevant to this reality, i.e. sufficiently real, to support its existence, then it would be analytically included in reality (as defined up to perceptual relevance). Second, active self-selection is indeed necessary, for existence is not merely a state but a process; the universe must internally distinguish that which it is from that which it is not, and passivity is ruled out because it would again imply the involvement of a complementary active principle of external origin.

By the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility, reality is a language. Because it is self-contained with respect to processing as well as configuration, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL whose general spatiotemporal structure is hologically replicated everywhere within it as self-transductive syntax. This reduces the generative phase of reality, including physical cosmogony, to the generative grammar of SCSPL. This reality-generative grammar is called Γ grammar and the MU form, being the most general or prior form of reality, is its basis. By the Principle of Infocognitive Monism and the hology of MU, SCSPL consists of MU-configured infocognition, and Γ grammar describes the generation and transformation of this universal constituent.

SCSPL is not an ordinary language, and Γ grammar is not an ordinary generative grammar. The reasons come down to the inherent limitations of computational language theory. In standard computation theory, a language consists of the set of strings accepted by a given automaton or class of automata; e.g., a language L is called “regular” if there is a finite-state automaton that accepts it. However, this approach is inadequate for SCSPL. First, it centers on computation, a general type of information processing associated with an abstract automaton, the Turing machine or “universal computer”, that could never have generated the informational structure of the real universe. Being an informational and metainformational (syntactic) construct, the universal computer can itself account for the genesis of neither syntax nor information. Second, unlike ordinary languages, the reality-language cannot rely on an external mind or automaton or preexisting hardware substrate for recognition and processing. Since any processor real enough to recognize and process reality is necessarily a part of reality, the language-processor distinction is without ontological force.

Thus, while ordinary discrete models of reality rely heavily on the language-processor distinction, SCSPL incurs no such debt. For example, cellular automaton models typically distinguish between a spatial array, the informational objects existing therein, and the distributed set of temporal state-transition rules by which the array and its contents are regulated. In contrast, SCSPL regards language and processor as aspects of an underlying infocognitive unity. By conspansive (ectomorphism-endomorphism) duality, SCSPL objects contain space and time in as real a sense as that in which spacetime contains the objects, resulting in a partial identification of space, time and matter. SCSPL is more than a reflexive programming language endowed with the capacity for computational self-execution; it is a protocomputational entity capable of telic recursion, and thus of generating its own informational and syntactic structure and dynamics.

Whereas ordinary computational models are informational and syntactic in character, the protocomputational nature of SCSPL requires a generalization of information and syntax. With respect to the origin or ultimate nature of perceptual reality, explanation is a reductive/inductive process that regressively unbinds constraints in order to lay bare those of highest priority and generality. This process eventually leads to the most basic intelligible descriptor that can be formulated, beyond which lies only the unintelligible. This marks the transition from information and syntax to a convergent reductive generalization, telesis.21

This points to a universal property of language: it is dynamic. While it is often conveniently assumed that languages are timeless Platonic ideals that waft around waiting to be processed by external acceptors, they can be treated in terms of static information only by users or processors that provide them with an external transductive syntax, and only then by neglecting certain underlying necessities. For example, to physically realize the informational structure of a language in a printed or electronic medium, it must be expressed in terms of physical particles that dynamically recognize each other’s locations to the extent required to maintain the spatial relationships comprising its informational structure. This is a general requirement, extending from the physical and concrete to the mathematical and abstract.

Thus, languages are ultimately self-processing; they must either contain their processors in their expressions, or be expressed in terms of a more basic language fulfilling this requirement. Accordingly, the expressions of SCSPL are dynamic informational configurations of information-processors, implying that SCSPL everywhere consists of information and acceptive-transductive syntax in a state of logical intersection. Together, information and syntax comprise infocognition, self-transducing information in the form of SCSPL syntactic operators that cross-absorptively “communicate” by acquiring each other’s informational states as cognitive-syntactic content. It is to the common basis of these two components that information may be reduced in the SCSPL context. Where the term telesis denotes this common component of information and syntax, SCSPL grammar refines infocognition by binding or constraining telesis as infocognition.

To the extent that any grammar functions by the recursive application of syntactic rules, SCSPL grammar is recursive (“self-calling”). However, SCSPL grammar is not merely deterministically or nondeterministically recursive, but telic-recursive. While an ordinary grammar recursively processes information or binds informational potential to an invariant syntax that distributes over its products, Γ grammar binds telesis, infocognitive potential ranging over possible relationships of syntax and state, by cross-refining syntax and its informational content through telic recursion. Telic recursion is the process responsible for configuring the syntax-content relationships on which standard informational recursion is based; its existence is an ontological requirement of reality. The telic-recursive cross-refinement of syntax and content is implicit in the “seed” of Γ grammar, the MU form, which embodies the potential for perfect complementarity of syntax and state, law and matter.

Since this potential can only be specifically realized through the infocognitive binding of telesis, and localized telic binding is freely and independently effected by localized, mutually decoherent telic operators, deviations from perfect complementarity are ubiquitous. SCSPL evolution, which can be viewed as an attempt to help this complementarity emerge from its potential status in MU, incorporates a global (syntactic) invariant that works to minimize the total deviation from perfect complementarity of syntax and state as syntactic operators freely and independently bind telesis. This primary SCSPL invariant, the Telic Principle, takes the form of a selection function with a quantitative parameter, generalized utility, related to the deviation. The Telic Principle can be regarded as the primary component of SCSPL syntax … the spatiotemporally distributed self-selective “choice to exist” coinciding with MU.

SCSPL incorporates the concepts of syntactic stratification and syntactic distribution. For example, because the laws of mathematics everywhere apply with respect to the laws of physics, the former distribute over the latter in the syntactic sense. Thus, where the laws of mathematics and physics are denoted by S1=LMS and S2 respectively, S1 distributes over S2, i.e. forms a syntactic covering for S2. Essentially, this means that the laws of mathematics are everywhere a required syntactic component of the language of physics. With S2 is associated an SCSPL “sublanguage” called L_o (with a letter O subscript). L_o constitutes the world of perception, the classical objective universe of sense data traditionally studied by science. L_o is contained in the telic-recursive, pre-informational phase of SCSPL, L_s, which encompasses the cross-refinement of L_o syntax and L_o content from the pre-infocognitive aspect of SCSPL. The part of SCSPL grammar confined to L_o incorporates certain restrictions to which L_s is not subject; e.g., the grammatical portion of L_o (S2) is fixed, distributed and supposedly continuous, while that of L_s can also be mutable, local and discrete … in a word, telic.

Γ grammar is the generative grammar of SCSPL = (L_s ⊃ L_o). Γ grammar is unlike an ordinary grammar in that its processors, products and productions coincide and are mutually formed by telic recursion. Syntax and state, loosely analogous to form and content (or productions and products), are mutually refined from telesis through telic recursion by infocognitive processors. Production rules include the Telic Principle, distributed elements of syntax formed in the primary phase of telic recursion, and more or less polymorphic telons formed by agent-level telors. The corresponding modes of production are global telic recursion, informational recursion by distributed syntax, and local telic recursion.

The “words” produced by Γ grammar are not strings of symbols, but L_o spatial relationships among parallel processors that can read and write to each other’s states. In effect, the states of its processors are roughly analogous to the symbols and strings of an ordinary language. The processors of Γ grammar thus function not only as transducers but as symbolic placeholders for observables and values, while their external states correspond to products and their state transitions realize the productions of the grammar. In other words, the states and state transitions of the processors of Γ grammar comprise a representation of Γ grammar, rendering SCSPL a dynamic self-modeling language or “interactive self-simulation”.

In the following description, products are limited to the physical end products associated with L_o. This is in no way to be interpreted to mean that the only SCSPL products are physical products; in fact, everything in SCSPL is to some extent a telic-recursive “product” of everything else. However, where the primary explanandum is physical (scientifically observable) reality, L_o is an appropriate choice.

Γ = (O, R, P, µ) contains:

1. A set O of active reflexive objects including Γ itself, the processors (producers-reducers)22 of Γ. All processors are capable of and responsive to informational (deterministic) recursion. O includes a distinguished set Σ = {Γ, A, Q} of syntactic operators, coherent processors capable of or responsive to telic recursion. In general, the parts of SCSPL syntax active within a given operator depend on its specific type. Σ includes the global processor Γ, the set Q = {q_i} of reducible and irreducible stable particles that are responsive to telic recursion in a degree proportional to their freedom and coherence, and the set A of telic agents, active telic-recursive operators or telors capable of expressing teleology on the local level. Elements of A need not occupy L_o, but may exist in L_s. Where υ denotes the generalized self-selection parameter of Γ, the elements of A are required by Γ as internal υ-responsive “sensor-controllers”.

2. A set R = (R_o, R_s) of products containing a subset R_o = (σ_o, τ_o, π_o) of L_o product states including all of the relations of L_o, and a subset R_s of telons or “pre-products” generated in L_s by telic recursion associated with global or agent-level syntactic operators. The elements of σ_o are spatial relations, those of τ_o are temporal relations, and those of π_o are spatiotemporal relations containing both σ_o and τ_o relations. σ _o consists of relations of states regarding which the corresponding transducers have no mutual input; τ_o consists of sequences of consecutive states of single objects; and π_o consists of processes, or combinations of both. These states are not in general fully determined by L_o rules of state transformation, but require telic augmentation for actualization.

3. A set P = (N, T) consisting of the productions of Γ. N consists of the distributed descriptors of π_o, including the spatiotemporally-distributed Markovian and conservative descriptors called “laws of physics”, while T consists of active L_s entities analogous to those of N but associated with specific telons (pre-products) from R_s and subject to coordinated local variation in the context of higher-order telonic relationships. The elements of N are determined in the primary stage of telic recursion, while those of T are determined in the secondary stage of telic recursion.

4. A starting configuration, the MU form µ, which is identical to the telic recursion event which creates it (the inception of SCSPL and Γ grammar is a telic recursion, not an informational-algorithmic recursion). It is this identity of event and outcome that determines the innate spatial and temporal characteristics of spacetime, for which µ is the “seed”. The MU form can be regarded as an “intrinsic perturbation” or “intrinsic asymmetry” in UBT. The MU form is distributed over SCSPL.

A processor of a grammar G is any natural or artificial dynamical system that operates, changes state or processes information in conformance to the rules of G. Unlike ordinary generative grammars, Γ grammar requires no external processors; its processors and productions are identical. Thus, Γ grammar is executed by its own productions in levels of syntactic distribution ranging from the global to the object level. In fact, O, R and P – processors, products (states) and production events – all coincide and thus exhibit a form of triality. This three-way coincidence is characteristic of Γ grammar and captures many of its essential features.

O-R-P coincidence is already to some extent realized in the standard language-grammar-processor model of computation theory, but only inadvertently. While linguistic processing is dynamically paralleled by changes in the internal and external states of processors, the processors are still considered separate from the language and grammar being processed. Moreover, the basic medium of processing is not considered, the model is not self-sufficient, and recursion is merely informational and computational; there is no allowance for infocognition or telic recursion. SCSPL shares none of these limitations.

Γ grammar generates SCSPL according to the utility of its sentient processors, including the self-utility of Γ and the utility of its L_o relations to telors in A. Γ and A generate telons on the global and local level respectively; thus, they must be capable of recognizing and maximizing the selection parameter υ (in the case of human telors, for example, this requires the QPS and ETS components of the HCS). As such, they are responsible for telic recursion and may be regarded as the “generators” of Γ grammar, while the set Q of elementary physical objects are freely and competitively acquired by telons and thus occupy an ontologically secondary position.

Γ grammar is conspansive. Non-global processors alternate between the generation and selective actualization of possible productions, and thus between the generative and selective (inner expansive and requantizative) phases of conspansion. The selective phase of an operator coincides with interactive mutual-acquisition events, while the generative phase coincides with the generation and selective actualization of possible productions through hological multiplexing. In conjunction with extended spatiotemporal superposition, conspansion provides the means of local (telic and informational) recursion.

Conspansion is a global process which cannot be locally differentiated as to rate. Its rate is thus a globally invariant “time-space conversion factor”, and because all changes of local state must be expressed in terms of it, it is maximal. This invariant maximal rate of production is referred to as the rate of conspansion c and can be physically identified with the speed of light in vacuo.23 The implications of the constancy of c and N in light of MAP have already been noted with respect to internally-apparent accelerating expansion of the global operator.

It is instructive to experiment with the various constructions that may be placed on L_s and L_o. For example, one can think of L_s as “L-sim”, reflecting its self-simulative, telic-recursive aspect, and of L_o as “L-out”, the output of this self-simulation. One can associate L_o with observable states and distributed-deterministic state-transition syntax, and L_s with the metasyntactic Telic Principle. One can even think of L_s and L_o as respectively internal and (partially) external to SCSPL syntactic operators, and thus as loosely correspondent to the subjective and objective aspects of reality. Where L_s and L_o are associated with the coherent inner expansion and decoherent requantization phases of conspansion, so then are subjective and objective reality, simulation and output, “wave and particle”. In other words, the subjective-objective distinction, along with complementarity, can be viewed as functions of conspansive duality.

The fact that L_o has a foliated structure consisting of spacelike sheets, with temporal rules confined to the operators embedded in the sheets, suggests that its inter-operator (state-wise, ectosyntactic) level of structure be regarded as essentially spatial in character. Thus, where space denotes the external relationships among operators and time denotes their internal self-relationships, one might also think of L_s and L_o as corresponding approximately to time and space. (The correspondence is “approximate” because L_s and L_o are mutually inclusive, reflecting the logical coupling of space and time; L_o topologically contains (L_s, L_o)-structured operators, while the operators descriptively contain L_o.) Where space and time respectively correspond to information and a combination of generalized cognition and telic recursion, one may therefore conclude that the conspansive evolution of spacetime is an alternation of teleo-cognitive and informational phases cross-refined by telic recursion involving extended, trans-Markovian telonic relationships.

Although it contains the observable aspect of SCSPL, L_o may in principle contain hidden (inobservable) parameters implicated in nomological relationships and therefore relevant to physical state. I.e., in addition to the standard dynamical variables of physics, L_o may contain additional dynamical variables that cannot be directly observed, but only theoretically inferred on the basis of more or less general observations. For example, string theorists, M-theorists and others often conjecture that the universe may be floating in some sort of external embedding space, its relationship to which yields explanatory value regarding the internal state or condition of the universe itself. SCSPL conspansive duality suggests that the putative “externality” of such a space is not a meaningful property; if such a space exists and is sufficiently relevant to the universe in which we live to be of explanatory value to us, then it is by definition an ingredient of SCSPL syntax and can therefore be regarded as residing within SCSPL syntactic operators. In fact, this is a direct consequence of the Reality Principle.

Although it would be possible to go on at length, this paper is intended to present a general outline of the theory rather than an exhaustive development. In conjunction with the principles and features enumerated above, the given framework should suffice to characterize SCSPL on an introductory basis and distinguish it in flavor and content from other theories.

SCSPL as the Self-Excited Circuit

We are now in a position to draw a few parallels between Wheeler’s vision of reality theory and the CTMU.

The Self-Excited Circuit, the informational logic loop through which physics engenders observer participation, which engenders information, which engenders physics, is a tight characterization of SCSPL … so tight that it would be difficult if not impossible to replace SCSPL with anything else and neither violate nor fall short of Wheeler’s description. SCSPL is logical in construction, has a loop-like dynamic, and creates information and syntax, including the laws of physics, through telic recursion generated by agent-level syntactic operators whose acts of observer-participation are essential to the self-configuration of the Participatory Universe. These acts are linked by telic recursion to the generalized cognitive-perceptual interactions of quantum-level syntactic operators, the minimal events comprising the fabric of spacetime.

Through telic feedback, state and syntax are cross-refined from unbound telesis or UBT, a zero-information domain of ontological potential, under the guidance of a higher-order law called the Telic Principle … a protean Law Without Law through which order is extracted from disorder as laws are configured according to the generalized utility of state-syntax relationships for agent-level operators or observer-participants. The binary yes-or-no indications prescribed by It from Bit are demanded by infocognitive monism and the fundamental status of two-valued sentential logic in SCSPL syntax. The world is not merely a cybernetic monstrosity, a “giant machine ruled by preestablished law”, but a metacybernetic system with logical priority over machines and the laws they obey.

How come existence? is answered by the fact that the universe is a global SCSPL operator amounting to one vast, self-selective, self-expressive act of reflexive observer-participation, while How come the quantum? is answered by the hological self-replication of the universe in each one of its microscopic syntactic operators and agent-level telors. Many observer-participants yield one coherent world because, through MU, the universe relates to its contents as a homogeneous distributed syntax that syndiffeonically supports and expresses their distinctions even as they help it evolve through observer-participation and telic recursion. Individual solipsism becomes distributed solipsism through the mutual absorption of SCSPL syntactic operators, made possible by a combination of distributed SCSPL syntax and shared teleology.

The Reality Principle, along with MAP, M=R and other logical guarantors of cosmic self-containment, shows that the syntactic stability of reality rules out any infinite reptilian regress of turtle on turtle, while the familiar continuum of classical physics corresponds to a syntactic (LMS) interpolation of the conspansive manifold generated by discrete SCSPL grammatical operations. Where space and time correspond to information and generalized cognition respectively, and where information and cognition are logically entwined in infocognitive SCSPL syntactic operators intersecting in states and state-transition events, space and time are entwined in a conspansive event-lattice connected by syntax and evolving through mutual absorption events among syntactic operators, symmetric instances of generalized observation influenced by telic recursion. Thus, time is not “fed into” the explanation of existence, but is a function of conspansive, telic-recursive SCSPL grammar.

The ultimate boundary of the boundary of the universe is UBT, a realm of zero constraint and infinite possibility where neither boundary nor content exists. The supertautologically-closed universe buys internal diffeonesis only at the price of global synesis, purchasing its informational distinctions only at the price of coherence. No question? No answer! reflects the fact that reality consists not of mere information, but infocognition, and that information on state is crucially linked to and dependent on syntax … the syntax of the “questions” asked of itself by the self-configuring universe. Due to the self-configurative freedom inherited by reality from UBT, the dynamically self-configuring universe displays uncertainty and complementarity and thus cannot be locked into locally-determinate answers for all possible questions at once, while the extended self-connectivity of conspansive spacetime unavoidably implicates the environment in the Q&A.

The Super-Copernican Principle reflects the distribution of the creation event over every point of spacetime according to the Extended Superposition Principle, which describes the way consequent states and events are atemporally superposed in their antecedent states and events. Generalized consciousness, the unitary reflexivity of the universe, is a fair description of the self-configuration and self-processing capacity of SCSPL as captured by the Telic and M=R Principles, while conspansive spacetime links spatially and temporally distant objects in a web of contact and communication exceeding even the neural connectivity of a human brain. And the CTMU describes the universe as just the sort of complex, teleologically self-variegating, self-synthesized information system prescribed by More is different, telic-recursively explicating multiplicity and diffeonesis from the unity and synesis of distributed SCSPL syntax, the (unique) CTMU counterpart of what has sometimes been called “the Implicate Order”.24

The above analogy is only partial, and it is nowhere implied that the current presentation is without its gaps. But in fairness, several crucial points can be made in favor of the CTMU even at this early stage of exposition. First, it is supertautological; being constructed to mirror logical tautology up to the level of model theory and beyond, it is true in much the same way that a theory of pure mathematics would be true, but with reference to an expanded universe consisting of both mathematical and physical reality. Indeed, the CTMU can be viewed as a theory of the mathematical structure of a new mathematical object, SCSPL. Second, it has considerably more explanatory scope than other theories, providing a framework that is capable of accommodating the logic of self-determinative cosmogony without prejudicially excluding (e.g.) subjective and non-material aspects of reality. Third, it largely embeds current models of reality, at least to the extent that these models have not already been pushed beyond their explanatory capacities. And fourth, it has what appear to be empirically valid implications absent from other theories except as assumptions or unexpected observations, e.g. accelerating cosmic expansion. But perhaps the most important thing at this point is that in principle, any apparent explanatory gaps can be filled. That is, if something can be explained within the realm of standard science, then it can be even better explained in an inclusive model fortified with conspansive duality.

The ramifications of the CTMU are sufficiently extensive that their issuance from a single theory almost demands an explanation of its own. The scientific, mathematical and philosophical implications of the CTMU are many and varied, running the gamut from basic physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, the theory of cognition, the foundations of mathematics and the philosophies of language and consciousness. But to be fair, nothing less is to be expected of a true “reality theory”, particularly one that takes the form of a description of the relationship between mind and the universe. After all, the CTMU is so-named because it is a symmetric cross-interpretation of mental and physical reality, logically mapping the concrete universe into an abstract theory of generalized cognition and vice versa according to the M=R Principle. Were its implications anything less than profound, it would be miscategorized and misnamed.

The CTMU says that reality is a language … a self-explanatory, self-theorizing, self-modeling structure identical to its universe. As such, it can be regarded as a limit or “contraction” of model theory in which theory and universe coincide on the syntactic level of theoretical structure. Whereas most scientific theories are hopefully mapped into or onto the universe across an unbridgeable dualistic gulf, the CTMU is a monic theory of perception that simply eliminates the gulf by tautologically injecting logic in its entirety, including logical extensions of model theory and the logic of formalized theories, into reality as distributed self-transductive syntax. The CTMU is able to do this because it is a hard mathematical fact that anything which does not conform to the syntax of logic is inconsistent and therefore not a part of any stable, coherent reality. Because the reality we inhabit is visibly stable and coherent, the correctness of this move is assured. By eliminating the theory-universe gulf on the level of cognitive and perceptual syntax, the CTMU admirably fulfills the criterion of theoretic economy … and supertautologically at that.

Does the CTMU qualify as a realization of Wheeler’s vision, and is it alone in this distinction? While one naturally hesitates to put words into the mouth of an icon, one or both of two things seems to be true: either relatively few reality theorists are inclined to share Wheeler’s far-reaching worldview, or relatively few reality theorists are able to understand this worldview and pursue its implications. Consequently, despite Wheeler’s eminence as a physicist, his has almost seemed a voice in the wilderness, leaving some with the impression that his deepest speculations have more the ring of distant prophecy than immediate theoretical practicality. But while the questions, “no’s” and clues in terms of which Wheeler describes his vision may occasionally appear heavier on intuition and creativity than on logical and mathematical rigor, they are just the sort of intuitive distillations of mathematical insight that one might expect from one so experienced in logical and quantitative reasoning. In conjunction with other necessary principles, they can be transformed into logico-mathematical properties of reality with enough restrictive power among them to determine a new mathematical structure called SCSPL, the ultimate “intrinsic language”. When all is said and done, there are excellent reasons to believe that this structure is unique, and that any additional principles that Professor Wheeler might have in mind can be accommodated by the CTMU as surely as by logic itself.

The CTMU and Intelligent Design

Design theory, which traces its origins to traditional theological “arguments from design” holding that nature was more or less obviously designed by a preexisting intelligence, maintains that the observed complexity of biological structures implies the involvement of empirically detectable intelligent causes in nature. Intelligent Design, the most recent scientific outgrowth of Design Theory, is a scientific research program based on a more philosophically neutral, and therefore scientific, search for instances of a clear, objective, standard form of biological complexity. According to William Dembski (1997), one of the movement’s leading spokesmen, this has led to “a theory of biological origins and development} according to which “intelligent [and empirically detectable] causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology.” In view of the informational nature of complexity, Dembski observes that “information is not reducible to natural causes … the origin of information is best sought in intelligent causes. Intelligent design thereby becomes a theory for detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and tracing its flow.”

One of the first things to note about the above definition is that it couples the implied definitions of intelligence, causation and information to a greater extent than do most dictionaries, pointing in principle to a joint definition of all of them. Since any good definition requires a model, one might be strongly tempted to infer on this basis that ID, as here defined, has a well-defined model in which all of its constituent concepts are related. It may therefore come as a surprise to many that perhaps the most frequent, or at any rate the most general, objection to ID in the wider intellectual community is that it “has no model”. According to its critics, it lacks any real-world interpretation specifying a fundamental medium able to support it or a means by which to realize it.

Furthermore, its critics claim, its central hypothesis is not only beyond proof, but unrealistic and not amenable to empirical confirmation.

In all fairness, it must be noted that insofar as science has itself spectacularly failed to agree on a global model of reality, this is really nothing more than an exercise in hypocrisy. Science observes, relates and extrapolates from observations with what often turns out to be great efficiency, but has time and time again proven unable to completely justify its reductions or the correspondences between its theories and the real universe as a whole. Although some critics claim that beyond a certain point, explanation is pointless and futile, they do not speak for science; the entire purpose of science is explanation, not rationally unsubstantiated assertions to the effect that a closed-form explanation is “unavailable” or “unnecessary”. In seeking a coherent explanation for existence – an explanation incorporating an ontological design phase that is rational, coherent and therefore intelligent – the ID program is in fact perfectly consistent with science.

However, being perfectly consistent with science means merely that something is in line for a model, not that it already has one. It has thus been possible for dedicated critics of ID to create the illusion, at least for sympathetic audiences, that they have it at a critical disadvantage. They contend that while science must be instrumental to society, yield specific predictions, and thus cite specific structural and dynamical laws that nontrivially explain its contexts of application, ID is nothing more than a Trojan horse for religious ideology, makes no nontrivial predictions, and is devoid of theoretical structure. Due to the number of sympathetic ears that such claims have found in Academia, this illusion has all but promoted itself to the status of a self-reinforcing mass delusion in certain closed-minded sectors of the intellectual community. Obviously, it would be to the advantage of the ID movement, and society as a whole, to end this contagion by putting forth something clearly recognizable as a model.

The problem, of course, is that as long as science in general lacks a fundamental model, so do all particular strains of science including Intelligent Design. Due to the close connection between fundamentality and generality, ID or any other field of scientific inquiry would ultimately have to provide science in general with a fundamental model in order to provide one for itself. This might have led some people, in particular those who doubt the existence of a stable fundamental model of reality, to suppose that the ID controversy would remain strictly within the realm of philosophy until the end of time. But this is not the case, for if there were really no fundamental model – if there were no way to map theoretic cognition onto reality in its entirety – perception itself would lack a stable foundation. Perception, after all, can be described as the modeling of objective reality in cognition, and the modeling of cognition in objective reality. The self-evident perceptual stability of reality, on which the existence and efficacy of science and scientific methodology absolutely depend, bear unshakable testimony to the existence of a fundamental model of the real universe.

The general nature of this model can be glimpsed merely by considering the tautological reflexivity of the term “self-evident”. Anything that is self evident proves (or evidences) itself, and any construct that is implicated in its own proof is tautological. Indeed, insofar as observers are real, perception amounts to reality tautologically perceiving itself. The logical ramifications of this statement are developed in the supertautological CTMU, according to which the model in question coincides logically and geometrically, syntactically and informationally, with the process of generating the model, i.e. with generalized cognition and perception. Information thus coincides with information transduction, and reality is a tautological self-interpretative process evolving through SCSPL grammar.

The CTMU has a meta-Darwinian message: the universe evolves by hological self-replication and self-selection. Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a cosmic form of natural selection. But by the nature of this selection process, it also bears description as intelligent self-design (the universe is “intelligent” because this is precisely what it must be in order to solve the problem of self-selection, the master-problem in terms of which all lesser problems are necessarily formulated). This is unsurprising, for intelligence itself is a natural phenomenon that could never have emerged in humans and animals were it not already a latent property of the medium of emergence. An object does not displace its medium, but embodies it and thus serves as an expression of its underlying syntactic properties. What is far more surprising, and far more disappointing, is the ideological conflict to which this has led. It seems that one group likes the term “intelligent” but is indifferent or hostile to the term “natural”, while the other likes “natural” but abhors “intelligent”. In some strange way, the whole controversy seems to hinge on terminology.

Of course, it can be credibly argued that the argument actually goes far deeper than semantics … that there are substantive differences between the two positions. For example, some proponents of the radical Darwinian version of natural selection insist on randomness rather than design as an explanation for how new mutations are generated prior to the restrictive action of natural selection itself. But this is untenable, for in any traditional scientific context, “randomness” is synonymous with “indeterminacy” or “acausality”, and when all is said and done, acausality means just what it always has: magic. That is, something which exists without external or intrinsic cause has been selected for and brought into existence by nothing at all of a causal nature, and is thus the sort of something-from-nothing proposition favored, usually through voluntary suspension of disbelief, by frequenters of magic shows.

Inexplicably, some of those taking this position nevertheless accuse of magical thinking anyone proposing to introduce an element of teleological volition to fill the causal gap. Such parties might object that by “randomness”, they mean not acausality but merely causal ignorance. However, if by taking this position they mean to belatedly invoke causality, then they are initiating a causal regress. Such a regress can take one of three forms: it can be infinite and open, it can terminate at a Prime Mover which itself has no causal explanation, or it can form some sort of closed cycle doubling as Prime Mover and that which is moved. But a Prime Mover has seemingly been ruled out by assumption, and an infinite open regress can be ruled out because its lack of a stable recursive syntax would make it impossible to form stable informational boundaries in terms of which to perceive and conceive of reality.

What about the cyclical solution? If one uses laws to explain states, then one is obliged to explain the laws themselves. Standard scientific methodology requires that natural laws be defined on observations of state. If it is then claimed that all states are by definition caused by natural laws, then this constitutes a circularity necessarily devolving to a mutual definition of law and state. If it is then objected that this circularity characterizes only the process of science, but not the objective universe that science studies, and that laws in fact have absolute priority over states, then the laws themselves require an explanation by something other than state. But this would effectively rule out the only remaining alternative, namely the closed-cycle configuration, and we would again arrive at … magic.

It follows that the inherently subjective process of science cannot ultimately be separated from the objective universe; the universe must be self-defining by cross-refinement of syntax and state. This brings us back to the CTMU, which says that the universe and everything in it ultimately evolves by self-multiplexing and self-selection. In the CTMU, design and selection, generative and restrictive sides of the same coin, are dual concepts associated with the alternating stages of conspansion. The self-selection of reality is inextricably coupled to self-design, and it is this two-phase process that results in nature. Biological evolution is simply a reflection of the evolution of reality itself, a process of telic recursion mirroring that of the universe as a whole. Thus, when computations of evolutionary probability are regressively extrapolated to the distributed instant of creation, they inevitably arrive at a logical and therefore meaningful foundation.

The CTMU says that on logical grounds, reality has generative and restrictive phases, and that evolution has generative and restrictive phases that are necessarily expressed in terms of those of reality. It asserts that the meta-cybernetic mechanism of evolution is telic recursion, an atemporal process which sets up a stratified dialectic between syntax and state, organism and environment, with mutually consistent mutable and invariant levels. It says that this process, though subject to various forms of noise, interference and competition predicated on the internal freedom of reality, tends to maximize the utility of the universe and its inhabitants. And it thus says that evolution is much more than a mere environmental dictatorship in which inexplicable laws of nature call the tune as biology slavishly dances the jig of life and death.

The CTMU says that by its self-generative, self-selective nature, which follows directly from the analytic requirement of self-containment, reality is its own “designer”. Other features of the generative grammar of reality imply that reality possesses certain logical properties traditionally regarded as theological or spiritual, and that to this extent, the self-designing aspect of reality is open to a theological or spiritual interpretation. The CTMU, being a logical theory, does not attempt to force such an interpretation down anyone’s throat; not all semantic permutations need affect theoretical structure. What it does do, however, is render any anti-theological interpretation a priori false, and ensures that whatever interpretation one chooses accommodates the existence of an “intelligent designer” … namely, reality itself. In light of the CTMU, this is now a matter more of logic than of taste.

In any case, it should be clear that the CTMU yields new ways of looking at both evolution and teleology. Just as it is distinguished from other theories of cosmic evolution by its level of self-containment, particularly with regard to its preference for self-determinacy rather than external determinacy or indeterminacy, so for its approach to biological evolution. Unlike other theories, the CTMU places evolutionary biology squarely in the context of a fundamental, self-contained model of reality, thus furnishing it with an explanation and foundation of its own instead of irresponsibly passing the explanatory buck to some future reduction; instead of counting it sufficient to model its evolutionary implications in the biological world, the CTMU establishes model-theoretic symmetry by providing a seamless blend of theory and universe in which the biological world can itself be “modeled” by physical embedment. This alone entitles it to a place in the evolutionary debate.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Gina Lynne LoSasso for creating the diagrams that appear in this paper and for many stimulating discussions and feedback regarding the presentation of this work. Many thanks are also in order for a number of individuals who have supported and followed my work and contributed stimulating questions that helped me to explicate the CTMU in its current level of detail. These include, among others, Robert North Seitz, John Chapman, Angell O. de la Sierra, Mike Doyle, Phillip Hopp, Quinn Tyler Jackson, Evangelos Katsiolis, Paul Kisak and Anthony Nolan.

References

Behe, M. J. (1998) Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Berlinski, D. (2001) What Brings a World into Being? Commentary, Vol. 111, No. 4, p. 17.

Dembski, W. A. (1997) Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 180–190.

Dembski, W. A. (1998) The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eddington, A. (1933) The Expanding Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gellert, W., Kustner, H., Hellwich, M., Kastner, H. (Eds.) (1977) The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.

Gödel, K. (1962) On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Translated by B. Meltzer. New York: Basic Books.

Langan, C. M. (1999) Introduction to the CTMU. Ubiquity, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Langan, C. M. (2001a) Physics and Metaphysics Noesis-E, Vol. 1, No. 3.

Langan, C. M. (2001b) Of Trees, Quads, and God. Noesis-E, Vol. 1, No. 4.

Langan, C. M. (2002a) The Art of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Selected Essays. Eastport, NY: Mega Foundation Press.

Langan, C. M. (2002b) The Theory of Theories. Noesis-E, Vol. 2, No. 1.

Russell, B. (1979) History of Western Philosophy. London: Unwin Paperbacks.

Shannon, C. E. (1948) A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, pp. 379-423 and 623-656.

Wheeler, J. A. (1979) From the Big Bang to the Big Crunch. Cosmic Search Magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 4, pp. 2–8.

Wheeler, J. A. (1980) Beyond the Black Hole. In H. Woolf (Ed.) Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein, pp. 341–375. Addison-Wesley Educational Publishing Company.

Wheeler, J. A. (1990a) Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links. In W. H. Zurek (Ed.) Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Vol. VIII, pp. 3–28. Addison-Wesley Educational Publishing Company.

Wheeler, J. A. (1990b) A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime. New York: Scientific American Library.

Wozniak, R. H. (1992) Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James. National Library of Medicine (U.S.), American Psychological Association.

11

This custom symbol cannot be displayed correctly in the browser as text, which results in a symbol for an unknown character (ˆ). This is how it’s supposed to be displayed:

It’s also visible in DIAGRAMS VI, VII, and IX.

Permission has been granted by The M.C. Escher Company to use some of the works of M.C. Escher in this publication. They are intended to serve as geometrical expressions of certain ideas presented in the text. To our minds, Escher’s art wonderfully complements the CTMU and its beautiful explication of the universal logical laws of the real Universe that reside within us. Enjoy!

The Polish–English edition of the “Introduction to the CTMU”

If you’d like to learn more about the works of M.C. Escher used in the publication, please follow the links below.

Page 2, Up and Down, July 1947, Lithograph.

Page 7, Smaller and Smaller, October 1956, Wood Engraving and Woodcut, printed from four blocks.

Page 11, Liberation, April 1955, Lithograph.

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Dear Guardians of Logos:

Thank you for your continued support and for sharing our vision of the triumph of the Human Singularity! Help others learn about Chris’s important work by giving a gift subscription and sharing our public posts with like-minded individuals.

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https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Discussions-of-Genius-Interview-with-Arthur-Jensen.pdf

As the company has conservative leanings, there have been complaints that some of its content is unverified and that facts are twisted to fit its partisan perspective. But this is to be expected, as progressivists and their partisans always claim, usually on no evidence whatsoever, to have an exclusive lock on truth and reason. In fact, DW appears to be a respectable company.

I was interviewed by the DW on April 30 [2022] in Nashville. It must have cost the company several thousand dollars (including airfare, car fees, and overnight accommodations for my wife and me). They pressed me repeatedly to be interviewed on short notice by Michael Knowles, who conducted the interview in what seemed a very professional way. The idea was that Michael wanted to use the interview as the inaugural presentation in a special series he planned to introduce.

In the course of the interview, Gina and I met Michael, Jeremy (co-owner of the DW), and other members of the DW staff. Everyone claimed to love the interview, and not just a little. We expected to see it online within a couple of weeks.

But then it was pulled without explanation of any kind.

Excerpted from Chris Langan's newsletter at https://chrislangan.substack.com/p/high-strangeness-at-the-daily-wire

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Publisher’s note: We have reprinted this interesting and productive discussion of the CTMU for didactic purposes. This dialogue took place circa 1999–2000. Several brief references to third parties that were not relevant to the dialogue have been removed. There was no further correspondence until Fred posted a “critique” of the CTMU. The “critique”, including Chris’s response, has been reprinted in the last part of this book.

This dialogue is also available as an ebook download for paid subscribers at Substack and linked in the members’ area at CTMU Radio.

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In agreeing to write this essay, I have promised to explain why I find Darwinism unconvincing. In order to keep this promise, I will be compelled to acknowledge the apparently paradoxical fact that I find it convincing as well. I find it convincing because it is in certain respects correct, and in fact tautologically so in the logical sense; I find it unconvincing because it is based on a weak and superficial understanding of causality and is therefore incomplete. Explaining why this is so will require a rather deep investigation of the nature of causality. It will also require not only that a direction of progress be indicated, but that a new synthesis embracing the seemingly antithetical notions of teleology and natural selection be outlined. But first, some essential background. […]

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