FAQs About Reality: Chris Langan's Social Media Posts. Book Two: Patreon (excerpt)

Two essays from 2019: “The One True Ontology” and “Is Reality Arbitrary?”

FAQs About Reality: Chris Langan's Social Media Posts. Book Two: Patreon (paperback edition)

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.

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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I requested that my unpublished content (scheduled and draft folders containing important writing on the CTMU) be returned to me.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.

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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.