The Smartest Man in the World: The Interview They Didn't Want You to See (transcription excerpt)
Transcription of the first forty-five minutes of the Daily Wire interview with Chris Langan
The Smartest Man in the World: The Interview They Didn't Want You to See (paperback edition)
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.
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.
“The mind is its own place, and in it self; Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
A fantastic interview and my first introduction to CTMU. Not surprised they didn't play it but it was an absolute shame.