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Thread: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Quote Posted by Jayke (here)
    How about we change track and bring it back to something more productive. Let’s bring it back to Christopher Langan and explore the wisdom he shares. Honest question time...what’s the most important insight you’ve gained from listening to Langans thoughts? What are the primary observations Langan shares that enable you to esteem him so highly?
    Great idea, Jayke, and thank you.

    So far the most I've taken away from his CTMU is that he's managed to take the old paradox of the first cause, and re-frame it in such a way that it actually kind of makes sense, even though it's still a baffling and ephemeral kind of thing.

    Fundamentalist Christians say that God created the universe from nothing. Okay, so where did God come from? It's the same problem with the Big Bang. Scientists say everything came from the Big Bang. Okay, then where did the Big Bang come from?

    There's always been this problem of what came first and how could something possibly come out of nothing.

    We already partially resolved this by realizing that time isn't necessarily a constant, that things can actually exist outside of time as we think of it, or time could even appear to flow backwards on the quantum level. So some people have concluded we can throw the idea of time out completely, and it's more satisfying to consider the Hindu concept that everything has simply always existed on some level, and that time isn't what we think it is.

    Okay, but that still doesn't explain why something exists and not nothing. Why should anything exist at all? We've removed time from the equation but we still don't have an answer.

    So that's where Langan comes in, and his theory appears to redefine the problem yet again. This time, an outside observer is effectively removed from the equation of the first cause. There is only one thing. There was nothing to observe what exactly "happened" except for the self-awareness inherent in reality itself. Now I'm not going to try to explain it any more than that because it goes over my head real quick, but I've been making an effort to understand parts of it and this is what I've got so far, and I do find it fascinating. Nor do I think Langan is parroting anyone, or insane, and he didn't even get a college degree so it's pointless to even bring up academic brainwashing.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    I wouldn’t consider Langan to be parroting anyone, be insane or be academically brainwashed, not in the slightest.

    If he was a member of this forum, and this thread was started by him introducing himself, I’d still be asking the same questions...and not because the ego would feel threatened, but because the ego is infinitely curious and inquisitive.

    That being said, I’d suggest his ‘Cognitive-Theoretical-Model of the Universe’ (CTMU) sounds a lot like it’s approaching the beginnings of Gnosticism, the idea that we can know and be present with the monad, the one divine creator of the universe, through our ability to comprehend divine knowledge (knowledge of the undivided essence of reality).

    I’d ask him if he was familiar with the Greek tradition of metempsychosis, the belief that each of our souls resides in the stars, and our incarnate lifetimes are like bees swarming from the nest (star) to the flowers (earth) to collect pollen (gnosis) so that once we die our soul returns to the nest to add our pollen to the honey reserves (Akashic records). Where we wait until we’re ready for our next departure and incarnation on earth to forage for more gnosis.

    I’d ask him if he was familiar with Lyndon LaRouche, the modern day embodiment of the Gnostic Neoplatonic traditions and how Langans CTMU model compares to LaRouches ‘Economics of the Noosphere’. I’d ask him how his CTMU model could lift millions of people out of poverty like LaRouches Economics is doing with Chinas new Silk Road. I’d ask him how his model could improve on LaRouches model, and how it could help make the world more abundant than it’s already becoming.

    Those are some of the more important questions I’d ask him if he ever became a member of Avalon at least.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    The smartest man alive is saying that Trump should be careful in moving to the right direction lest he be assassinated by the enemies surrounding him as if the enemies surrounding him will not notice that he is moving to the right direction.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    An interesting parallel to Langan's work is the electron. Is it a particle or a wave? First scientists thought it was a particle, but then they found evidence that it behaved as a wave.

    So they came up with the double-slit experiment to finally define (by observing from the outside!) it as either a particle or a wave. Guess what? It didn't fit either definition -- turns out the observer plays a deterministic role in defining whether the electron behaves as a particle or a wave.

    Here is how that relates to Langan:

    Langan is pointing out that because a thing which gives rise to everything else in existence must be a singular, unified thing, it is impossible to use any real framework that exists outside of it in order to try to make sense of it, because nothing exists outside of it. The best you can do is try to use fragments of reality to describe all of reality, and this obviously is never going to result in a complete picture. The best you can do is an approximation, and this is where he gets into the idea of holograms that approximate the form of all of reality like a fractal, as a model for understanding reality, rather than trying to dissect it into pieces and put them back together.

    So Langan is telling us, if I am interpreting all of this right, that we can't ultimately define God/the unified field/whatever by using some external framework as if we were observing it from the outside, because this whole concept doesn't make any sense. It's impossible to be outside of the thing that gives rise to all of reality. This leads him to the idea that there is some self-initializing principle within the unified field, and that consciousness and self-awareness are also involved, but no external observer at the most fundamental level, since, again, nothing can be external to it. So in a way he is beating around the idea of purely subjective and self-generating awareness, that is reiterating itself in a fractal-like pattern even in human beings, who share many of these same self-generating and self-aware characteristics. And that is pretty much the same as the idea that God created man in his own image, though the act of creation may not have involved a bearded guy sitting on a throne, pointing his finger around.

    The Tao te Ching implies this concept too, in its opening chapter, when it says "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao," and that "naming is the origin of all particular things." You can see all kinds of phenomenon in reality and give them names and distinguish them from the one thing, but you cannot then easily describe the whole thing again by trying to put together these pieces that we invented back together, especially since we never understood that one thing to begin with. And Langan is saying that this has very direct implications on trying to come up with a unified field theory. So he is opting for some self-generating principle that can't be completely encapsulated in some formula. He is just trying to approximately model it instead, by the looks of it.


    Quote Posted by Bubu (here)
    The smartest man alive is saying that Trump should be careful in moving to the right direction lest he be assassinated by the enemies surrounding him as if the enemies surrounding him will not notice that he is moving to the right direction.
    There have been multiple assassination attempts against him already. This isn't hard to see. Even the media has reported on a gun being found on a driver and confiscated, and things like that. We all saw the guy try to pull a cop's gun at a rally when he was running for president. This isn't patty-cake.

    He's not moving "in the right direction" against every corrupt faction at the same time either, or they could easily dogpile him. Fortunately there are enough differences between factions that he can negotiate with them separately. He's obviously having to cut deals with very bad apples by finding common ground. He's had to deal with the the Saudis first, and Netanyahu's faction of the Israelis, and the Chinese, the Queen of England, and who knows who else he's having to negotiate with (people like Henry Kissinger showing up at the Oval Office for meetings), just to keep things from devolving into the kind of worldwide catastrophe that would result in trying to go after every entrenched power all at once. I also don't doubt, and I was saying this all the way back in late 2015/early 2016, that he has military backing and protection, and has had military backing since the beginning of his campaign. So it's not as simple of a scenario as you are thinking. The Saudi royals were among the most evil people on Earth, but they've now been convinced to work with us instead of trying to blow us up now.

    One step at a time. The more power he solidifies through these negotiations, the more leverage he has to force even greater amounts of corruption to the surface and expose and eliminate them. It's not as if as soon as he was inaugurated he could instantly reveal all of his plans and demand the arrests of x number of criminals worldwide by foreign governments, demand Congress change all of these corrupt laws, while simultaneously demanding all the corrupt Congressman resign because now he has the NSA intel on them, and all the rest. You know it would be insane to do that as soon as he walked into the door, with little/no established network to help him. He has to build that and he is doing it through power negotiations.
    Last edited by A Voice from the Mountains; 7th August 2018 at 19:14.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Quote Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)
    Quote Posted by Jayke (here)
    How about we change track and bring it back to something more productive. Let’s bring it back to Christopher Langan and explore the wisdom he shares. Honest question time...what’s the most important insight you’ve gained from listening to Langans thoughts? What are the primary observations Langan shares that enable you to esteem him so highly?
    Great idea, Jayke, and thank you.
    Yes. The mods can easily edit the thread title, too, if you like... it's the work of a moment. I think the problem wasn't that this guy's very bright and has some interesting things to say — the community here will always receive that well! — but that it's a bit of a red rag to even use the word 'smartest' (what does that mean, anyway??), and he's definitely NOT the only person alive with a measured IQ over 200.
    * Aside (and it IS an aside! ): There's an interesting — and provocative! — page here called The 30 Smartest People Alive Today. Chris Langan makes it to #29. Many of those listed most folks will never have heard of, and there are about another dozen or more which I could add to the list myself.

    With most, it's impossible to rank or compare. Even Avalon's very own Carmody has an IQ over 200. This very topic, of super-geniuses and what they do with their lives, might well deserve its own thread.


    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 7th August 2018 at 19:39.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Sure, if that will make everyone feel better, I have no problem with the thread title being changed, Bill.

    Maybe then we could talk more about what the guy is actually saying instead of having a stream of posts implying that he might be insane, close-minded, or parroting others.


    Like I said before, he might not actually be the smartest man on the planet, but there's no clear way to define that anyway and I don't think it really makes any big difference if we call him the #1 smartest guy or #100 in the global ranking or whatever. Makes no difference to me really. What I find more disturbing than the thread title is how much raw emotion it seems to have stirred up. Bucket of crabs principle!
    Last edited by A Voice from the Mountains; 7th August 2018 at 19:48.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Quote Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)
    Sure, if that will make everyone feel better, I have no problem with the thread title being changed, Bill.
    Okay, I changed it from
    Introducing Christopher Langan, the smartest man in the world
    to
    Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box.
    Mods can amend thread titles simply, so please let us know if you'd like any more tweaks or edits. As you may well know, we regularly make small title changes to better describe what a thread's about, which is almost always in the interest of the person who started it and wanted to bring something interesting to our attention.


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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Thanks Bill. The way you renamed the thread made me laugh actually. I don't know how far outside of the box the guy is actually thinking but I don't really care about that either. Most of what he's saying that I can make any sense of has been pointed out by others anyway, he just seems to be repackaging a lot of older ideas around a new way of approaching the old Big Bang problem. But the thread title is fine as it is now.

    I like his political commentaries too but looks like since he's been banned from Facebook those aren't as easy to come by anymore.

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box


    Mega Society

    Keith Raniere (NXIVM founder) has similar claims to fame.

    “the smartest man in the world”

    "‘He has an estimated problem-solving rarity of one in 425,000,000 with respect to the general population."

    Some notable people have taken the Mega Test, meeting the Mega Society entrance requirements which the society has used to validate its authority to judge the super intelligent. These prominent people include Chris Langan, author and columnist Marilyn vos Savant, mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, former governor of New Hampshire and former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and and Raniere. Ref

    Ideas should always stand (or fall) on their own merit and not on their supposed origin, IMO.

    Buyer beware.
    Knock Knock

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Quote Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)
    One step at a time. The more power he solidifies through these negotiations, the more leverage he has to force even greater amounts of corruption to the surface and expose and eliminate them.
    That description reminds me of how Putin gained power over some (not all) of the seriously bad apples that were destroying Russia.
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    O.K.! Now I understand why I find I have to read Carmody's posts a little slowly to digest them!

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    Default Re: Introducing Christopher Langan, a VERY smart man who thinks WAY out of the box

    Quote Posted by happyuk (here)
    While I enjoy many of Langan's commentaries, including the ones that have been posted, I have a problem with his so-called CTMU theories.
    There quite a few comments on quora about Langan's CTMU theories -- here is just one:

    Quote Jack Fraser, Masters Physics, University of Oxford (2018)

    I'm going to offer a quote from Langan himself, about his so called “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe”:
    You can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics.
    This is, quite simply, horse****. And trust me — it's been the Cheltenham Races this week, I know horse**** when I see it.

    [...]

    Well let's examine that quote up there. He's claiming that mathematics can prove the existence of God.

    Except, there is a problem. Mathematics is independent of our universe — that is the way we have constructed it. Mathematics does not depend on our universe to be true.
    https://www.quora.com/What-do-physic...-Universe-CTMU

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