plool

Greetings,

I am a long-time lurker, and have thoroughly enjoyed various debates and comments on The Secular Web Forum for the past few months and am very grateful for this wonderful site.

Unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) one of the side-affects of this is that I'm filled with more questions than the answers which I was looking for.

Anyway, I recently I watched an interview with a man named Christopher Langan on the television. He apparently holds one of the highest IQs in the world, and has his own theory about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Have any fellow infidels heard of this man? I'd be interested to hear others views.

He has a website dedicated to his theory at <a href="http://www.ctmu.org/" target="_blank">http://www.ctmu.org/</a> and an article introducing his ideas is located at <a href="http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU.html" target="_blank">http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU.html</a>

Admittedly, some of his ideas are a little over my head, but again I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm sort of of the opinion that he is maybe just a very intelligent quack, though there have been one or two quacks throughout history who have proved to be just misunderstood or well ahead of their time.

Thoughts?

Phscs

My first impression (from his first paragraph in your second link) is that he's over his own head as well.

Take his second sentence for example

What? Reality does not exist?

He may have a 200+ IQ, but he's no genius in communicating ideas.

He also enjoys using odd words - hardly useful if you plan to actually make your reader understand what you're writing. Some examples: conspansion, incoversion, autology . I'm not a native english speaker, but I do hold a PhD in physics, and I've never come across these words before.

regards

-phscs

excreationist

Well I had a lot of objections to what he's saying, but he seems to be able to justify what he is saying...
The articles I read were pretty impressive (I was very skeptical at first).

<a href="http://www.megafoundation.org/Ubiquity/Fall00/HiQA.html" target="_blank">Does the CTMU allow for the existence of souls and reincarnation?</a>
I don't see why "the informational construct called "you" may be locally re-injected or redistributed in spacetime"....

I might ask him about this... (maybe he can prove it somehow) anyway, I think his intelligence is pretty frightening.

Vorkosigan

Whereas God perceives one total act of creation in a parallel distributed fashion, with everything in perfect superposition, we are localized in spacetime and perceive reality only in a succession of locally creative moments. This parallelism has powerful implications. When a human being dies, his entire history remains embedded in the timeless level of consciousness...the Deic level. In that sense, he or she is preserved by virtue of his or her "soul". And since the universe is a self-refining entity, that which is teleologically valid in the informational construct called "you" may be locally re-injected or redistributed in spacetime. In principle, this could be a recombinative process, with the essences of many people combining in a set of local injections or "reincarnations" (this could lead to strange effects...e.g., a single person remembering simultaneous "past lifetimes").

It's full of unjustified assertions that are simply upworded versions of mystical crap we've seen before. He offers no method for discovering whether his ideas are true, no evidence for his ideas, no practical principles under which consciousness in this reality can interact with the other aspects of the universe, no proof or evidence of teleology.

For example, how does he know that "Whereas God perceives one total act of creation in a parallel distributed fashion, with everything in perfect superposition?" How does he know there is a god, and how it perceives, and what it percieves? He can't possibly know these things. It's just the usual impossible quantum mysticism.

Michael

theyeti

This belongs in Science and Skepticism.

ohwilleke

This fellow is making an ontological proof of the existence of God (i.e. a proof from first principals and logic rather than evidence). Basically, he argues that it is fair to describe the universe as having the ability as a whole, to perceive itself, and that something that can perceive itself exists, and that something so all encompassing that can preceive itself is fairly called God. In short, as he states well into the discussion, he is a pantheist, and argues that human abuse of the God concept for less abstract Gods than the pantheistic concept are a result of humanity's limited ability to think and perceive, compounded by politics.

The problem is, that his musings fall into the area rightly called useless theory. They have little connection to the real world, and provide little information about the real world. He fails to recognize that God is an ill defined concept and that his definition of God is not identical, or even similar to, the definition of God used by most people who really care about God in their daily lives.

plool

Thanks for the comments.

I did find what appears to be somewhat of a debate between this man and a Kevin Langdon.

<a href="http://www.polymath-systems.com/intel/hiqsocs/megasoc/noes153/muscle.html" target="_blank">http://www.polymath-systems.com/intel/hiqsocs/megasoc/noes153/muscle.html</a>

Perhaps even the most intelligent among us are not immune to delusion.

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: plool ]</p>

Phscs

Or perhaps the numerical IQ only shows how well a person solves mathematical/verbal riddles/puzzles?

How about programming skills, design skills, communication skills, emotional skills, inventive skills?

Dustin Hoffman was very good at some computing skills in the movie "Rainman", and he would probably have scored quite high on some numerical IQ tests, but the overall "intellect" of his character wasn't very impressive ...

regards

-phscs

excreationist

It says <a href="http://www.megasociety.net/NoesisArchive/Highlights/NoesisHighlightsMarch.html" target="_blank">here</a> that Chris Langan is "the World's Smartest Living Person"...!

Not just "in someone's opinion", but THE world's smartest living person, period.

And he's got big muscles too. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> (But I agree that his CTMU is pretty flawed)

ohwilleke

In fact, the most stable and healthy high IQ organization is Mensa which incidentally also has one of the lowest cutoffs for high IQ (135 I believe). Most of the higher IQ societies which have been formed (and often died) have a long history of contention, inability to cooperate, fierce grugfests, schism and other stuff that is not symptomatic of a healthy organization.