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Christopher Langan

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Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1957) is an American blue-collar thinker whose IQ is reported by the media to have been measured at 195. Billed as possibly "the smartest man in America", he rose to prominence in 1999 while working as a bouncer on Long Island. Langan is author of the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU (pronounced "cat-mew"), among his claims for which are that it constitutes absolute truth, provides the logical framework of a theory of everything, and proves the existence of God.

Life

Langan was born in San Francisco but spent most of his early life in Montana. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive but was cut off from her family; his father died or disappeared before he was born. Langan started talking at six months, taught himself to read at three years, and was skipped ahead in school. But he grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by his stepfather from when he was almost six to when he was about fourteen. By the end of that time, Langan had begun weight training. He recounted the result to Cynthia McFadden of 20/20:

McFADDEN What happened then?

Mr. LANGAN Well, he came into the room one morning and hit me across the eyes with a garrison belt. So I beat the hell out of him and told him never to come back.

McFADDEN And he didn’t.

Mr. LANGAN He didn’t.

He earned a reputation as a tough guy, and closed out his high school years doing mostly independent study: "hey didn't know what to teach me anymore, but nobody was going to take me out and put me in college on the fast track, so I just did what they told me. I went to study hall and worked on my own, taught myself advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that." After earning a perfect score on the SAT, he tried college (Reed College and later Montana State University), but dropped out due to finance and transportation problems, as well as to intellectual discontent, explaining to Esquire: "There I was, paying my own money, taking classes from people who were obviously my intellectual inferiors. I just figured, Hey, I need this like a moose needs a hat rack!"

Langan took a string of labor-intensive jobs, and by his mid-40s had been a construction worker, cowboy, forest service firefighter, farmhand, and for over twenty years, a bouncer on Long Island. He developed a "double-life strategy": "On one side, you're a regular guy. You go to work, you do your job, you exchange pleasantries. On the other side, you come home and you begin doing equations in your head."

In this way, working in isolation, he created the CTMU, his philosophical theory of the relationship between mind and reality. Wider attention came in 1999, when Esquire magazine published a profile of Langan and other members of the high-IQ community. Billing Langan as "the smartest man in America", the article's account of the weight-lifting bouncer and his "Theory of Everything" sparked a flurry of media interest. Articles and interviews highlighting Langan appeared in Popular Science, The Times, Newsday, Muscle & Fitness (which reported that he could bench 500 pounds), and elsewhere. Langan was featured on 20/20, interviewed on BBC Radio and on Errol Morris's First Person, and appeared in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. He has written question-and-answer columns for New York Newsday, The Improper Hamptonian, and Men's Fitness.

Board-certified neuropsychologist Dr. Robert Novelly tested Langan's IQ for 20/20, which reported that Langan broke the ceiling of the test, scoring "off the charts". Novelly was said to be astounded, saying: "Chris is the highest individual that I have ever measured in 25 years of doing this."

Langan is a co-founder and the Chairman of the Mega Foundation, a non-profit corporation established in 1999 to create and implement programs that aid in the development of severely gifted individuals and their ideas. Among the foundation's programs is the Ultranet, an online high-IQ group designed to serve as a mutual support system and forum for exchange of information and development of novel ideas, with a focus on creative actualization and meaningful production.

Langan moved in 2004 with his wife Gina (née LoSasso), a clinical neuropsychologist, to northern Missouri, where he owns and operates a horse ranch.

Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe

Langan created the CTMU in the mid-1980s while working as a nightclub bouncer on Long Island. His first paper on the theory, "The Resolution of Newcomb's Paradox", appeared in the December 1989–January 1990 issue of Noesis, the journal of the Noetic Society, a high-IQ society to which Langan belonged. Since then Langan has refined his work, continuing to publish and discuss it in high-IQ journals and elsewhere, and has written an unpublished book about the CTMU called Design for a Universe. Though the recipient of mass-media attention, including a description in Popular Science, Langan's work has not appeared in mainstream academic journals.

The CTMU is a philosophical, metaphysical theory of the relationship between mind and reality. Langan contends that to answer questions about the laws of nature like where in reality they reside, how they might be expressed and implemented, why and how they came to be, and how their consistency and universality are maintained, science alone is logically inadequate, and that a new explanatory framework is required. Unlike scientific theories, which rely on observation to establish their correspondence with reality, the CTMU is intended to correspond with reality necessarily, by reliance on pure logic and metalogic. In fact, claims Langan, "any other valid theory of reality will necessarily equate to the CTMU up to isomorphism; whatever it adds will come by way of specificity, not generality". The CTMU relates logic to reality using three metalogical principles associated with comprehensiveness, consistency, and closure, themselves, he argues, necessarily modeled by reality as a condition of its existence.

In the CTMU, reality takes the form of an algebraic structure Langan calls a "Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language" or SCSPL. The fundamental objects are "syntactic operators", units of self-processing information or "infocognition". SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of one substance (infocognition) with two aspects (information and cognition). The CTMU therefore supports a kind of panpsychism. Although every part of SCSPL has a cognitive aspect, the mental capabilities of a given subsystem depend on its structure, and Langan distinguishes several "levels of self-cognition". The highest of these is the global level, that of reality as a whole. This level, he says, possesses three formal properties of SCSPL: "syntactic self-distribution" (analogous to omnipresence), "perfect autotransductive reflexivity" (analogous to omniscience), and "self-configuration up to freedom" (analogous to omnipotence). Because these are theological attributes, Langan describes reality as "the mind of God". So, claims Langan, by logical and mathematical reasoning from necessary metalogical principles, the CTMU proves the existence of God.

According to Langan, the CTMU blends elements of various branches of advanced mathematics, including category theory, model theory, computation theory, abstract algebra, and the logic of formalized theories. Langan's public writings are meant to be relatively accessible, and for that reason, he says, tend to avoid heavy use of symbolic notation in favor of informal characterization. Nonetheless, he claims, the CTMU is axiomatizable and formalizable, and SCSPL is well-defined.

Intelligent design

Langan and his wife are fellows of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), a professional society whose stated purpose is to investigate complex systems using information- and design-theoretic concepts. The ISCID promotes intelligent design, the controversial idea that there is scientific evidence for design in life. In 2002, Langan published in the society's online journal a 56-page paper, "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory". Later that year, Langan gave a twenty-minute talk with the same title at the ISCID's Research and Progress in Intelligent Design (RAPID) conference. In 2004, Langan contributed a chapter to the book Uncommon Dissent, a collection of essays edited by William Dembski and whose authors include leading figures in the intelligent design movement.

The CTMU says that reality's self-selection amounts to "intelligent self-design"—that reality intelligently designs itself, evolving by purposeful self-replication and self-selection from a background of unbound potential. In Uncommon Dissent, Langan argues that neo-Darwinism and intelligent design theory, as theories of biological origins and evolution and therefore of biological causality, ultimately require a model of nature and causality accounting for the laws of nature and their role in natural processes. He contends that both neo-Darwinism and ID theory are currently deficient in this regard, and describes what he sees as a number of problems with the causality concept itself. As a solution to these problems and a model of nature and causality, he proposes SCSPL and the CTMU. The CTMU, he says, synthesizes neo-Darwinism and ID theory, providing a reconciliatory framework in which teleology and evolution co-exist in a new approach to biological origins and evolution he calls "Teleologic Evolution".

Asked about creationism, Langan has said:

Regarding evolution and creationism, the linkage is simple: since Biblical accounts of the genesis of our world and species are true but metaphorical, our task is to correctly decipher the metaphor in light of scientific evidence also given to us by God. Hence, the CTMU.

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

Langan has said he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma." He calls himself "a respecter of all faiths, among peoples everywhere."

Mega Society

The Mega Society, a high-IQ society whose admission requirement is an intelligence score at the one-in-a-million level, was founded in 1982 and once numbered about two dozen members. In 1997, following a seven-month lapse in publication of its journal Noesis and unsuccessful attempts to contact the society's officers, Langan, a longtime member and previous editor of the journal, began publishing new issues himself. Because he lived in New York and the officers lived in California, he labeled his edition Noesis East, and his end of the society the "East Coast Faction". In 2001, in affiliation with the Mega Foundation, he launched a distinct high-IQ society, the Mega Society East, with an electronic journal, Noesis-E.

In 2002 the Mega Society filed suit against Langan in a California Superior Court, which issued a default judgment enjoining him and anyone acting in concert with him from using the society's trademarks and trade names. The next year the society submitted a complaint to the National Arbitration Forum seeking five "mega" domain names registered by Langan's wife, contending that her use of those names for the purpose of a business with policies and purposes similar to that of the Mega Society constituted bad faith. She contended in response that there is a clear distinction between "The Mega Foundation" and "The Mega Society", and that the complainant's conduct was nothing more than attempted reverse domain name hijacking. The Forum ordered the transfer of megasociety.net and megasociety.com, but made no order with respect to megafoundation.net, megafoundation.org, and megacenter.org.

The Mega Foundation's "Mega International Web Complex" is currently home to, among other programs and projects, Mega International, a "5-sigma international think tank", and Noeon, a "newsletter and interdisciplinary journal".

In a separate incident in 2002, Ian Goddard, a contributor to Noesis-E, contested priority in an Internet forum over Langan's concept of "syndiffeonesis". Langan's wife, the Executive Editor of Noesis-E, then inserted a citation of prior work by Langan into an essay by Goddard in that journal, to which Goddard objected.

References

  1. Sager 1999, McFadden 1999, Fowler 2000, Wigmore 2000, O'Connell 2001, Brabham 2001, Quain 2001.
  2. Sager 1999, Fowler 2000, Wigmore 2000, Brabham 2001.
  3. ^ McFadden, Cynthia. (December 9, 1999). "The Smart Guy". 20/20.
  4. ^ Sager, Mike. (November 1999). "The Smartest Man in America". Esquire.
  5. ^ Quain, John R. (October 14, 2001). "Wise Guy" ( ). Popular Science.
  6. Wigmore, Barry. (February 7, 2000). "Einstein's brain, King Kong's body". The Times.
  7. Brabham, Dennis. (August 21, 2001). "The Smart Guy". Newsday.
  8. O'Connell, Jeff. (May 2001). "Mister Universe". Muscle & Fitness.
  9. Fowler, Damien. (January 2000). Interview with Mega Foundation members. Outlook. BBC Radio.
  10. Morris, Errol. (August 14, 2001). "The Smartest Man in the World". First Person.
  11. Chris Langan. Internet Movie Database.
  12. Langan, Christopher M. (September 2001). Chris Langan answers your questions. New York Newsday. Melville, NY.
  13. Langan, Christopher M. (2000-2001). HiQ. The Improper Hamptonian. Westhampton Beach, NY.
  14. O'Connell, Jeff, Ed. (2004). World of knowledge: we harness the expertise of the brawny, the brainy, and the bearded to solve your most pressing dilemmas. Men's Fitness.
  15. Langan, Christopher M. (December 1989–January 1990). "The Resolution of Newcomb's Paradox." Noesis No. 44.
  16. Langan 2002, p. 3.
  17. Langan 2002, p. 53, n. 6.
  18. Langan 2002, p. 15.
  19. Langan 2002, pp. 42–47.
  20. Langan 2002, p. 20.
  21. Langan 2002, p. 33.
  22. Langan 2002, p. 38, 52; Langan, Christopher M. (1999). "Introduction to the CTMU". Ubiquity Vol. 1, No. 1.
  23. ISCID fellows
  24. Langan, Christopher M. (2002). The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory. Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design 1.2-1.3.
  25. RAPID conference schedule
  26. Langan, Christopher M. (2004). "Cheating the Millennium: The Mounting Explanatory Debts of Scientific Naturalism". In Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, edited by William Dembski. ISI Books.
  27. Langan 2002, p. 50.
  28. CTMU Q & A - More on God
  29. ^ ABCNEWS.com Chat Transcript
  30. About the Mega Society
  31. For background, see Noesis 152–154.
  32. View Case Detail - MEGA SOCIETY vs LANGAN Superior Court of California, County of San Diego.
  33. Judgment Superior Court for the State of California, County of San Diego, March 2003.
  34. Decision The Mega Society v. Dr. Gina Lynne LoSasso d/b/a Mega Foundation. Claim Number: FA0312000215404. National Arbitration Forum, January 2004.
  35. Mega International Web Complex
  36. Syndiffeonesis, its Original Definition Ian Goddard.

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