Motivations
This is a short demonstration of understanding of Christopher Langan, his motives, and the setup that went into developing, or causing, the CTMU. There will be plenty of speculation, a bit like a detective trying to solve a case, but I try to keep the jumps as small as possible, going no more than one or two steps from established fact at a time. We will start with a loose timeline of Chris’s life, the CTMU, and the papers that lead to it. From here we will extract the main parts that stand out to us and go on to examine each one, then try to fit all the pieces together. This paper was written by an amateur, and I will shamelessly cite Wikipedia where it serves me, and do not guarantee my sources are numbered in the order they are cited in.
O.G. Galaxy Brain Christopher Langan was born in 1952 in San Francisco, California [1]. He was talking by the time he was 6 months old, and had taught himself to read before he was 4 [2]. Over the course of childhood, and later in life, he had multiple paranormal or religious caliber experiences, going so far as to say there was not some phenomena of that sort that he had not experienced spontaneously at some point in his life [3]. At the age of 14 while working as a cowboy on a ranch in Montana he brought with him a book by Bertrand Russell and a book by Albert Einstein. It struck him that Einstein viewed the world as geometric while Russell viewed the world as Linguistic. He thought these two things really need to be put together, making reality Logico-Geometric [4]. Later he gets into Reed college where he has a difficult experience with a math professor when asking why calculus is being developed in set theory, sets are static objects and calculus is about change [4]. Some time after he dropped out of Reed College [1]. He then worked various blue collar jobs over the course of his life [4]. In 1989, when Langan would be around 37, John Wheeler published the paper “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” [5]. Then in 2002, at around age 50, Langan published the CTMU, much of it a response to Wheeler’s paper. From this timeline a few things stand out:
A mystical or religious inclination. Even apart from the source above, Langan talks about religion and God a lot. It’s a common theme.
Practical experiences like being a cowboy or a bouncer demand immediate results, so any mystical inclination is likely constrained with an equally practical one: can’t be so open minded your brain falls out while some guy is trying to punch you in the face.
He decided Einstein’s Geometric reality and Russell’s Linguistic reality must be unified, birthing Logico-Geometric reality.
He was heavily influenced by John Wheeler, who through his paper effectively “asks the question” that the CTMU is an answer to. A sort of poetic reflection of Wheeler’s clue: “No question? No answer!”.
He was not just a child prodigy, excelling at isolated subjects early on, he was also a late bloomer excelling at combining vast knowledge from different domains, the former demonstrated by learning to read at such a young age, the latter demonstrated by publishing the CTMU itself at the age of 50. Given this he seems to fall in a category a bit his own, and familiar labels like prodigy or genius should probably be used with caution.
Let’s discuss the mystical inclination. Based on the paper “Cheating The Millenium: The Mounting Explanatory Debts of Scientific Naturalism” (Major Papers 5), we can simplistically say Langan sees material causality as material cause + efficient cause. Material cause and effect being the take on causality that the current scientific paradigm uses phrased in terms of Aristotle’s four causes [6]. Langan rejects that material causality is the whole story and would likely add that we can do better than just material causality [6]. The heavy focus on causality in general can be seen throughout [7]. Let’s take as common knowledge that we as human beings generally interpret the world through our world view, our beliefs, values, and the way we ourselves think. From these facts we may conclude that, due to a mystical history and inclination, when Langan looks at the world or examines a phenomena his explanation set has a wider breadth than is typically used in science, philosophy, or religion. We may speculate that this makes him susceptible to a sort of pareidolia, being inclined to throw false positives (and thereby explaining some of the political beliefs to those inclined to dismiss him outright on that front). However we also can guess that this makes him able to see answers that others would miss, regardless of intellect or education level on either side, simply because a wider aperture makes it more likely that he has at his disposal a mental construct that better fits the data.
With regard to his practical experiences we saw that he worked numerous jobs from being a cowboy, to a bar bouncer, to a horse rancher [1]. If the general zeitgeist, as well as my blue collar and higher risk employed friends, are to be believed, these jobs, unlike some white collar or academic jobs, do not have the privilege of preserving opinion in the face of result. It doesn’t matter if you like your 360-spin-kung-fu block, if you keep getting hit in the face it probably just doesn’t work. We can speculate that these experiences constrained his mystical worldview into something much more practical, useful, and amenable to mathematical treatment. Something to the effect of “If you keep praying and your god keeps not answering, maybe they don’t exist (or some other variant)”.
The Logico-Geometric treatment of reality is an especially interesting one. As we saw above, while working as a cowboy he brought books by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein and was struck that the two worldviews should be put together [14]. This is quite an interesting move considering that in the modern day Philosophy and Physics are generally separate disciplines; Philosophy not being as amenable to mathematical formulations and Physics not being as amenable to intuitive ones [8]. He thus put Russell’s Linguistic view and Einstein’s Geometric one into a Logico-Geometric view of reality. As an aside, the transition from Linguistic to Logico in that transformation isn’t an odd one if you look at logic, and Russell was a Logician afterall [9]. Zermelo–Fraenkel Set Theory (ZF) or Zermelo–Fraenkel Set Theory with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC) serves as a foundation for modern mathematics including geometry [10]. If Langan studied General Relativity, Einstein’s “Geometric World”, he would have encountered ZFC as a natural progression. If he studied Bertrand Russell he would have read plenty of Logic, and he is clearly aware of Model Theory. Both Geometry and Logic have duality principles. A good introduction to duality in logic can be found in [11]. This leads me to suspect that he attempted to formulate a duality between ZFC and Logic, which could be why in MP Introduction to The CTMU he talks about ZF and hints at a solution - it’s not just a fluke necessity based on the need for reality to self-contain (although it is a necessity), it would also be a conclusion he would naturally come to in trying to merge Einstein and Russell - probably after a great deal of elbow grease and brain power.
Then in 1989 Wheeler published “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search For Links” [5]. Much of the CTMU is a direct response to this paper [15] as can be seen in [12] where Langan outlines the main points of the Wheeler paper. A later section of the CTMU [13], goes on to succinctly answer the Wheeler questions with answers the CTMU paper develops along the way, with one interesting omission. In the Wheeler paper Wheeler gives a supreme goal: Deduce the quantum from an understanding of existence. It’s interesting that Langan seems to omit this goal of Wheeler’s in the CTMU. It is slightly different from what Langan does since the CTMU is a metaphysical theory of everything rather than a physical theory of everything [3], but he does hint (perhaps more than subtly) at deducing some form of quantization purely from the conditions of existence.
Some further comments are in order:
There are fewer neologisms or completely made up concepts in the CTMU than a casual reader would suspect on a first read, e.g. ERSU (Expanding Rubber Sheet Universe) can be found in Edward Harrison’s “Cosmology” first published 21 years before the publication of the CTMU.
I believe there was one interview in which Langan said he felt Leibniz was one of the closest to his theory with his “Monadology”, but I couldn’t find the source.
A lot of criticism is leveled against the CTMU saying for example the lack of citations makes it read like it was written by an amateur. But it was written by an amateur, Langan is not a professional academic and is writing from well outside the Ivory Tower, and even industry. This by itself may be a good enough reason for many to ignore it, or not accept it, fair enough. I would argue that it’s not by itself a reason to reject it.
At [16] he mentions being on an Indian reservation and feeling like he could see the earth living.
Obviously it’s a little suspicious to say that a made up thought experiment Newcomb’s Demon has ontological bearing [17].
I also suspect that like many mathematical problems the CTMU or the self-simulation has a trivial solution, that more or less anything can be fit into it without breaking it. This makes the CTMU non-falsifiable (which the author effectively admits in claiming it to be a super-tautology), but also provides a situation in which it “adds nothing”.
So there you have it, the story of the CTMU, albeit simplistically and likely riddled with omissions. One mystical O.G. Galaxy Brained Smart Boi with a thesis, antithesis, synthesis between language and geometry, one giant question asked by a physicist-profit, some drunks and bullshit, and a lot of elbow grease. Meme summaries aside, the suggestion of a possible dual formulation of Logic and Set Theory (and therefore geometry) from a desire to put Einstein and Russell together is a particularly fascinating possibility to me. The duality between Set Theory and Logic is well known, but I think formulating a single theory with a duality principle between the two is likely novel. I hope this helps clarify for you why the CTMU may have been developed, who it was developed by, and in a sense what kind of person the theory is for. I hope this gives some evidence in my favor that the project is proceeding along.
Sources and Comments
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
[2]: https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Christopher_Michael_Langan I find this source dubious but I think the same information may also be in Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers”, I just don’t have a copy on hand to verify.
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA&t=5400s
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9miVG2xT5jY&t=750s
[5]: https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
[6]: Major Papers Section 5.2
[7]: Major Papers 5
[8]: I’m sure there are plenty out there who would vehemently disagree with this simplification but try formulating all of “The Problems of Philosophy” in pure mathematical formalism or simply intuiting General Relativity without direct mathematical rigor
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
[10]: https://people.math.ethz.ch/~halorenz/4students/LogikGT/Ch13.pdf
[11]: Kleene, Mathematical Logic, Chapter 1 Section 6
[12]: MP S 4.5
[13]: MP S 4.9
[14]: I suspect the books were one of “Principia Mathematica”, “A History of Western Philosophy”, or “The Problems of Philosophy” for Russell and “The Meaning of Relativity” for Einstein, but I lost the source for that.
[15]: as well as some other papers but this is the main one
[16]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA&t=12840s
[17]: Beyond requiring a universe which allows someone to think up the thought experiment. Using simulation as the resolution to the two contradictory hypotheses “ND has already put the money in the box so take both” and “ND knows what you’re gonna do so take only one” is pretty cool, as is simulation or self-simulation, but it seems the paradox itself doesn’t seem to imply the thinker of the paradox lives in a simulation. I am of course excluding the presuppositions required for there to be a thinker thinking the paradox; those seem like a ‘different’ concern than the paradox itself, at least as far as the common reader would be concerned.
