Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A Partial Summary and Review, published by jessicata on March 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
About 15 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He profiled Chris Langan, an extremely high-IQ person, claiming that he had only mediocre accomplishments despite his high IQ. Chris Langan's theory of everything, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, was mentioned. I considered that it might be worth checking out someday.
Well, someday has happened, and I looked into CTMU, prompted by Alex Zhu (who also paid me for reviewing the work). The main CTMU paper is "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory".
CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation.
As a short work, it can't fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a "seed" of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.
In reading the work, there is a repeated sense of "what?", staring and looking at terms, and then "ohhh" as something clicks. These insights may actually be the main value of the work; at the end I still don't quite see how everything fits together in a coherent system, but there were a lot of clicks along the way nonetheless.
Many of the ideas are similar to other intellectual ideas such as "anthropics" and "acausal interaction", but with less apparent mathematical precision, such that it's harder to see exactly what is being said, and easier to round off to something imprecise and implausible.
There is repeated discussion of "intelligent design", and Langan claims that CTMU proves the existence of God (albeit with a very different conceptualization than traditional religions). From the perspective of someone who witnessed the evolution / intelligent design debate of the 90s-00s, siding with the "intelligent design" branch seems erroneous, although the version presented here differs quite a lot from more standard intelligent design argumentation.
On the other hand, the "evolutionists" have gone on to develop complex and underspecified theories of anthropics, multiverses, and simulations, which bring some amount of fundamental or nearly-fundamental mind and agency back into the picture.
I didn't finish summarizing and reviewing the full work, but what I have written might be useful to some people. Note that this is a very long post.
Abstract
Perception is a kind of model of reality. Information about reality includes information about the information processor ("one's self"), which is called reflexivity. The theory identifies mental and physical reality, in common with idealism. CTMU is described as a "supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic"; logic deals in tautologies, and CTMU somehow deals in meta-tautologies. It is based in part on computational language theory (e.g. the work of Chomsky, and type theory).
Central to CTMU is the Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL), a language that can reflect on itself and configure its own execution, perhaps analogous to a self-modifying program. SCSPL encodes a form of "dual-aspect monism" consisting of "infocognition", integrated information and cognition.
CTMU states that the universe comes from "unbounded telesis" (UBT), a "primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint"; this may be similar to a language in which the physical universe could be "specified", or perhaps...
