Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
Monday, October 19, 2015
Langan’s “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe
Someone pointed me recently to Christopher Michael Langan’s long paper on his CTMU -- Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. I took a little time today to read it over, and here are some of my thoughts....
This “new model of the universe” has received little if any scrutiny in the academic literature, but it has gotten some media attention in the past, due to its author being an interesting character — an especially high-IQ individual who is also a body-builder and has worked throughout his life in blue collar jobs rather than becoming an academic or a corporate researcher…. (Outliers of this sort tend to interest me personally, as I was a semi-prodigy myself in youth, generally waaaaaay ahead of the curriculum while going through school, and finishing my undergrad degree at 18 and my PhD at 22 ... and before finally deciding to finish my PhD and become an "official researcher" I often considered taking a pure-maverick approach similar to Langan's....)
In capsule summary, Langan views reality as a language for talking about itself, to itself. He understands time as an emergent relationship between different languages, “later” ones along some “emergent timeline” extending previous ones. He looks at series of languages as progressing toward goals that are expressed as maximization of “generalized utility functions.” In this view, mind and physical reality are seen as part of the same set of networks of linguistic relationships. Individual minds are connected with the universal mind, and with physical entities, via linguistic relationships.
He expresses these interesting ideas (and many more details, and some points my crude summary above skips) using a lot of idiosyncratic terminology, plus some reasonable mathematics…
One term he uses for his model of reality is: a ”Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language" or SCSPL
The only thing in his model that really rubs me the wrong way is his placing a “utility function” in a central role. This seems a limiting perspective, as Weaver and Viktoras pointed out in their recent paper on “Open-Ended Intelligence.” But in this regard, Langan is more mainstream than me; the reinforcement-learning perspective is very popular in AI right now, and optimality principles have been central to physics for centuries…
Other than that, the overall framework he posits makes sense to me.
As Langan himself affirms, what he’s putting forth is a philosophy, not a scientific theory. It’s not really a new kind of “theory of everything”, it’s a mathematically semi-formalized metaphysics…. If his theory hasn’t attracted much attention yet, I think this is not just because of its author's "outsider" status, but also because almost nobody cares that much about formal metaphysics these days…. Current culture focuses mainly on practical things; and those concerned with metaphysics are generally new-agey and experientially-oriented, not formalism-oriented.
A few further detailed comments follow below…. These are basically my own notes upon reading Langan's paper, rather than a structured formal critique or response, so take them for what they are...
The Multiverse According to Ben: Langan’s “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe”
Langan’s “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe
Someone pointed me recently to Christopher Michael Langan’s long paper on his CTMU -- Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. I took a little time today to read it over, and here are some of my thoughts....
This “new model of the universe” has received little if any scrutiny in the academic literature, but it has gotten some media attention in the past, due to its author being an interesting character — an especially high-IQ individual who is also a body-builder and has worked throughout his life in blue collar jobs rather than becoming an academic or a corporate researcher…. (Outliers of this sort tend to interest me personally, as I was a semi-prodigy myself in youth, generally waaaaaay ahead of the curriculum while going through school, and finishing my undergrad degree at 18 and my PhD at 22 ... and before finally deciding to finish my PhD and become an "official researcher" I often considered taking a pure-maverick approach similar to Langan's....)
In capsule summary, Langan views reality as a language for talking about itself, to itself. He understands time as an emergent relationship between different languages, “later” ones along some “emergent timeline” extending previous ones. He looks at series of languages as progressing toward goals that are expressed as maximization of “generalized utility functions.” In this view, mind and physical reality are seen as part of the same set of networks of linguistic relationships. Individual minds are connected with the universal mind, and with physical entities, via linguistic relationships.
He expresses these interesting ideas (and many more details, and some points my crude summary above skips) using a lot of idiosyncratic terminology, plus some reasonable mathematics…
One term he uses for his model of reality is: a ”Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language" or SCSPL
The only thing in his model that really rubs me the wrong way is his placing a “utility function” in a central role. This seems a limiting perspective, as Weaver and Viktoras pointed out in their recent paper on “Open-Ended Intelligence.” But in this regard, Langan is more mainstream than me; the reinforcement-learning perspective is very popular in AI right now, and optimality principles have been central to physics for centuries…
Other than that, the overall framework he posits makes sense to me.
As Langan himself affirms, what he’s putting forth is a philosophy, not a scientific theory. It’s not really a new kind of “theory of everything”, it’s a mathematically semi-formalized metaphysics…. If his theory hasn’t attracted much attention yet, I think this is not just because of its author's "outsider" status, but also because almost nobody cares that much about formal metaphysics these days…. Current culture focuses mainly on practical things; and those concerned with metaphysics are generally new-agey and experientially-oriented, not formalism-oriented.
A few further detailed comments follow below…. These are basically my own notes upon reading Langan's paper, rather than a structured formal critique or response, so take them for what they are...
The Multiverse According to Ben: Langan’s “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe”
