Very few atheists would describe their position as “I know there is no God”.
My position, and that of pretty much every atheist I know of, is “I see no evidence for the existence of a God. I have no more reason to believe in god than a flying spaghetti monster”. This isn’t a hypothesis.
Who’s on first?
I also *believe *that I’m sitting at a desk in an office in Marina del Rey. I am unable to unequivocally *prove *that I’m sitting at a desk in Marina del Rey. However the evidence that I have at hand is sufficient to convince me that my “desk in Marina del Rey” belief is well-justified.
I have NO evidence that I’m a disembodied brain in a jar on Mar, although such a possibility cannot entirely be ruled out. I could CHOOSE to believe such a thing, but such a believe would NOT be well-justified.
Believing in God is not well-justified.
Now can we go back to talking about Chris Langan?
You aren’t even going to try, are you?
Thank you for that witness. Not the most compelling one I’ve heard, but “A” for effort.
Sure we can get back to Mr Langan, although I suspect there’s at least a few more testimonies in the immediate thread future.
It would appear that Mr Langan has a chip on his shoulder the size of his intellect.
Try? Try what exactly?
While using a computer connected to the internet! How ironical! Are you (even vaguely) aware of the various and numerous cumulative discoveries required in physics and chemistry that made this possible? Were we limited to what was discovered in antiquity or through the divination of faith, you’d be wrathing your wroth with parchment and quills, if that.
I can casually look around this room and see hundreds of objects invented after a scientific thought process that make my life easier and more comfortable than my pre-industrial ancestors could have enjoyed, and unless you’re posting from a cave, so can you.
Are you saying Tim Berners-Lee is God?
Whodathunkit?
Let me ask you 2 questions, and I’d appreaciate a simple yes or no to each.
Does God exist?
(You know, the high octane one that is alleged to have made all this stuff)
Can you prove it?
(You know, using the “scientific methods”)
Yes or no will suffice.
I’m saying no one is. It’s rather sad to invent a god where none is needed. Besides, Berners-Lee was simply building on the work of others who’d discovered the principals that make something like a computer and the internet possible and invented machines that build on these principals.
Pathetic reply. Where’s your messiah now?
Seriously. They guys is obviously a genius. But also obviously a crackpot [edit: or troll] if you read through all of his comments. The best part is where someone pulled a bait-and-switch, pretending to ask a sincere comment about the relation of his theory to QFT (which was actually just jargon-filled jibberish), and Langan took the bait and responded with his own jibberish.
You have at least one currently open thread to argue whether (a) god exists.
That discussion does not belong in this thread.
EVERYONE, take the “god” squabbles back to the threads where they belong.
[ /Moderating ]
<never mind>
I can’t find it, where did this happen?
Bull crap.
Found it… hilarious
“Andrew Goldstein” asks a question here (it’s literally random quantum mechanical gibberish):
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29023
And immediately below it, Chris responds to it.
But later, the commentor Rubix drops the bomb on him (and look at the responses below it):
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29212
Also: Easy QM questions are asked of Chris:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29229
Chris makes excuses as to why he isn’t going to answer them:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29240
He also doesn’t seem to think evolution is falsifiable.
I’m beginning to think this guy’s an idiot. I’m honestly pretty shocked.
Never have so many keystrokes been wasted on so little consequence.
The more I read of Langan the more I agree that he’s not as smart as he claims to be. He seems very adept at making himself sound smart, in an arrogant sort of way, but where is the evidence he’s actually a supergenius?
I was just assuming the guy was a tested supergenius, but upon looking at his bio what seems to be true is that he SAYS he’s a genius and many media sources have trumpeted hs claim. As has already been point out his IQ can’t really have been tested accurately in the range of 195-210.
Langan could read by 4. That’s unusual but not really a big deal; I was reading at 3 and I am no genius. believe you me. He claims to have taught himself many disciplines of science by the end of high school, got a perfect SAT score - certainly indicative of being very bright, but not proof of towering genius - and…
… Well, and that’s it. That is quite literally the extent of Langan’s intellectual resume. His fame seems to rest upon the fact that he’s a blue collar worker who’s come up with a unifying theory of the universe and SAYS he’s smarter than Einstein. But there isn’t actually any evidence except for Langan’s own self-promotion than he’s any smarter than “pretty smart.”
And he sure as hell doesn’t read like a genius in those discussion threads. He reads like a guy who’s trying to just bob and weave in a way that he can claim he’s a genius.
I’m worked my way through Langan’s introduction to CTMU and my bullshit detectors are blaring all the way through. He can’t et 100 words in without sending the argument down an ontological path,
I’ve just listened to all of the first YouTube video and part of the second one that are both linked to in the OP. On one hand, I have to admire how Langan somehow managed to live through his childhood. He had a stepfather who frequently beat him up because he was so smart. It’s the kind of story that at first sounds incredible (anyone today who acted like his stepfather within sight of any other adult would spend a long time in jail), but perhaps in his community and that time such things happened. When Langan was 14, he was big enough to beat up his stepfather in turn and throw him out of the house. An experience like that is likely to teach a child that society doesn’t care about them, that anybody strong enough to beat up other people will be able to dominate other people, and that they better become stronger than other people because that’s the only way to survive. It’s not too far from there to imagining that the way to succeed intellectually is to assert your ideas and not bother trying to listen to anyone else’s corrections or even their suggestions for improvement, since they are obviously just jealous of your intellect and want to put you down.
Apparently no one knew exactly what to do with him in high school. He was obviously brilliant, but he was always shabbily dressed (since his family was so poor) and he was arrogant about his intelligence. He says that the last two years of high school they let him spend all his time in the library studying by himself. If that’s true, it’s actually a better plan than most mediocre high schools would have for anyone that brilliant. Most fairly bad high schools would tell such a person, “Look, we know that you think that you can go to some high-faluting college after high school, even though you know perfectly well that no one from this high school has ever gotten into anything better than a second-rate state university (and certainly no one who came from a trashy family like yours). Just play along with us and we won’t do anything to stop you. Go to your classes, get top grades, get top scores on the SAT, join a few extra-curricular activities, and try to impress a few teachers so you can get some great recommendations. Then you can go to your fancy college and never have to see us again, which is just fine with us, since we don’t like you anyway.” Langan didn’t want to play along with the people at his high school, and incredibly enough they went along with him. They let him study by himself in the library and apparently did something to make his high school record look good enough that he got into Reed College, which was probably the most selective college within a couple of hundred miles from where he grew up. So, far from trying to hurt Langan, someone at his high school (and probably a number of people) was able to figure out a way that someone as brilliant and yet as arrogant as Langan could compile a high school record good enough to allow him to get into a top college even though he couldn’t be bothered to go to his classes. So, contrary to what Langan says, even in high school someone was looking out for him.
His story about what happened to him at Reed is confused. I don’t know what to believe about it. Even if it’s true that missing the deadline for a financial aid form meant that he couldn’t have gotten financial aid for the next year, that doesn’t mean that he would have had to drop out. At worst he could have just taken a year off, worked at some job, and re-enrolled the next year with financial aid. Instead he blows up, refuses to take his final exams (which makes no sense whatever), and never comes back to Reed. This is the sign of a hothead who’s determined to make things worse for himself.
As I was typing up this post, it occurred to me that I personally know of a case where Reed College screwed over someone on financial aid around this time. Chris Langan was born the same year as I was and presumably entered Reed in 1970, the same year I entered college. My best friend from grad school (at the University of Texas from 1974 to 1977) graduated from Reed. He grew up in Oregon, and his father taught at a college there. Reed and several other colleges in Oregon (including the one that my friend’s father taught at) had a mutual agreement that they would give full financial aid (i.e., pay all their tuition and room and board, I guess) for any child of a faculty member of any other college who were part of this agreement who went to their college. When my friend applied to Reed for the 1968-9 year, Reed said that they wouldn’t honor the financial aid agreement. Reed had found that many children of faculty at other colleges in this agreement wanted to go to Reed, but few children of Reed faculty wanted to go to their second-rate colleges, so Reed thought they were getting a bad deal in the agreement. Reed told my friend that he could enroll there, but he would have to pay full tuition, room, and board. Instead, my friend went to his second choice, the University of Chicago, which offered him some financial aid. He didn’t like it there during his freshman year, so he decided to transfer to Reed even though they still wouldn’t give him tuition for his sophomore year. Finally Reed decided to honor the agreement for his junior and senior years and gave him full financial aid. So maybe Reed really was trying to get away with something shady on financial aid around that time.
I think it would be fascinating to interview all the people around Langan to get their stories about him. All we know is what he says about his life at the time. Who knows how much of it is true? Langan would make a great subject for a biography.
“Every object in spacetime includes the entirety of spacetime as a state-transition syntax”, Langan writes.
He thus sees reality as “a system that consistently perceives itself and develops its own structure from within via hology, a 2-stage form of self-similarity roughly analogous to holography” – adding that hology is a “form of self-similarity in which the global structure of a self-contained, self-interactive system doubles as its distributed self-transductive syntax” – and so “this structure is self-similar; S distributes over S, where ‘distributes over S’ means ‘exists without constraint on location or scale within S’. In other words, the universe is a perfectly self-similar system whose overall structure is replicated everywhere within it as a general state-recognition and state-transition syntax”.
So, just as every part of a hologram contains the image of the entire object, all information in the system is completely self-distributed in every local subsystem – even though a sentient subsystem like you generally expresses and utilizes only a part of this syntax, on whatever limited scale you’re currently plugging away at.
But any cognitor with access to any hologram-like part can potentially hold the whole universe in one’s mind, and would be God; if no such cognitor is doing so, Langan claims that various inconsistencies would result; some cognitor must therefore be doing so (which, as Langan says, “amounts to pantheism, the thesis that God is omnipresent with respect to the material universe.” Langan adds that it would be more descriptive to call it “holopantheism”).
But the amount of information inside any given spacetime volume (with a lightlike boundary) is strictly bounded by a value proportional to the area of the boundary. So even if a human mind saturated that bound (it does not, for then it would be a black hole), it could only hold a tiny fraction of the information inside the universe within itself. Besides, even a hologram, if cut apart, looses information – it will still show the whole image, but at a lower spatial resolution, and eventually degrade completely.