Christopher Langan

I am closer to absolute truth than any man has been before me

Christopher Langan is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), a professional society which promotes intelligent design. His IQ score has been measured at 195 (although, at such high levels, IQ tests are highly unreliable) and he also claims to have scored a perfect SAT score while taking a nap during the test. He was employed as a bar bouncer, but now owns a horse ranch in Mercer Co., Missouri.

Langan styles himself as a misunderstood genius; indeed, Filmmaker Errol Morris directed a short documentary on Langan titled The Smartest Man in the World. However, his pet theory, the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe," appears to the casual observer to be a steaming mound of incoherent babbling, and Langan has reportedly used ad hominem attacks against those asking him to explain it further, which does not bode well for his "misunderstood genius" claims.

Beliefs
Langan accepts the theory of evolution, but believes it could not be responsible for the specified complexity of the biodiversity that we see today. He believes on various levels that intelligence is responsible for the evolution of life, the ultimate level being "GOD" or the Global Operator Definor (or Designer), which is compatible with the monotheism found in the God of the Bible. He even believes there is a logico-mathematical explanation for the phenomenon of a "messiah", which suggests Jesus wasn't the only one; however, he describes his personal approach as "logical theology" in his words,

Racism and support of conspiracy theories
Langan's support of conspiracy theories, including the 9/11 Truther movement and the white genocide conspiracy theory, and his opposition to mixed-race relationships, have contributed to him amassing a following among members of the alt-right. Langan not only claimed that 9/11 was carried out by George W. Bush, but that the motive was to prevent the world from learning about his theory, the CTMU. In 2018, Langan wrote an obituary on Facebook for, in which he argued that the Western world should be admitting gorillas as immigrants instead of Somalis, claiming that gorillas are more intelligent. Posts such as this one have been popular on neo-Nazi forums including The Daily Stormer, , and Vanguard News Network. Langan's high IQ score has also contributed to his popularity among the alt-right, whose members often subscribe to the belief that intelligence is based on racial characteristics. Langan's views have been described as racist and anti-Semitic by journalist Justin Ward in The Baffler.

Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)
Langan describes the CTMU as a metatheory or a theory about how theories are made in general. The subjects he covers belong to the fields of epistemology and meta-mathematics. The main concept in the CTMU is "telic recursion" which differs from standard Markovian recursion in which the next state is only determined by the current one, but that the next state is also determined by the path it took to get to that state as well as the rest of space and time, so the state-transitional syntax of every part is ultimately determined by the "syntactic unisect" of the whole, which he identifies with "teleology", the relationship between the logic of the parts and the whole with "hology" and the theological or metaphysical system this implies as "holotheism".

Critics point out this model is kind of a semantic game. In an interview, Langan was asked if nonconsciousness exists, and if that question is the same as the nonsensical question: "Does nonexistence exist?" Chris Langan answered, "Consciousness is a stratified predicate. Everything partakes of global consciousness, but on the local level, incoherence results from stratification. So the answer is yes and no. Regarding existence, it is defined on its complement, namely "nonexistence". So if one exists, both exist." What is missing is a distinction between conceptual and material existence. Just because something exists materially, does not mean it can also not exist in the material world. An example is the Earth's sun in the year 2005. We know it materially exists in the year 2005. Conceptually we can imagine it not existing in that year. But materially, apparently it does exist in 2005, which means that it is not the case that it materially doesn't exist in the year 2005. Another example, "In order for X to have property X, ~X must also have property X." The former is arguable and perhaps defendable; the latter is clearly false. But by turning the former into an examination of existence, he has turned it into the latter.

Langan also explains that the Expanding Rubber Sheet Universe is the Universe as a Self-Representational Entity, which is a consequence of duality in an "infocognitive" lattice. He admits the ideas in his theory are not new, however they haven't been brought together before. The shift towards noncommutative geometry found in Shahn Majid's work is one example.

In an ID forum Langan and his partner Genie LoSasso threatened critics and engaged in relentless character assassination. Even non-critics who innocently say they don't understand his ideas are often accused by Langan of lying by pretending not to understand. He began his essay on the explanatory debts of scientific naturalism with the Hegelian dictum thesis + antithesis = synthesis, in which he attempts to show how natural selection and teleological selection are compatible explanations for evolution, not only on the biological but cosmic scale. However rather than "design" Langan uses terms like "self-determinacy" and "self-design", which are closer to the autopoietic nature of his ideas.

Wikipedia warrior
Under the handle Asmodeus, Langan and his partner have been caught repeatedly trying to positively skew the Wikipedia article covering him and the CTMU. Exhibiting his typical highly aggressive style of combative dialectic he attempted to brow-beat everyone who edited the page; this eventually led to him being topic banned.

View of RationalWiki
From a Quora answer of someone who claims to be Chris Langan: