In July 2021, an epic-length interview with Chris Langan premiered on Toronto filmmaker Curt Jaimungal’s popular Youtube channel Theories of Everything.  It ignited fresh awareness of Langan’s work and unique persona… and brought back a lot of memories for me.  Let me fill you in.

Scroll down to skip the story and get right to the comments I made (excerpted from Youtube’s stream), quoted in entirety and in context.

In Spring 2016, I attended a mostly charming, academic odd-ball conference in Berkeley.  The sponsoring organization Foundations of Mind (FOM) was going on several years (and conferences) strong and promised publication of papers for participants in a special edition of the Australia-based natural philosophy journal Cosmos & History.

After the conference, new participants, like myself, were invited to join the organization’s established google group.  Shortly thereafter, someone invited Chris Langan to join the group, in hopes he would participate online and attend/publish with FOM down the road.  (He eventually published one paper each year in 2017 and 2018).  I read his magnus opus Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) without delay.  It resonated with me so strongly that I pivoted from my intended paper topic and began work on “Notes from the existential underground”, which was published in the Fall 2016.

Naturally, Langan did not mind that I found resonances with and was praising of his work.  However, he remained reticent about engaging in directly collaborative, or public or private, exchanges of any sort with me.  Instead, he leaned heavily on the winds of the “public” forum of the google group (it was a private group).  On the heels of him joining were a handful of other new people, who together formed a sort of self-proclaimed heavy-hitters intellectual posse.  I did my best to stomach and pivot as best I could. I took heart (I was writing favorably about his work and preparing a final draft for review and publication) from the fact that Langan seemed to do his best to be “above it all.”  He was willing to engage in good humor with me, again, only in a group setting.  He’s not as bad as the others, I justified to myself.  Deepak Chopra, whose regular collaborator Menas Kafatos was a long-standing member of the group, joined for a time.  The heavy-hitter posse relentlessly poked fun, often mean-spirited, at Chopra.  I became his defacto defender.  Wisely he simply promoted a few things and didn’t stick around long.

Papers submitted and through review, one month before they were to be published, I posted a group reply to the FOM organizer, to which he did not take kindly, and without warning or explanation, he booted me from the group.  He was known for being short-fused and capricious with membership, a fact I would have liked to have been privy to earlier.  Many members reached out to me, sympathetic, even frustrated by my situation.  My real fear was that in the month that I was out of favor, my paper would somehow be pulled.  Big relief when I saw for myself that it was in fact published.

After the group’s papers were published in Oct 2016, with tectonic cultural shifts beginning, I began a process of self-isolating from wider, traditional digital social venues.  One exception was Langan’s acceptance of my request to join his private FB page.  I made it about a week before I could take no more.  To give you an idea, another member contacted me on a private chat to say “I sympathize more than you can imagine, but you are wasting your time.  He will never change his mind.”

At the end of 2017, I made my first publicly available statement taking issue with Langan’s CTMU.  I focused on the inadequacy of the concept of “distributed solipsism” that he uses to account for shared reality experiences.

Starting around then, and for six months only, I participated actively on Quora.  It was overall a frustrating experience being on Quora, aggravated by persistent attention by Langan’s followers. Fairly or not, they were being censored and sought sympathies and logical ways to combat the problem.  I was unmoved.   I bowed out of Quora, and left with the feeling that Langan’s posse was a cult-like group.

It was also around this time that I noticed his CTMU Wiki was full to the brim with extreme far right and conspiracy threads.  While not entirely surprising, I had rising concerns that I might one day have to defend my own reputation, having written of him favorably in 2016.

In early 2019, I learned that Langan had published another paper in Cosmos & History.  I reluctantly took a peek.  When I saw the title “The metaformal system: completing the theory of language” I had a sinking feeling.  From a self-involved perspective, I took the purpose of the paper to be an effort to convince anyone who might be keen on language-based ontological work like mine, that such a thing is not possible or necessary.  It signaled to me that, as far as he was concerned, onus lay with me to believe anything other than “I am in a fantasy world if I think his work is proof of mine.” (I make that claim in “Notes from the existential underground“).

Earlier this year, I finally processed my feelings about Langan’s 2018 paper “The metaformal system.”  With that, I prepared a brief Primer on Language, so I could share my understanding of how my own work relates to language theory.  (This became relevant in the context of my volunteer work with meta-ontology working group.)  I refer directly to Langan and his work in the Primer, though it is not the focus.  It includes a link to Langan’s full paper.

And that brings us to Langan’s over four hours long July 2021 interview on Theory of Everything (YouTube).  Remember how I had started to worry about my own reputation?  I was grateful he was interviewed, but only because it gave me a platform on which to make comments that could relate my unique position.  Below, I share the comments I made, quoted in entirety and in context.   The first is between an admirer of Langan’s and me.  The second set includes Langan and me interacting.

On checking just now, I see Langan has made his CTMU Wiki squeaky clean (no off the wall stuff that I could find)… reasonable business only.  I’m not complaining, but it’s an indication of how he leans towards people-pleasing when he gets positive attention.  I can imagine that the TOE interview may have brought about the “clean up your act” shift.  That was how I suspect I remained so doe-eyed when first learning of his work through the FOM google group.  At seeing the current interview, I had the passing thought, maybe he’s changed.  Then our interactions through the YouTube comments section of his TOE interview unfolded, and smashed that hope.

I have so far chosen not to watch the interview, as his presence aggrieves me.   I see his self-aggrandizing and cognition-only TOE claims as old paradigm in sheep’s clothing and find his ill treatment of me inexcusable.

Chris Langan on IQ, The Singularity, Free Will, Psychedelics, CTMU, and God

Premiered Jul 14, 2021

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal