Throughout history a small group of people have been trying decode the nature of reality. From Aquinas to Newton, and from Einstein to Hawking the most brilliant minds have sought to contribute to this herculean endeavor. Today in the present day, Christopher Langan has made his attempt. He is self-taught blue-collar worker with a special gift. He is one of the smartest men in the world, with an IQ measured to be above 200+. So, what does a man with a 200 IQ do in his free time? Try to explain reality itself, obviously. The result of his years of research is what he calls the “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.” or CTMU for short. CTMU is not a physics model, it’s a model of reality which asks a basic question that most theories dodge, “What must reality be like if it can contain minds that model reality from the inside”.
CTMU is a serious attempt to answer one of the oldest questions facing mankind by fusing logic, language, and existence into a single picture.
This will probably be the hardest concept to understand in the entire “God is Real” series. However, I will try my best to paint a clear picture and explain in down to earth terms what Langan was talking about, while keeping it faithful to the original ideas. I believe that once you understand it, it will paint a powerful picture for theism, and add another perhaps even several planks to the bridge of evidence.
CTMU in plain English
CTMU says reality is a self-configuring, self-processing language. Read that again, slowly. Langan is saying that reality is not just stuff. He is saying it is also a system that contains the rules for how it can be, and it runs those rules on itself. Minds and matter belong to the same system. The map and the territory are aspects of one thing. Think of it like this, the universe is not a book on a shelf. It is a book that writes and reads itself, with us inside it as characters who can also learn to read (I know, we’re not even a paragraph in and its already getting wild). That is why CTMU is called a cognitive-theoretic model. It is about the built-in relation between cognition and the universe.
To explain this clearly, I have to slow down and define each core CTMU terms. Once we understand the moving parts, then I’ll go back and explain how Langan says they fit together.
POINT 1: Closure and self-reference
Reality must be closed with respect to description and operation. Closed means all the parts and rules of reality are inside reality. There is nothing outside of it acting on it. Self-reference means reality can in some way refer to itself. That is required because we, as parts of reality, think about reality. Our thoughts are inside reality but can still be about the whole. If reality were not self-referential to some degree, our thinking could never be about reality itself, only about a slice.
In Plain English: Reality loops back on itself. It includes beings that can think about reality, which means reality can represent itself from within.
POINT 2: SCSPL
SCSPL stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. A language here means a system with syntax and semantics. Syntax is structure, like grammar or rules. Semantics is meaning or content. In SCSPL, reality has both. It has structural rules and it has the content those rules operate on. Because reality contains everything, its syntax and semantics cannot be in two separate boxes. They must be two sides of one coin.
In Plain English: Reality is like an operating system that contains its own programming language, its own compiler, and its own hardware, all in one, and it constantly runs and updates itself.
POINT 3: Infocognition
Information and cognition are two sides of one process. Information is the structured content. Cognition is the processing and interpretation of that content. In CTMU they are not fully separate. Infocognition is the dual-aspect unity by which reality both is information and processes information through cognitive agents and through its own global structure.
In Plain English: Reality is a knowing system. It stores and processes information at every level. Rocks are not little people, but information and processing do not belong only to brain tissue. They belong to the structure of reality as a whole, with special intensifications in minds.
POINT 4: Telic recursion
Telic means goal directed. Recursion means something that refers to or runs on itself. Telic recursion is the feedback loop by which reality selects and locks in constraints that let it exist consistently and develop meaningfully. A constraint is a rule that makes some states allowed and others not. Reality chooses constraints that keep it self-consistent and intelligible from within, because only a self-consistent reality can contain agents that discover truth.
In Plain English: Reality prunes its own possibilities so that the world is coherent and can be understood. It is not random chaos. It is self-selecting order.
POINT 5: Unbound telesis
This is the raw, undifferentiated potential in CTMU. Think of unbound telesis as the primordial degrees of freedom from which specific structures and laws are carved by telic recursion. It is not a pile of particles. It is the potential to configure any consistent pattern.
In Plain English: Unbound telesis is the clay. Telic recursion is how the clay is shaped into a stable world that minds can live in and understand.
POINT 6: Syndiffeonesis
This term joins two ideas, synthesis and difference. It says that in a self-contained reality, distinctions are always made within an underlying unity. Things are different, but they are different within the same whole, by constraints that the whole sets on itself. That keeps self-reference from exploding into paradox. It is like saying the one and the many are reconciled inside a single operating system.
In Plain English: Reality is one system that can still contain real differences without falling apart. The unity comes first, and within that unity, differences are real and structured.
POINT 7: Conspansion
This is CTMU’s way of handling space, time, and change within the self-configuring language. Conspansion is not a physics equation. It is a way of saying that reality can scale and adjust its descriptive frame from within without leaving itself. It is about how the system internally manages the relation between the global whole and local parts as they evolve.
In Plain English: Reality has an internal zoom and timing function. The whole adjusts how parts are coordinated, and the parts adjust how they participate in the whole, without anything outside doing the adjusting.
POINT 8: The Global Self
Because reality is closed, self-referential, and self-processing, CTMU argues that there is a global level at which reality functions as a single Self. Do not picture a giant man in the sky. Picture the universe as a single mind-like system that knows and configures itself while containing local minds like us inside it.
In Plain English: The universe has a mind-like aspect at the top level. Our minds are local reflections of the global cognitive structure.
Phew. That was a lot. Ok now let’s bring it together in a simple, step-by-step line of reasoning.
- Any true theory must be formulated inside reality by agents that are part of reality.
- For those agents to successfully model reality, reality must be describable from within.
- A reality that is describable from within must be closed and at least partly self-referential.
- A closed, self-referential reality must contain both the rules of description and the content described. That is syntax and semantics in one unified system.
- Therefore, reality behaves like a self-configuring, self-processing language.
- Such a language must select and stabilize constraints that let it remain intelligible and consistent from within. That is telic recursion operating on unbound telesis to produce a coherent world.
- Because the closure is global, there is an overarching cognitive unity. That is the Global Self of reality.
- In that sense, reality has a built-in mind-like grounding. The classical word for the ultimate mind-like grounding of reality is God.
Now there are two brief scriptural connections that are hard to ignore. John 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word.” Now lets look at the Greek word “Logos”, which means reason, logic, meaningful structure. CTMU says reality is a self-language that configures and processes itself. Colossians 1 says, “In him all things hold together.” CTMU says the system is globally unified and holds itself together by selecting constraints that keep it consistent from within. Another coincidence to think about.
Here are some analogies to help wrap your mind around the core ideas.
- Closure and self-reference: A video game that contains its own game editor. The editor runs inside the game and can edit the world the player inhabits.
- SCSPL: A computer that includes its hardware, operating system, compiler, and code, and the machine can rewrite its own code while it runs.
- Infocognition: A smart home where sensors and control systems are part of the house itself, not external. The house both stores info and uses it to manage itself.
- Telic recursion: A gardener pruning branches so the tree stays healthy. The tree is the world of possibilities. Pruning is the selection of constraints that keep it alive and fruitful.
- Unbound telesis: The block of marble before the sculpture. It can be carved into many shapes.
- Syndiffeonesis: A symphony where many distinct instruments stay within one composition.
- Conspansion: The conductor controls tempo and dynamics so that the whole piece stays coordinated while parts play their lines.
- Global Self: The composer, score, and performance as one integrated event that contains the audience inside the hall.
Now the full analogy that ties CTMU together
Imagine a massive, cloud based world simulation that starts with pure blank capacity. Call this capacity the cloud’s raw compute and storage. That is unbound telesis. The system boots up with a kernel that is both language and machine. It can express rules and run those rules on itself. That is SCSPL. The system makes many possible worlds. Most are unstable. They collapse or contradict themselves. Through a built-in goal loop, the system selects constraints that keep the simulation coherent, lawful, and discoverable by agents inside it. That is telic recursion choosing constraints. The simulation is not set and forget. It continuously monitors itself, keeps itself consistent, and integrates the discoveries of the agents inside it. That is infocognition. Agents can build inner models of the simulation that are true, because the global system and the local minds are parts of the same language. That is closure and self-reference. The simulation is one system with many parts. Differences are real inside the unity. That is syndiffeonesis. The simulation adjusts timing, scale, and resolution so that the global pattern holds while local events unfold. That is conspansion. All of this functions under a global controlling identity, the operator of operators, by which the system recognizes and manages itself as a whole. That is the Global Self. Now replace the words cloud and simulation with reality. You have the CTMU picture.
Objections and rebuttals. I will do fifteen. Each objection will be stated in plain language. Each rebuttal will be detailed and will call out any fallacy in play.
Objection 1: CTMU is unfalsifiable. That makes it pseudoscience.
Rebuttal 1: CTMU is not a physics hypothesis. It is a metastructure for reality. Demanding empirical falsifiability of a metalogical framework commits a category mistake. It is like calling logic pseudoscience because you cannot test modus ponens in a particle collider. CTMU aims to explain why physics can be done from within reality and why true models are possible. You judge it by coherence, explanatory scope, and whether it solves the inside the system problem. The fallacy here is a misplaced standard, also called category error.
Objection 2: Saying reality is a language turns words into atoms. You are equivocating.
Rebuttal 2: CTMU does not say reality is human language. Language means a system with rules and content. Reality exhibits rule governed structure and meaningful states. When we say SCSPL, we are not confusing English with quarks. We are saying the world has grammar like constraint, and semantics like state. That is a formal analogy with real bite. The fallacy in the objection is equivocation on the word language.
Objection 3: This is just a fancy tautology. Reality exists because reality exists. Trivial.
Rebuttal 3: CTMU is based on self containment and self reference, so it uses necessary truths about how a whole can include parts that model the whole. That does not make it trivial. Mathematics and logic use true tautologies that are not trivial at all. CTMU argues that reality must be self describing in a precise way for internal cognition to be possible. That is a deep constraint, not a shallow restatement. The fallacy here is conflating informative necessity with empty circularity.
Objection 4: Telic recursion smuggles purpose into nature. That begs the question.
Rebuttal 4: The point is not that nature has a human like purpose. The point is that a globally closed system that must be internally coherent will necessarily prune possibilities that break coherence. That pruning is goal like in the minimal sense that it preserves consistency and intelligibility. The goal is not imposed from outside. It is imposed by the requirement of self consistency. Calling that question begging confuses a derived requirement with a sneaked in premise. The fallacy accusation misses the internal origin of the constraint.
Objection 5: Unbound telesis is hand waving. It is just magic potential.
Rebuttal 5: Every theory needs a basic substrate. In physics it might be fields or strings. In CTMU it is undifferentiated potential that can be shaped by consistency constraints. Unbound telesis is the generalization of raw degrees of freedom before any particular law is fixed. It is not magic. It is a name for the fact that rules must apply to something. If you reject any substrate, you have nowhere to apply any rule. The fallacy here is straw man. The critic attacks a caricature of telesis.
Objection 6: Infocognition is warmed over panpsychism. Nothing new.
Rebuttal 6: Panpsychism attributes mind like properties to all matter. CTMU does something different. It unifies information and cognition as two aspects of one global system. Local minds are special concentrations, not little souls in stones. The novelty is the global closure and the way modeling is possible from within. Dismissing it as panpsychism ignores the unified language structure and the global operator role. The fallacy is false analogy.
Objection 7: Conspansion is incompatible with relativity and modern physics.
Rebuttal 7: Conspansion is not a rival to specific physical theories. It is a way of talking about how a closed system adjusts global and local description frames so that change is coherent. It does not tell you how to compute GPS or how to model a black hole. It tells you why such modeling is possible in a self contained world. When a metaphysical term is read as a physics equation, the critic commits a category error again.
Objection 8: The Global Self is warmed over idealism or even solipsism.
Rebuttal 8: CTMU is not personal idealism. It does not say your mind creates the world. It says reality as a whole has a mind like aspect and that our minds are internal reflections of it. External reality remains real and independent of your personal whims. The Global Self is not your private dream. It is the unified cognitive structure of reality that contains all agents. Calling it solipsism confuses local and global levels. The fallacy is equivocation on the word mind.
Objection 9: CTMU has no empirical predictions. It explains nothing new.
Rebuttal 9: CTMU is not meant to predict new particle masses. It is a framework that explains why prediction and explanation are possible in the first place. It has explanatory power where physics cannot go, for example, why a law governed world exists, why minds can know it, and why global coherence holds. That is a different explanatory target. The fallacy is demanding the wrong kind of evidence.
Objection 10: Reality cannot be both syntax and semantics. That collapses distinctions.
Rebuttal 10: In a fully closed system, syntax and semantics cannot exist in separate realms. They must be mutually entangled. CTMU keeps distinctions by syndiffeonesis. Differences are real within unity. The point is not to erase structure and meaning. It is to unite them in a system that can describe itself without an external interpreter. The fallacy is the excluded middle. The critic assumes only total separation or total collapse.
Objection 11: Self reference leads to paradoxes like Russell and liar sentences. CTMU is inconsistent.
Rebuttal 11: Unrestricted self reference does cause paradox. CTMU avoids this by stratifying self reference and binding it to global consistency via telic recursion. The system only admits self referential structures that preserve coherence. That is what the constraint selection does. The paradox worry is real but answered by the mechanism of self selection under consistency. The critic is ignoring the role of constraints and treating CTMU as naive set theory. That is a straw man.
Objection 12: Calling the universe a language is anthropomorphic.
Rebuttal 12: Language in CTMU means a formal system with rules and content, not human speech. When physics writes equations, it acknowledges rule governed structure. CTMU generalizes this without projecting lips and tongues onto galaxies. The fallacy is anthropomorphism accusation without basis, which is just a rhetorical move.
Objection 13: CTMU simply defines God into existence by calling reality a Global Self.
Rebuttal 13: CTMU derives a global cognitive ground from the requirements of closure, self description, and internal truth. It then notes that this ground has attributes traditionally associated with God, such as self existence, unity, creativity, and omnipresence in the sense of being the ground of all. That is not word magic. It is an inference from structural necessities. If you think the inference fails, you must reject the closure and self description premises, not shout definition. The fallacy is begging the question accusation used as a shield, plus a misunderstanding of the actual steps.
Objection 14: CTMU is not peer reviewed in mainstream journals. That discredits it.
Rebuttal 14: Peer review is a social filter, not a truth oracle. Whole fields of logic and metaphysics have major works outside standard journals. Also, CTMU straddles philosophy, math, and foundations. It does not fit neatly. Evaluate the arguments on their merits. If they are wrong, show where. Appeal to authority is not a refutation. The fallacy is argument from authority, or in this case, argument from lack of authority.
Objection 15: This is too abstract to matter. It does not change anything.
Rebuttal 15: CTMU answers the meta question that sits above all others. Why is there a coherent world that minds can know from within. If that question is trivial, then so is science, because science presupposes a world that is knowable by beings inside it. CTMU tightens the link between mind and world. It says they belong to one reality that contains both rule and content. That matters more than most people realize. The fallacy is dismissiveness disguised as critique.
Final Thoughts
CTMU approaches describing reality from a brand new and different road than previous explanations. It says a world that contains minds that truly model the world from within must be self describing, self configuring, and self processing. That leads to a global cognitive ground that looks a lot like God. Not a bearded caricature, but the ultimate mind like source in which we live and move and have our being. Now this type of system clearly expresses an intelligence, which makes it more likely than not an intelligence was part of its creation.
You have made it through the hardest lesson to in the God is Real series. There is another one that is difficult near the end, but not as complex as CTMU.
So take a break and when you are ready for the next lesson CLICK HERE.
-Will