The Ontology of Christopher Langan's Psychical Physics: The Neuropsychology of the Atemporal Recursive Processes––an empirical framework

Christopher Langan's CTMU offers a new look into an old place: the universe. This theory is both attractive and elusive, a mixture of cosmology and ontology which promises a reunification of what science has so ignobly divided. While the cosmological and spiritual pieces of the puzzle are beyond the scope of this author's competence to define, I propose to demonstrate through specific psychological and neuroscientific example, some of the more tantalizing and etherial ideas mentioned in the CTMU. These ideas are tangible, and are subject to direct daily observation, and hence, empirical demonstration. It should be noted that I am an atheist, and need carry no baggage for Mr. Langan, who has in the CTMU offered up a new idea, one which can be proven or disproven as science, an idea worthy of consideration quite apart and independent of one's personal beliefs. Indeed, it is difficult to look at things in a new way, our very mental structure all but forbids it, the lateral prefrontal cortex providing a definitional template for experience, pairing down the information available to us, measuring the situation against our preconceptions, structures so very necessary for forming our snap judgments, and also, so inhibitive in the understanding of a new idea which does not conform to them (Gazzaniga, 2009 pp. 578-579). I propose to demonstrate the atemporal cycles of Christopher Langan's telic recursion, as it defines our internal universe and experience. This proof will be multidisciplinary in drawing together threads from a convergence of depth psychology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. This ontological proof will be concluded with a series of experimental constructs, which although general, will outline a methodological approach toward demonstration of the psycho-ontological aspects of the CTMU, leaving but a clear experimentally defined articulation of the proposed theoretic connective tissue underlying the unity of the psychical and the physical, to close the empirical gap. Telic recursion: The coexistence and connectivity of Past, Present and Future In order to elucidate the application of the theories explained in the CTMU by way of specific example, I will ease my task by focusing my observations clearly in the theatre of the psycho-ontological. To accomplish both my expository, and my experimental, and therefore, linear aim, I must first decide upon a specific piece of theory in the CTMU which will allow me access along the self-referential and circular route of tautological self-containment. This pathway will become clear as we find foothold and firm purchase upon what appear at first, to be some of the more unlikely propositions put forward in the CTMU. I will encourage the reader to take in the entire of the CTMU for themselves, but, once cautioned as to the limits of extracting any fact from its context, I will now do exactly that, and present a few prime pieces of theory to which I will refer again and again, many of which appear as paradox, but are in fact, an everyday dynamic which underlies reality, a dynamic which if working properly, goes unnoticed: 1. Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). . . . . . the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. (Langan, 2002, p.1) 2. The currency of telic feedback is a quantifiable self-selection parameter, generalized utility, a generalized property of law and state in the maximization of which they undergo mutual refinement (note that generalized utility is self-descriptive or autologous, intrinsically and retroactively defined within the system, and “pre-informational” in the sense that it assigns no specific property to any specific object). Through telic feedback, a system retroactively selfconfigures by reflexively applying a “generalized utility function” to its internal existential potential or possible futures. In effect, the system brings itself into existence as a means of atemporal communication between its past and future whereby law and state, syntax and informational content, generate and refine each other across time to maximize total systemic self-utility. This defines a situation in which the true temporal identity of the system is a distributed point of temporal equilibrium that is both between and inclusive of past and future. In this sense, the system is timeless or atemporal. (p.6-7) 3. In short, two-valued logic is something without which reality could not exist. If it were eliminated, then true and false, real and unreal, and existence and nonexistence could not be distinguished, and the merest act of perception or cognition would be utterly impossible. (p. 13) 4. According to the nature of sentential logic, truth is tautologically based on the integrity of cognitive and perceptual reality. Cognition and perception comprise the primitive (selfdefinitive) basis of logic, and logic comprises the rules of structure and inference under which perception and cognition are stable and coherent. (p. 13) Therefore, the proposed tautology-preserving principles of reality theory should put mind back into the mix in an explicit, theoretically tractable way, effectively endowing logic with “selfprocessing capability”. This, after all, is exactly what it possesses in its natural manifestation . . . (p.14) 5. To put it another way: if the “noumenal” (perceptually independent) part of reality were truly unrelated to the phenomenal (cognition-isomorphic) part, then these two “halves” of reality would neither be coincident nor share a joint medium relating them. In that case, they would simply fall apart, and any integrated “reality” supposedly containing both of them would fail for lack of an integrated model. (p. 23) 6. In CTMU cosmogony, “nothingness” is informationally defined as zero constraint or pure freedom (unbound telesis or UBT), and the apparent construction of the universe is explained as a self-restriction of this potential. (p. 27) 7. Conspansion describes the “alternation” of these units between the dual (generalizedcognitive and informational) aspects of reality, and thus between syntax and state. This alternation, which permits localized mutual refinements of cognitive syntax and informational state, is essential to an evolutionary process called telic recursion. . . the conspansive nesting of atemporal events puts all of time in “simultaneous self-contact” without compromising ordinality (p. 30) 8. By putting temporally remote events in extended descriptive contact with each other, the Extended Superposition Principle enables coherent cross-temporal telic feedback and thus plays a necessary role in cosmic self-configuration. Among the higher-order determinant relationships in which events and objects can thus be implicated are utile state-syntax relationships called telons, telic attractors capable of guiding cosmic and biological evolution. (p. 31) 9. The process of reducing distinctions to the homogeneous syntactic media that support them is called syndiffeonic regression. This process involves unisection, whereby the rules of structure and dynamics that respectively govern a set of distinct objects are reduced to a “syntactic join” in an infocognitive lattice of syntactic media. 10. It follows that the active medium of cross-definition possesses logical primacy over laws and arguments alike, and is thus pre-informational and pre-nomological in nature...i.e., telic. Telesis, which can be characterized as “infocognitive potential”, is the primordial active medium from which laws and their arguments and parameters emerge by mutual refinement or telic recursion. (p. 35) 11. The Telic principle simply asserts that this is the case; the most fundamental imperative of reality is such as to force on it a supertautological, conspansive structure. Thus, the universe “selects itself” from unbound telesis or UBT, a realm of zero information and unlimited ontological potential, by means of telic recursion, whereby infocognitive syntax and its informational content are cross-refined through telic (syntax-state) feedback over the entire range of potential syntax-state relationships, up to and including all of spacetime and reality in general. . . the Extended Superposition Principle, a property of conspansive spacetime that coherently relates widely-separated events, lets the universe “retrodict” itself through meaningful cross-temporal feedback (p. 38) 12. Where the term telesis denotes this common component of information and syntax, SCSPL grammar refines infocognition by binding or constraining telesis as infocognition. (p. 43) 13. While an ordinary grammar recursively processes information or binds informational potential to an invariant syntax that distributes over its products, Γ grammar binds telesis, infocognitive potential ranging over possible relationships of syntax and state, by crossrefining syntax and its informational content through telic recursion. Telic recursion is the process responsible for configuring the syntax-content relationships on which standard informational recursion is based; its existence is an ontological requirement of reality. (p. 44) The metapsychology and neurophysiology of telic recursive function: So dear reader, now that you have seen the ideas, can you grasp them? It seems as if they are an impossibility, but to look more closely, one can find more than a shadow of reality in them, in fact, these processes live in the shadows of the normal mind, and can be seen to appear everywhere once one has learned to look. But where? Where is one to find such elusive concepts and dynamic relations which seems so separate from each other as past, present, and future? Surely these ideas are exclusive and separate, not interactive or self-configuring in any way! Although this seems a safe and assured position from which to judge the situation, closer inspection will reveal the fact to be otherwise. Please indulge me to follow this most basic example, and understand that in the ideas of past, present and future, we see just that: ideas! Concepts!–– We are directly present to our externally triggered representation of the world, an internal experience which impinges upon the mental system through stimulus originating from without. We are also present to our inner world of thought and fantasy, which also impinges upon the mental system, but from stimulus originating within. The concept of the present, then, is directly accessible to us in experience, and has as its ontological neural substrate, what I will call: the Perceptual System. While we are conscious, I will propose as a simplistic starting point, that this system encompasses the intrasystemic activity of all the limbic structures, and, the higher areas involved in perception invigorated to produce cortical tone by the ascending activating system (Solms, 2002, pp. 264-267). The past is also a concept, and has as its neural substrate, what I will call the Long-Term Mnemic System. This system encompasses the neural structures which provide for long-term memory and its retrieval into consciousness, such as the neocortex (Gazzaniga, 2009, p. 331). Let us now bring the future into focus by remembering that it too is but a concept, and, finds its neural substrate in those areas associated with anticipatory thought and long-term goal-oriented behavior, along with situational planning, such as the pre-fontal cortex, (Gazzaniga, 2009, pp. 555-598). With this most basic picture in mind, we can see our way around the problem, even if at first, only in a myopic way. In even a single moment of our lives, the seamless integration and mutual affective dynamism of past, present and future is available to observe. We sit in class and think of the next lecture, and the exam to follow, and begin to worry, only to remember the last exam, and then relax, as we got an "easy A." Our past defines what we may well expect in the future and present, and also, the future defines our definition of the past as well! In “The Pain Was Greater If It Will Happen Again: The Effect of Anticipated Continuation on Retrospective Discomfort,” we find the following observation: “Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation” (Galak & Meyvis, 2011, p.