Do you, from your vantage point, from the way your brain works, can you explain to me how we might perceive the world differently? Imagine you're processing information all the time in a way that your brain must be really noisy. Well, you learn to filter it out after a

while. You become a kind of a monomaniac. You'll notice all these guys running around with Asperger's syndrome that don't be paying too much attention, are very involved in what's going on around them. That's because they have a richer mental

life. What's going on in their heads is much more complex than most people understand. So like at this moment, what's going through your mind? What else, what are you perceiving in this room in your mind? Can you try and describe it to me? You know, I'm perceiving a situation in

which I want to avoid putting both feet in my mouth and swallowing [Laughter] like anybody else. But yeah, as a matter of fact, I find this whole thing very, very interesting. There's a lot of technology here, and I wonder how some of it works

because I'm not entirely sure how all of it works. For example, those cameras over there, as far as the, the what, what I'm taking in, what I'm drinking in right now, is just visual pictures like anybody else, and those are being filed away and

later on, I will edit those, throw out the ones that I don't want and keep the ones that I do, and I'll have some very clear pictures of this entire thing when I get done. But there will be a lot of stuff that's thrown out too, and

you have to become good at figuring out what to keep and what to throw out that's part of being intelligent a lot of people have what I call trash can memories they remember everything that happens right other people do a lot of editing and they don't remember so much they

only remember the important key things the ability to remember those key things is what distinguishes a really intelligent person from one who's not are you are you able to read people quickly yes I have very good human instincts that comes from having been a bar bouncer for 25 years

so uh what if you now we've known each other for 20 minutes but like if you had to give me a quick read what would how would you what would you read me as in the 20 minutes you've got pitted uh I would think that you were a an

intelligent somewhat bookish person who probably wouldn't hurt a fly even if the fly attacked him and uh that you you're also a very amiable and easy to get along with person you get into any bar I ever worked so I thought emotional intelligence would

require some self-awareness also some some some intelligence about your own emotional well that's called called metacognition basically it's a kind of a transcendental ability where you rise above yourself and look down on yourself from above it's a different level of thought

where you've got the level of the object level where you're talking about things that you see and then you talk about the level where you talk about yourself talking about things that you see then you can go up from there and metacognition if it's mobile it can

actually go up an arbitrary degree until finally you experience oneness with the universe. So is it, is it a spiritual, is it connected to spirituality ultimately? It does and ultimately it is because you connect with the identity of reality itself if you can do it well enough, which

brings us to your, you should probably explain it, but the uh, CTMU, cognitive theoretic model of the universe and that's the project you're working on. Yes, it's the attempt to understand ultimate reality. Are you trying to discover something or prove something? How would

you define it? Is it, well, you're trying to do both. When you're trying to understand reality, you want to be able to use that understanding for other purposes if you have, but also there's a certain amount of, of insight and pleasure to be gotten from

just understanding what ident, what, what reality is and that's what the CTMU does for me and could potentially do for others as well. And what's your theory of what reality is? If you take a look at reality, the highest level of reality, the very highest level

is going to be an identity and identity is something that distributes over everything in the system, right? And the CTMU is designed to be that identity. So it is everywhere present on both physical and metaphysical levels, but the one thing you talked about is

that I remember when I was researching you was your idea was that if you can hold this entire universe in your mind's eye simultaneously and all of its complexities, that you can then, you'll be able to understand God. Isn't that what God does?

Yeah, he holds everything in his mind or his meta-mind simultaneously. So in order, in order to really understand what reality is and what God is, you have to be able to kind of do that yourself. Of course, we're just human beings, so the only way we can do that is to wrap

everything up in a very small package. That's what the CTMU is. So what is God in this, in your mind, and your, yeah, what is God? Well, you know, God has been called a number of things, but one of the things he's been called, especially in, in Christian

theology, which is our dominant theology, has been called Logos, which is the word. Which, of course, word means a piece of language. Looking at a piece of language, and that is exactly what the CTMU is. It models reality as a language. What's your definition of God personally?

The identity of reality. You see, I've been talking about reality, and I've been talking about the identity of reality. God is reality. As a matter of fact, God is the ultimate reality. He is reality on its very highest level. No other definition of God makes sense.

So the idea is that the universe and all of us and our mind and our perception, all adds up to be God, right? The universe is a coupling of mind and perceptual reality, right? You see out there the external world and the internal world, the internal

world being your mind. This is a coupling, and it's not a coupling you can take apart and reduce to separate parts. It is one thing with two aspects. That's what I mean by a coupling, and that's what the universe is, and that's what God is as well, except

God has the power to actually factorize himself or fractionate himself into this coupling. And um, do you consider yourself spiritual? I think you have to be to do what I do. Yeah, in what way? Like how do you define your spirituality? Well, I would def, I'm aware of the

metaphysical structure of reality. If you take the average person, you know, they really think that they live in the material world and that uh, that's it. All right, anybody who is aware that there is actually another dimension or other dimensions to reality, then you start getting into spirituality

because what connects the perceptual world to these other dimensions if not spirit? And what so what other realities are happening [Music] here in front of us besides the the physical reality? There are no limits except those that are on existence itself. Whatever can exist

can exist in this theory. Most of us perceive three dimensions, is it is that correct? That's in one dimension of time, so it's three plus one. And how many do you perceive? More than that? Can I perceive? Can I see more than three spatial dimensions?

Only when I'm deeply asleep. And what do you see? Well, you actually see connections and correlations. You see patterns right that are not necessarily separated into dimensions, three dimensions. They have a special property which is they're all independent of each other. That's what it means they're orthogonal.

They're perpendicular, right? Mathematically, that means that they're independent. The dimensions of reality are not all independent of each other. They get tangled up and tied up in certain ways, and those are the patterns that you can see that will inform you of spiritual

reality do you ever exhaust yourself all the time I'm exhausted right now because I've been largely without sleep in the last three days that gives me an idea what a uh I don't remember who taught me who told me this but like what if we just tried to laugh

right now I would find that very easy all right you look funny you know and I know I do too do you ever like having this mind that is so rich so you have all these ideas and thoughts I can't imagine there being that many people you meet if anybody that you can

really connect with in all of these things you're thinking and feeling well that's so so wonderful about I mentioned earlier about people tracking me down out of nowhere occasionally we'll have lots of young men you know actually show up on the door and say hi are you Chris Langan well

yeah who are you and it these people have come from all over the country and they end up on my doorstep I don't even know how they find me because I live in the middle of nowhere but there they are and then they reveal to me what their thoughts are about what

I wrote many years ago and I realized you know this is completely simpatico I mean this this this person actually understands what I'm talking about which is always great right especially when you're talking about the kind of things that I talk about so the

people you admire have immense cognitive ability there's not people you admire for other re like those are people like I don't know Bob Dylan Patti Smith um Vincent van Gogh who maybe you know like that have other abilities like or is

Cognitive ability is really the main thing, well that's that's that's cognitive ability as far as artistry is concerned. Of course there's also that creativity that you say you know, something that's very hard to put your finger on, but it's there too.

And that that that ability, that ability to originate that I was talking about with the very greatest minds, that's what creative people have, quite essentially. I mean that's what they do, they can originate things that are brand new. And so yes, if I neglected to mention

artists, I'm sorry because they're very defensive, um what about okay so if I forced you to say who you admire that's actually living today, who would who would you say? I admire almost everybody. I'm capable of, for example, if I see some Missouri dirt farmer

who's out there and he comes up with a clever way of fixing a machine or solving a problem that I haven't seen before, I admire him. I'll tell him to his face, 'You're a genius!' Yeah, have you met him before? Are you

talking about a specific farmer? Oh yeah, but I've met dozens of dozens of them. It's like I say, everybody has their own particular brand of intelligence and I admire them for it. They're very admirable for it, especially when they can use it, when they can focus it.

And most people are able to do that to some extent, so yeah I admire, yeah okay, I admire almost everybody. I would say that Hawking is being overly optimistic in at least two ways. He's giving us 200 years whereas we may already have passed the

point of no return, we can hope that that's not the case, but we must redress the situation as soon as we possibly can. The other way in which he may be over optimistic is that in order to get human beings off planet, we will have to build very big spaceships

in orbit, and the current allocation of resources is such that we're spending our money on other more trivial things, and therefore we'll never be able to get enough together to build these great orbiting colonies that we'd need in order to get off planet.

Have we already destroyed ourselves? Well, I mean, you've got certain things that are that are brewing and we don't know how bad they've gotten yet. For example, Fukushima. I mean, this is something, you know, they were supposed to close the nuclear cycle

years and years ago. We're not supposed to have all this hot stuff that we have to get rid of, and we're especially not supposed to put it on in fault zones right next to places that experience tsunamis, right? And yet, this is what certain

people itching to stick some more money in their pockets have done. And it's a travesty that we've done to the environment. All kinds of toxins that we've introduced, GMO crops, we don't know how modified genes actually affect other organisms in the long run. We don't

know that you can... Are you okay over there? You just depressed me. It's just basically a two-valued logical complement, a complementarity thing where on the one hand you know something and on the other hand you don't. Some things mystify you.

and some things don't [Music] the reasons that homo sapiens evolved beyond any other species was due to the ability that we can all buy into collective fiction together whether it's civilization or a government or nation or money or religion that these

collective fictions we all buy into but I don't know I don't know if we all have I don't know if all six and a half billion of us have bought into any one same fiction that's exactly right you

Chris Langan - Spike Jonze Interview - 2019

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