It was a bit surprising to see Chris Langan being quoted about his CTMU and its implications for mortality in the British media:
‘What happens after we die?’ is the most existential question humans face.
But a man with one of the highest IQs in history claims to know the answer.
Chris Langan, 72, is an American horse rancher who is alleged to have an IQ between 190 and 210. That ‘genius’ score is 30 to 50 points higher than Albert Einstein’s.
Langan has developed a hypothesis called the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), which he says ‘explains the connection between mind and reality.’
He believes that when we die, we transition from one form of being to another within the computational structure of reality, meaning the consciousness, or ‘soul,’ moves to another dimension or plane of existence we cannot access while alive.
It’s not clear what that new dimension would look like, or what happens to the ‘soul’ once it arrives there. But Langan believes traditional views of heaven and hell are too simplistic, whereas his theory posits a transition to an entirely new state of being.
Langan explained his concept of death during an appearance on the podcast Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal in May.
He said death is ‘The termination of your relationship with your particular physical body that you have at this present time. When you are retracted from this reality, you go back up toward the origin of reality. You can be provided with a substitute body, another kind of terminal body that allows you to keep on existing.’
Thus, according to Langan, death does not mean that you cease to exist.
Once you transition to this new plane of exitance, you might not even remember who you were before, Langan said. ‘You can have – these memories can be – nothing goes out of existence in the math.’
The CTMU isn’t Christian per se; it’s better described as Christian-compatible philosophy. I’ve read his main paper on it and comprehended about half of it on the first go-through. My plan is to read it again, interview him, and then do a series of Darkstream’s attempting to interpret it for people. It should be interesting to find myself in the role of a popularizer rather than an originator for a change.