You may have seen articles claiming that science debunked free will. Despite relying on disproven neuroscience from the 1980s, an experiment which found that the brain signals to make a physical movement occur 500 milliseconds before someone registers their intention to perform that action to the experimenter. Look it up. Aside from ontological and methodological holes about this experiment and conclusion that one could drive a truck through, this line of reasoning proves very popular. Prominent atheist and academic neuroscientist Sam Harris writes in his book Free Will that free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and that the state of the art in neuroscience "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.” But, because academia has yet to even consider certain fundamental questions about neurology, such as how the brain encodes between internal and external reality, whether the brain extends only into material reality or if their is a deeper mental plane from which consciousness emerges, what is the nature of experience, and how does the brain so much as function to produce a single qualia of conscious experience, and more, academic science is in absolutely no position to make such sweeping claims. It takes a deeper level of analysis, that of the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, a theory of everything by Christopher Langan which reveals reality to be a self-simulation occurring in a general kind of mind, to make definitive claims on this issue. Thus, the CTMU proves the existence of God and free will.
Here are some common questions and objections to free will and God and their answers in CTMU metaphysics:How can we have free will if we don’t have control of our thoughts or our unconscious?
We are secondary images of the entirety of Reality and thus have free will, just as Reality has pure self-configurative freedom. Chris Langan writes, “Free will establishes that they are not imprisoned by their “natures’, but have self-configurative power as CTMU secondary telors. This means that they have the option to do right instead of wrong.” You seem to have confused thoughts with the choice to act on them. Langan continues, “An evil impulse which achieves cognitive emergence has only been bound on the cognitive level of existence. It is still subject to editing. Carrying it to the behavioral level is much, much worse. Each of us has a telic editor which screens the thoughts that are realized in our minds. In biblical terms, thoughts and “impulses” are elements of the set of attributions instantiating knowledge of good and evil.” It’s not a matter of subjective opinion, it’s a matter of logic and metaphysics.
Who is God and why do we need to posit His existence for reality-theoretic purposes?
In the CTMU, God is called the Global Operator Descriptor (G.O.D.) of reality, comprising the metaphysical essence of all things, creating and reigning over the universe. I have a classical, idiosyncratic view of God as the Ground and Source of all Being and Creation as the overflowing of His Being, although He has no parts or attributes separate from the fullness of His Being as a simple, undivided substance which can acquire personal properties relative to His Creation and by injecting Himself into each observer-participant in Reality, like human beings.
Therefore, God scales all levels of personality and impersonality and there is nothing “magical” about Him besides His majesty and grandeur. Science can tell us how the Universe was created to a limited extent, but only rigorous metaphysics can reveal the Universe’s true inner structure and why it was created. We must seek not a “first cause” but instead a “first Self”, again: the Ground and Source of All Being. On this level of analysis, “how?”, “why?”, and “who?” are the same question.
A reality without the G.O.D. and its strata of telic self-identification is uninstantiated, patternless, nothingness. No coherent theory of everything makes sense without God. That’s why the great geniuses of old: Newton, Leibniz, Plato, Aristotle, all believed in God. There is no way to formulate a coherent picture of reality if you subtract the Big G.
Is the CTMU a form of non-dualism?
Yes, but the CTMU replaces “non-dualism” with “self-dualism”, neither denying the distinction between things in reality but instead situating the distinction in a higher unity (I.e. the relationship between the two different things). This is expressed by the CTMU term “syndiffeonesis” which means “sameness in difference”.
Is God ‘energy’?
Since telesis is a metaphysical generalization of energy to include information and all the structure needed to bind Reality, the Essence | Energy distinction can be generalized to a Essence | Telesis distinction where telesis and all the "t-words" (telic feedback, Telos, teleology, telons, etc.) are the "mappings" by which God's essence subsists in and creates His Creation.
If the universe has a teleology, why is there so much cruelty and suffering?
Chris Langan addressed this question in his prescient interview with Keith Woods. It's a very difficult problem because it's basically a recast of the problem of evil and suffering, theodicy: the vindication of divine goodness. What Chris Langan says is that this is the best possible universe because it is structured in such a way that we (as biological telors) can make this the best of all possible worlds for ourselves and for all other species on the planet and the laws of the universe (God's "Universal Distributed Form") are perfectly tuned towards this end. This harmony, however, has been overturned. Even in the world of biological evolution, there is violence and cruelty which seems pointless, and human beings' violence and oppression of one another, exploitation of the natural environment, etc. seems to betray that our world is not run by God but by something else entirely. Yet, Langan maintains, if you take everything into account, not only from the beginning of time to the present moment, but everything that ever will happen, from the beginning to the end, the alpha point to the omega point, this remains the best of all possible universes. And while animals may escape moral judgment, us humans do not: we must make this the best of all possible worlds for everyone in it. God allows for a finite amount of suffering so there can be a non-finite amount of bliss, a bliss freely willed by us human beings, better than never to have suffered at all.
Does the CTMU ‘limit’ God?
The CTMU contains no restrictions on God’s absolute creative power, knowledge, personality, and presence. God is the Infinite Source of Everything, scaling all levels of personality and impersonality, creating and sustaining the Universe and entering into direct relationships with His secondary images, such as human beings. To quote Chris Langan, “The beauty, truth, and perfection of God are limitless.”
Why is the reality self-simulation occurring?
Creation is a self-simulation by, for, and through Ultimate Reality. Reality is an identity operator that identifies with itself through the process of Creation and then attributes Existence to its own identity. In the CTMU, God is called the G.O.D., the Global Operator-Descriptor, of this Reality Self-Simulation. The internal logic of the Self-simulation is through the Metaformal System, an intrinsic language that Reality uses to communicate with itself. Counterintuitively, Reality is not necessarily running on a computer or mind external to itself, but rather the computational/cognitive infrastructure of Reality itself. Even if the Universe were a simulation like Elon Musk believes, there would still be a yet deeper level of Reality which contains both us and the simulators, and thus the Ultimate Reality would still have to explain itself in terms of a Reality Self-Simulation.
How does it feel to be God?
If I knew what it was like to be God, I would be God. Any attribution I could make along those lines would be both ignorant and blasphemous. That said, I do believe there is something which it's like to be God. This comes not only from my religious experience of God as a personal and sovereign entity but my understanding of CTMU metaphysics.
Langan himself says he believes in a God who hears prayer, communicates with humans in their own language, cares about what we do in our life, has a purpose for us, etc. but also in a God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists (i.e. the laws of physics, etc.).
So God, I suppose, is the personal, living, conscious, identity which gives lattice to ultimate reality. Any definition of God not as a person or not as the ultimate reality falls short in my opinion. Basically, the God described in all of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is the best description.
There's also something I think to the idea that God experiences consciousness through human beings/secondary telors ("images of God ''), and whose experience is the sum of all of these perspectives across all of time… as local images of God with constraints such as limited power and knowledge, it is probably beyond our grasp to truly know what it is like to be God. We were not created to know, but only to serve in love.
To be paragons of light, salvation, and strength and use our free will to refine and reinforce the identity of the Absolute as a secondary image of God.
Let the light shine forth in the darkness. May the peace of our Father in heaven be upon you. Like and subscribe. Peace.
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