Gvildenu | Mintys / ChristopherLangan

Laiškas Christopher Langan

Dear Chris,

I'm finding your thinking very relevant to my own life work. I've started going through your introduction which I'm finding to be a good place to start.

When I was a child, I set out on a quest to "know everything and apply that usefully". As I entered college, I realized that what little I knew about quantum physics was that "reality fades away". So I looked instead in the places where the knowledge might be most easily placed within my reach, and also that people most avoid looking, which is wisdom of human life.

I looked for absolutes and came across "divisions of everything". These can be observed as perspectives that a conversation might break down into. I observed that if we divide everything into two perspectives, then one will be "opposites coexist" (as in free will) and the other "all things are the same" (as with fate). We may divide everything into three perspectives: "take a stand, follow through, and reflect". Or into four perspectives: "why, how, what, whether".

I noticed that "everything" served as an absolute anchor, and that it had four properties:

no external context (if you put it in a box, it includes the box)
no internal structure (hence nothing for meaning to cling to, so that all statements are trivially true, as in "everything is hot, cold, etc.")
the simplest algorithm (accepts all things)
a required concept (we all have it, and there is no analogue in the physical world, so we could not have learned it).So this is very much like your SetOfAllSets. One difference is that I also identify this with the state of contradiction in which all things are true.

I tried to imagine what it's like for a God who is all alone, self-contained. The only thing that I can imagine for such a God to do is to divide himself into perspectives. For example, he can create one perspective ("everything") by going beyond himself, out of the unbounded and into the (self-)bounded. For such a God, "exist" and "not exist" mean the same thing at this point. What's interesting for such a God is whether he necessarily exists? which is to say, exists even when he doesn't exist? So this makes for two perspectives (as in a proof by contradiction): one where God exists, hence he exists (as assumed in the spiritual world), and another where God does not exist, yet ultimately does exist (which describes the situation of the physical world). Yet are these two Gods the same? Well, there is one God who "understands" (the Father), and another "who figures it out" (the Son), so what makes them the same is the God who is "understood" (the Spirit) which they both share. So this yields the threesome, as God thinks it. It is a self-standing structure (God's "self"); but what if something found itself in that structure; what would that mean? This gives rise to a "godlet" (like us) which is separated from that self by nothing, whereas the others were separated from that self by everything, anything, or something. This yields the foursome, and this operation +1 (adding one perspective) gives rise to more divisions of everything: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/AddOne (Note: this is quite the story of Genesis if we think of divisions as events or "days"). Finally, we come to the eightsome, which is the sevensome (the logical square: all are good, all are bad, not all are bad, not all are good, all are good and not all are bad, all are bad and not all are good, not all are bad and not all are good): http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Sevensome but adding an eighth perspective "all are good and all are bad" which means that the system is empty, and so it all collapses into the nullsome. I think this operation +1 is for the "self-defining" that you write about.

We don't actually conceive these divisions directly, but instead, we approach them by means of representations (for example, the twosome has four:)

free will and fate
outside and inside
theory and practice
same and different

The fivesome has two representations: time and space. There are six representations in all by which we look on the whole: observer, observed, and access (through an observational plane) to nothing, something, anything, everything. There are also twelve topologies, which are the backdrops for the imagination, what Kant would call categories. They allow us to isolate a part of a division. They are generated by mind games, such as: "search for constancy; either you find

one* example of it, or it is *all* constantly unconstant, and in order

to search, you needed to assume that what you choose to inspect and what you have inspected are one and the same, so it is *multiply* constant".

I'm currently working on deriving the representations and the topologies in terms of an operation +2: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/AddTwo and I've benefited a lot from Christopher Alexander's observations that "(recurring) activity evokes structure, and structure channels activity". I think the operation +2 is for what you call "self-inclusion" and I will benefit from understanding your ideas.

Finally, I think there is an operation +3 which is the shift in mental state that we call "consciousness". For example, the twosome is what is needed for the issue of "existence" (we need to be able to ask the question, Does the chair exist? (opposites coexist), but also be able to settle it with an answer (if it does, it does; if it doesn't, it doesn't; but it's settled). When we are "conscious" of this issue, the our state of mind is given by three additional perspectives, which is to say, the fivesome (for decisionmaking - space or time). I think this particular equation 2 +3 = 5 is what Kant intended by his Transcendental Deduction. And it's cyclic, so that 7 +3 = 2. I will be working on the details of this operation. I think that it should relate to your state-transition syntax, and presumably, the three elements for resolving the set-of-all-sets paradox. I expect that this operation +3 will generated three dynamic "languages" (argumentation - how do things come to matter? verbalization - how do things come to mean? narration - how do things happen?) and I have good empirical bases to work with. Underlying the languages is an "inversion effect" (like 1/1-x) whereby, in order to imagine "a God who loves us more than we love ourselves", we need to turn everything around, so that God is the smallest thing (deeper than our hearts can reach) and the unknown is the largest thing which engulfs us. (Your ideas make me consider that such a God may then find himself needing to identify with us so as to undo the inversion and not get stuck; all this to affirm that indeed the knowledge of everything may be dispersed everywhere as you say).

That's an introduction of why I'm very happy to learn of your thinking and your results. I certainly know that they are useful to me. I also know they are for real, not invented, have a warmth towards God and humans and a care for truth.

I will be sorting through your introduction, working on it at my workspace, see Christopher Langan on: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/MeaningfulConcepts and I will try to decode and interpret the various terms in your introduction. I will also be working at my lab's working group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/livingbytruth/ where I will share my letter.

I have found myself alone as I think you have in pursuing such thoughts. Yet many along the way have helped by allowing me to think out loud. In 1997, I moved to Lithuania and then founded Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt, an open laboratory serving and organizing independent thinkers around the world, primarily through the Internet. I have found that as independent thinkers we have a shared value of "caring about thinking". We find ourselves everywhere on the periphery because the people who are quick to agree end up in the center. So we each develop our own private languages. And yet we are able to agree with each other because our existential situation is the same. We are able to be absolutely inclusive by filtering in all those interested who are able to demonstrate that they can openly "work for free" on their own projects so that all might share their work-in-progress. We currently have 100 active and 1,000 supportive participants. We're working especially on global villages, tools for thinking, open economy, leadership development, loving God, social networking, global inclusion and more.

All of my work is in the Public Domain and my philosophical work is completely free-of-charge for people to use according to their best judgement. I do alert you, though, to our lab's services: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/Services http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/Clients which might be helpful for you or the Mega Foundation. For example, I and my lab could help popularize your work, provide support services to the severely gifted, or explore business opportunities for your think-tank.

More about how my thinking unfolded: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Andrius my current research interests (pulling together all the structures that I'm aware of): http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Overview http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Omniscope and me: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/Profiles/AndriusKulikauskas The latest news from our lab is at: http://www.ms.lt and more about our lab: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/MinciuSodas

A few participants I think you'd want to know about: Anthony Judge http://www.laetusinpraesens.org http://www.uia.org Joseph Goguen http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/goguen/ Sarunas Raudys http://www.science.mii.lt/mii/raudys/