The smartest man in the world

 

While this video (from the YouTube channel Formscapes) is nominally a polemic against "Professor Dave", it´s actually about the history of science, the nature of scientific theories and (to some extent) also about Chris Langan´s speculations. Langan, mostly known for reportedly having an IQ of 200, has developed his own "Theory of Everything" known as the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). I don´t claim to understand it, but at a cursory glance, Langan´s system sounds like an attempted synthesis of pantheism and theism. Formscapes makes comparisons to both Neoplatonism and Whitehead´s process philosophy.

The video isn´t easy to follow, but the main point seems to be that those who reject the CTMU doesn´t even understand what it is. It´s not a scientific theory generating testable hypotheses, but rather a metaphysical model explaining how scientific theories are possible at all. Which raises the question why we would need metaphysics in the first place? Why not simply have testable scientific hypotheses and be done with it?

Formscapes believes that modern science has moved further and further away from reality, into a kind of la-la-land of increasingly illusory and absurd theories, nominally accepted because "the math works" but actually because of the institutional power that comes with this kind of scientism. In the real world, modern cosmology is empirically falsified at every step (the example mentioned in the video is how "dark matter" is used to save the Big Bang). This seems to be more or less true. But what should be done about it? For Formscapes, the solution is a return to metaphysics. Hence his interest in the CTMU. 

Personally, I would rather make science even more empirical than it currently is. How about replacing Einstein´s theory of relativity with a theory that isn´t "perspectival"? I suppose Formscapes would argue that even such a science needs metaphysical grounding, but why really? Why can´t our experiences simply ground themselves? After all, that´s what they actually do, in the really real world...