The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe as the

Nexus of Spirituality and Cosmology:

A n I n t er d i s c ip l i n ar y A p p r o a ch to R e a l i t y

1. General Introduction

Since the dawn of our species, human beings have been asking difficult questions about
themselves, the universe and the nature of existence, but have lacked a unified
conceptual framework strong and broad enough to yield the answers. Enter
the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU).

Scientific theories are mental constructs that take objective reality as their content, with
the scientific method putting observation first and letting explanation be determined by
experiment. But because all theories have logical properties that are abstract and
mathematical, and therefore independent of observation - it is these very properties that
let us recognize and understand our world - we could equally well start withthem and see
what they might tell us about objective reality. Just as scientific observation makes
demands on theories, the logic of theories makes demands on scientific observation, and
these demands tell us in a general way what we can observe about the universe.

In other words, a comprehensive theory of reality is not just about observation, but
theories and their logical requisites. Since theories are mental constructs,
and mental means "of the mind", this can be rephrased as follows: mind and reality are
linked in mutual dependence on the most basic level of understanding. It is this linkage
of the abstract and the concrete, the subjective and the objective, the internal and the
external, that constitutes the proper focus of a Theory of Everything (TOE). Since reality
forever retains the ability to surprise us, the task of scientific observation can never be
completed with absolute certainty, and this means that a comprehensive theory of reality
cannot be based on scientific observation alone. Instead, reality theory must be based on
the logic underlying the general process of making and interpreting scientific
observations. Since observation and interpretation are predicated on the relationship
holding between mind and reality, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe delivers
an account of that relationship.

For the most part, ordinary theories are linguistic and mathematical descriptions of
specific observations. In contrast, the CTMU is a metatheory about the general
relationship between theories and observations…i.e., about science, knowledge and
cognition themselves. In explaining this relationship, the CTMU shows that reality
possesses a complex property akin to self-awareness; just as the mind is real, reality is in
some respects like a mind. But when we attempt to answer the obvious question
"whose mind?", the answer turns out to qualify by reasonable standards as a
mathematical and scientific definition of God. This implies that we all exist in what can be
called "the Mind of God”, and that our individual minds are parts of this Universal
Mind. As such, they are directly connected to the greatest source of knowledge and
power that exists. This connection of our minds to the Mind of the Universe, which we
sometimes call the soul or spirit, is the most essential part of being human.

In its exciting development of these and other ideas, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the
Universe helps us to understand not only the nature of reality, but the integral role played
by human beings in the creation and maintenance of the world they inhabit. In the
process, the CTMU enables us to comprehend the psychological, metaphysical, and ethical
ramifications of the relationship between man and the cosmos, and thus what it means to
be human.

Among the questions that are answered within the framework of the CTMU: What is the
nature of humanity's relationship with God? What is our relationship with each other on
individual and cultural levels? Do human beings possess free will? Is there life after
death? Is there a physical basis for spirituality? Where did the universe come from? Is
there such a thing as absolute good or absolute evil? These are just a few of the many
burning philosophical dilemmas that mankind has pondered since its infancy. When these
dilemmas are finally considered in the advanced conceptual framework of a true TOE like
the CTMU, their answers fall into place as though under the influence of an attractive
force. The mystery melts away, but not the wonder.

In its role as a comprehensive theory of reality, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the

Universe serves as a firm basis for the unification of science and theology, leading us
inevitably in the direction of intellectual enlightenment and a collective spiritual
awakening. The traditional Cartesian divider between body and mind, matter and
thought, science and spirituality is penetrated by logical reasoning of a higher order than
ordinary scientific reasoning, but no less scientific than any other kind of mathematical
truth. Accordingly, it serves as the long-awaited gateway between science and
humanism, a bridge of reason over what has long seemed an impassable gulf.

2. The CTMU and Physics

The avowed goal of physics is to produce what is sometimes called a "Theory of

Everything" or TOE. As presently conceived, the TOE is thought to consist of one equation
describing a single "superforce" unifying all the forces of nature (gravity,
electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). But this is actually an
oversimplification; every equation must be embedded in a theory, and theories
require models for their proper interpretation. Unfortunately, the currently available
theory and model lack three important
properties:closure, consistency and comprehensivity. That is, they are not self-contained;
they suffer from various intractable paradoxes; and they conspicuously exclude or neglect
various crucial factors, including subjective ones like consciousness and emotion. Since
the excluded factors fall as squarely under the heading everythingas the included ones, a
real TOE has no business omitting them. So as now envisioned by physicists, the TOE is
misnamed as a "theory of everything".

The CTMU, on the other hand, is a TOE framework in which “everything” really
means everything. Whereas the currently-envisioned TOE emphasizes objective reality at
the expense of its subjective counterpart (mind), the CTMU places mind on the agenda at
the outset. It does this not by making assumptions, but by eliminating the erroneous
scientific assumption that mind and objective reality can be even tentatively
separated. To do this, it exploits not just what we know of objective reality – the so-
called “everything” of the standard TOE – but also what we know of the first word in
“TOE”, namely theory. In other words, it brings the logic of formalized theories to bear
on reality theory.
Although this is a mathematically obvious move, it has been almost completely
overlooked in the physical and mathematical sciences. By correcting this error, the CTMU
warrants description as a theory of the relationship between the mind of the theorist and
the objective reality about which it theorizes, completing the program of subjective-
objective unification already inherent in certain aspects of the formalisms of relativity and
quantum mechanics. In the process, it also brings the quantum and classical realms of
physics into the sort of intimate contact that can only be provided by a fundamentally
new model of physical and metaphysical reality…a model truly worthy of being called a
“new paradigm”.

Fundamental to this new model are revisions of basic physical concepts including space,
time, matter and motion. Space, once a featureless medium aimlessly proliferating
through cosmic expansion, becomes a distributed syntactic structure iteratively reborn of
matter and subject to conspansive evacuation and rescaling. Time, previously envisioned
as a quasi-spatial linear dimension along which the cosmos hurtles like a runaway
locomotive, becomes the means by which the universe self-configures…an SCSPL-
grammatical symphony of logico-linguistic transformations played by the self-creating
cosmos. Lumps of matter, no longer the inert pawns of external laws of physics, become
SCSPL syntactic operators containing within themselves the syntactic rules by which they
internally process each other to create new states of physical reality. And motion, once
seen as the passage of material attribute-ensembles through adjacent infinitesimal cells
of empty space displaying them as content, becomes an iterative, self-simulative
sequence of endomorphic self-projections by moving bodies themselves.

3. The CTMU and Mathematics

Mathematics, like the empirical sciences, requires protection from subjective

contamination. Just as the scientific method is designed to exclude bias from science, the
axiomatic method is designed to specify an initial set of definitive or “self-evident”
principles and exclude all further assumptions from the deductive process. Accordingly,
mathematical entities are objectified by mathematicians in the same way that physical
entities are objectified by scientists; they are considered to reside outside the subject,
concealed in objective reality as “hidden programming” or secreted away in an ideal
Platonic realm beyond the reach of the senses. Rejecting these notions in absence of a
model of reality explicitly relating the mathematical and material worlds, others choose to
believe that mathematics is a feature or even an invention of the human mind. But since
any meaningful explanation can be logically formalized, and since logic is an essential
ingredient of mathematics, subjectivizing mathematics within a (Cartesian) dualistic
framework would again seem to leave the essential regularities of nature without an
objective explanation.

Replacing Cartesian dualism with an advanced form of dual-aspect monism, the CTMU
treats the abstract and mathematical, and the concrete and physical, as coincident
aspects of the same reality. Reality becomes a self-distributed “hological” system whose
essential structure is replicated everywhere within it as mathematical rules of self-
recognition and self-processing. Hology, the central attribute of any self-recognizing,
self-processing entity, is a logical species of self-similarity according to which such an
entitydistributes over itself as rules of structure and evolution…rules that inhere in, and
are obeyed by, every interacting part of the system. Thus, what the system becomes is
always consistent with what it already is(and vice versa); its causal integrity is
tautologically preserved. In the CTMU, these rules – the syntax of the language spoken
to reality by reality itself - are understood to be largely mathematical in nature.

The theoretic vantage of the CTMU is essentially logical, with an accent on model
theory. Its perspective is associated with the mathematical discipline governing the
formulation and validation of theories, namely logic, with emphasis on the branch of logic
which deals with the mapping of theories to their universes, namely model theory. This
elevates it to a higher level of discourse than ordinary scientific theories, which are simply
compact mathematical descriptions of observational data, and even most mathematical
theories, which are compact mathematical descriptions of mathematical objects,
structures and processes. This is reflected in the name of the theory; “CTMU” is just a
way of saying “the metatheory that describes a model, or valid interpretation, of
the theory of cognition, including logic and mathematics, in the real universe (and vice
versa).”

Since the elementary categories of cognition and perception can be viewed as syntactic
elements of cognitive and perceptual languages, cognition and perception can be model-
theoretically treated as mappings of cognitive and perceptual languages onto their
respective dual universes, and can thus be related by the CTMU within a single monic
universe. Because mathematics and science are based on cognition and observation
respectively, the CTMU is naturally equipped to address the foundations of both
mathematics and science. The CTMU reposes mathematics in reality, and reality in
mathematics, in a way that puts each at the other’s immediate disposal for solving
foundational problems and resolving paradoxes.

4. The CTMU and Cosmology

A curious child often asks “why” questions, and when an answer is given, immediately
asks another why question about the answer. Such a child is unsatisfied with superficial
explanations, craving instead an ultimate rationale for existence. Example: “Why is grass
green?” “Chlorophyll’s green.” “Why does grass have chlorophyll?” “Because it needs to
photosynthesize.” “Why?” “Because it gets its energy from the sun.” “Why does the sun
make energy?” “Because it’s a huge fusion reactor that takes energy from atoms.” “Why
do atoms have energy?” “Because, as a man named Einstein showed, matter is energy.”
“Why?” “Because that’s the way the universe is made.” “What’s the universe and who
made it?” At this point, the weary adult has exhausted his scientific knowledge and must
begin to deal with the most general and philosophically controversial abstractions in his
mental vocabulary…or give up.

Stephen Hawking is among those who have proposed a way out of the regress. In
collaboration with James Hartle, he decided to answer the last question - what is the
universe and who made it? - as follows. “The universe made itself, and its structure is
determined by its ability to do just that.” This is contained in the No Boundary Proposal,
which Hawking describes thusly: “This proposal incorporates the idea that the universe is
completely self-contained, and that there is nothing outside the universe. In a way, you
could say that the boundary conditions of the universe are that there is no boundary.” To
mathematically support this thesis, Hawking infuses the quantum wavefunction of the
universe with a set of geometries in which space and time are on a par. The fact that
time consists of a succession of individual moments thus becomes a consequence of
spatial geometry, explaining the “arrow of time” by which time flows from past to future.
 Unfortunately, despite the essential correctness of the “intrinsic cosmology” idea (to make
the universe self-contained and self-explanatory), there are many logical problems with
its execution. These problems cannot be solved simply by choosing a convenient set of
possible geometries (structurings of space); one must also explain where these geometric
possibilities came from. For his own part, Hawking explains them as possible solutions of
the equations expressing the laws of physics. But if this is to be counted a meaningful
explanation, it must include an account of how the laws of physics originated…and there
are further requirements as well. They include the need to solve paradoxical physical
conundrums like ex nihilocosmogony (how something, namely the universe, can be
created from nothing), quantum nonlocality (how subatomic particles can instantaneously
communicate in order to preserve certain conserved physical quantities), accelerating
cosmic expansion (how the universe can appear to expand when there is no external
medium of expansion, and accelerate in the process to boot), and so on. Even in the
hands of experts, the conventional picture of reality is too narrow to meaningfully address
these issues. Yet it is too useful, and too accurate, to be “wrong”. In light of the
fundamentality of the problems just enumerated, this implies a need for
additional logical structure, with the extended picture reducing to the current one as a
limiting case.

The CTMU takes the reflexive self-containment relationship invoked by Hawking and some
of his cosmological peers and predecessors and explores it in depth, yielding the logical
structures of which it is built. Together, these structures comprise an overall structure
called SCSPL, acronymic for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. The natural
terminus of the cosmological self-containment imperative, SCSPL is a sophisticated
mathematical entity that possesses logical priority over any geometric explanation of
reality, and thus supersedes previous models as a fundamental explanation of the universe
we inhabit. In doing so, it relies on a formative principle essential to its nature, the Telic
Principle. A logical analogue of teleology, the Telic Principle replaces the usual run of
ontological hypotheses, including quasi-tautological anthropic principles such as “we
perceive this universe because this universe supports our existence,” as the basis of
cosmogony.

5. The CTMU and Modern Philosophy

20th century philosophy has been dominated by the linguistic and logico-analytic schools,
whose joint program was to convert concepts and observations to language, and scientific
and philosophical reasoning to the logical analysis of language. As long as language was
by assumption held apart from reality, this program had the inevitable and unfortunate
effect of demoting philosophy to the status of an irrelevant word game. In consequence,
philosophers have lapsed into a pervasive cynicism that eats away at the foundations of
human knowledge like a slow cancer, looking resignedly to scientific materialism to solve
problems that science itself has frankly admitted are philosophical and empirically
unsolvable. Perceiving themselves as hopelessly beaten in the name of philosophy, the
vast majority of modern philosophers have dejectedly become traitors to their cause.

The CTMU ignores philosophical defeatism and takes the obvious next step in the logico-
linguistic tradition, which is to subject the problematic relationship between language and
reality itself to logical analysis. When this is properly done, it turns out that reality and
language are not so easily held apart. In fact, it turns out that they can ultimately be
treated as identical for purposes of philosophical and scientific reasoning...that they can
be melded in a single self-similar medium, SCSPL, which is everywhere both real and
linguistic, i.e., “monic” in CTMU dual-aspect sense (as distinguished from the separative
dualism pervading the sciences). This restores philosophy to a position from which it can
effect the resolution of scientific paradox, which is just what the CTMU does in its capacity
as reality theory.

More specifically, because it comprises a higher-level metalanguage of the language of

physics, the CTMU is technically a theory of metaphysics in the formal sense (a
metalanguage is a higher-level language in which one can talk about the structure of a
lower-level language and its correspondence to whatever it describes). Thus, it has
bearing on the traditional ingredients of metaphysics including cosmology (the study of
the origin and composition of the universe), ontology (the study of being),
and epistemology (the study of the nature and limits of knowledge). The CTMU is thus
closely related not only to cosmological science, but also to the burgeoning philosophies
of mind and language.

6. The CTMU and Theology

Basically, the Scientific Method says that science should be concerned with objective
phenomena meeting at least two criteria: distinguishability, which means that they
produce distinctive effects, and replicability, which means that they can be experimentally
recreated and studied by multiple observers who compare their data and confirm each
other’s findings. Unfortunately, God nowhere fits into this scheme. First, God is
considered to be omnipresent even in monotheistic schemata, which means “distributed
over reality as a whole” and therefore lacking any specific location at which to be
“distinguished”. Second, there is such a thing as being too replicable. If something is
distributed over reality, then it is present no matter where or when it is tested, and one
cannot distinguish what is being “replicated”. And then, of course, we have the “Creator”
aspect of God; if God is indeed the Creator of reality, then He need not make His works
replicable by mere scientists. Thus, the God concept is unavoidably ambiguous in both
spatial and temporal location, and no amount of scientific experimentation can overcome
this logical difficulty.

In short, while the God concept may be amenable to empirical confirmation, e.g. through
the discovery of vanishingly improbable leaps of biological evolution exceeding available
genetic information, it is by definition resistant to scientific verification. God, like
consciousness, is a predicate whose extended logical structure, including a supporting
conceptual framework, exceeds what science is presently equipped to analyze. This, of
course, means that arguments for or against God cannot be decided on empirical
grounds, all but precluding a working relationship between the scientific and religious
communities. Even the sincerest attempts to foster dialogue between the two camps are
obstructed by the unrealistic expectations of each regarding the ability of the other to
meet it on its own ground; whereas the obvious first step towards meaningful
communication is a basis for mutual understanding, no amount of encouragement or
monetary incentive can provide it for those whose languages stubbornly resist
translation. Since this describes the relationship between science and religion, the first
step toward reconciliation must be to provide a logical bridge between their internal
languages…a master language in which both languages are embedded. The CTMU,
conceived as the most general and comprehensive of logical languages, is designed to
serve as that bridge.
It has been written that God is dead. This might more accurately have been written
about faith. Mankind is creating an increasingly complex and mechanized world, and the
essence of complexity and mechanism is not faith, but logic. So the time for a logical
approach to theology is nigh. Accordingly, the CTMU does not begin with a preconceived
definition of God; rather, it determines within the extended logical structure of reality how
the properties most often attributed to God are logically related, reserving the title for the
relationship actually educed. In this way, it avoids the circular, faith-driven explanations
to which religion so often resorts, and at which science so often revolts. And meanwhile,
by eliminating the barrier between subjective and objective reality, it permits recognition
of the subjective dimension of the universe as a whole…the dimension by virtue of which
the universe can truly be described as “the Mind of God.”

7. The CTMU and Teleology

Historically, the Telic Principle can be understood as a logical analogue of teleology

incorporating John Archibald Wheeler’s Observer Participation Thesis (approximately,
“man participates in the ongoing quantum-scale creation of reality by observing it and
thereby collapsing the wavefunction representing its potential”). More directly, the Telic
Principle says that reality is a self-configuring entity that emerges from a background of
unbound potential as a protean recursive construct with a single imperative: self-
actualization. In other words, existence and its amplification is the tautological raison
d’être of the cosmos. The phrase “raison d’être” has a literal significance; in order to
exist, a self-contained universe must configure itself to recognize its own existence, and
to configure itself in this way it must, by default, generate and parameterize its own self-
configuration and self-recognition functions. This describes a situation in which the
universe generates its own generalized utility: to self-configure, the universe must have a
“self-actualization criterion” by which to select one of many possible structures or
“futures” for itself, and this criterion is a generalized analogue of human utility…its raison
d’être.

In addition to generalized utility and generalized volition (teleology), the universe also
possesses generalized cognition (coherent self-recognition). By any reasonable definition
of the term “mental”, this makes the universe mental in a generalized sense, where
“generalized” means that these attributes conform to general functional descriptions of
what humans do in the process of volition, cognition and mentation. The “coherent self-
recognition” feature of reality appears as an explicit feature of conspansive spacetime, a
model-theoretic dual of the expanding cosmos. Whereas the expanding cosmos is
simplistically depicted in terms of a model called ERSU, short for Expanding Rubber-Sheet
Universe, conspansive spacetime is depicted by a model-theoretic dual of ERSU called
USRE, short for the Universe as a Self-Representational Entity. While ERSU is a product
of Cartesian mind-matter dualism that effectively excludes mind in favor of matter, USRE,
which portrays the universe as a “self-simulation”, is a form of dual-aspect monism
according to which reality is distributively informational and cognitive in nature.

It is important to understand that the CTMU does not arbitrarily “project” human
attributes onto the cosmos; it permits the logical deduction of necessary general
attributes of reality, lets us identify any related human attributes derived from these
general attributes, and allows us to explain the latter in terms of the former. CTMU
cosmology is thus non-anthropomorphic. Rather, it uses an understanding of the
cosmological mediumof sentience to explain the mental attributes inherited by sentient
organisms from the cosmos in which they have arisen. Unlike mere anthropomorphic
reasoning, this is a logically correct description of human characteristics in terms of the
characteristics of the universe from which we derive our existence.

8. The CTMU and Consciousness Studies

Modern science seems to offer many intriguing clues about the nature of consciousness,
mainly involving the structure and dynamics of the brain. But for all its success and
sophistication, science is ill-equipped to turn these clues into an ultimate explanation of
consciousness or any other subjective property. Among the reasons are its empiricism,
which means that it prefers observation to introspection; its objectivism, which means
that it deliberately excludes “subjective contamination” from that which is observed; and
its physical reductionism, which means that it tries to account for all scientific
observations strictly in terms of matter and energy distributed in space and
time. Unfortunately, this perspective is innately opposed to the study of anything that is
subjective by nature, i.e., any property not directly observable except by the mind that
embodies it. In its zeal to eliminate “subjective contamination”, science unwittingly
discards the baby with the bath water.

As an example of the scientific perspective, consider the Turing Test, a version of which
says that the humanoid consciousness of a machine intelligence can only be tested by
letting it hold an anonymous conversation with a real human. If the human is fooled into
thinking that he is conversing with another human, then the machine is taken to possess
human consciousness. But in fact, all that such a machine has demonstrated are certain
objective effects usually associated with the property “consciousness”, but which may
have been mindlessly produced by a set of logical instructions executed by inanimate
hardware. The only thing that knows whether the machine is truly conscious is the
machine itself, and only if it is truly conscious at that. For its own part, science lacks the
conceptual apparatus to even make this distinction.

Unfortunately, philosophy – the mother of science – appears to have abdicated its

parental responsibility, failing to tell science how to enlarge its horizons to accommodate
subjective phenomena. The CTMU fills this breach, using advanced logic to expand our
conceptual framework in a way that permits the meaningful analysis of subjective
properties. It does this by enlarging and deepening the relationship between the most
fundamental ingredients of scientific analysis - ingredients like space, time, and object –
and developing the implications in a mathematical and scientific context. The
explanations that emerge not only possess an unprecedented degree of logical structure,
but are automatically integrated with science and compatible with all of its best insights.

9. The CTMU and Intelligent Design

Among the most exciting recent developments in science are complexity theory, the
theory of self-organizing systems, and the modern incarnation of Intelligent Design
Theory, which investigates the deep relationship between self-organization and
evolutionary biology in a scientific context not preemptively closed to theological
causation. Bucking the traditional physical reductionism of the hard sciences, complexity
theory has given rise to a new trend, informational reductionism, which holds that the
basis of reality is not matter and energy, but information. Unfortunately, this new form of
reductionism is as problematic as the old one. As mathematician David Berlinski writes
regarding the material and informational aspects of DNA: “We quite know what DNA is: it
is a macromolecule and so a material object. We quite know what it achieves: apparently
everything. Are the two sides of this equation in balance?” More generally, Berlinski
observes that since the information embodied in a string of DNA or protein cannot affect
the material dynamic of reality without being read by a material transducer, information is
meaningless without matter.

The relationship between physical and informational reductionism is a telling one, for it
directly mirrors Cartesian mind-matter dualism, the source of several centuries of
philosophical and scientific controversy regarding the nature of deep reality. As long as
matter and information remain separate, with specialists treating one as primary while
tacitly relegating the other to secondary status, dualism remains in effect. To this extent,
history is merely repeating itself; where mind and matter once vied with each other for
primary status, concrete matter now vies with abstract information abstractly
representing matter and its extended relationships. But while the abstractness of
information seems to make it a worthy compromise between mind and matter, Berlinski’s
comment demonstrates its inadequacy as a conceptual substitute. What is now required
is thus what has been required all along: a conceptual framework in which the relationship
between mind and matter, cognition and information, is made explicit. This framework
must not only permit the completion of the gradual ongoing dissolution of the Cartesian
mind-matter divider, but the construction of a footworthy logical bridge across the
resulting explanatory gap.

Mathematically, the theoretical framework of Intelligent Design consists of certain

definitive principles governing the application of complexity and probability to the analysis
of two key attributes of evolutionary phenomena, irreducible complexity and specified
complexity. On one hand, because the mathematics of probability must be causally
interpreted to be scientifically meaningful, and because probabilities are therefore
expressly relativized to specific causal scenarios, it is difficult to assign definite
probabilities to evolutionary states in any model not supporting the detailed
reconstruction and analysis of specific causal pathways. On the other hand, positing the
“absolute improbability” of an evolutionary state ultimately entails the specification of an
absolute (intrinsic global) model with respect to which absolute probabilistic deviations
can be determined. A little reflection suffices to inform us of some of its properties: it
must be rationally derivable from a priori principles and essentially tautological in nature,
it must on some level identify matter and information, and it must eliminate the
explanatory gap between the mental and physical aspects of reality. Furthermore, in
keeping with the name of that to be modeled, it must meaningfully incorporate
theintelligence and design concepts, describing the universe as an intelligently self-
designed, self-organizing system.

The CTMU is exactly the model required. It describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-
Processing Language, an ultimate kind of self-organizing, self-emergent system consisting
of "infocognitive" syntactic operators at once material and informational in nature. It is a
rationally-bootstrapped model-theoretic extension of logic that shares its tautological
structure, approximating an answer for Berlinski's question what brings a universe into
being? Owing to conspansion, a distributed evolutionary process by virtue of which the
universe can be described as a Universal Self-Representational Entity, it unites mind and
matter in a self-configuring, self-processing system endowed with a species of coherence
substantiating its possession of higher-order sentience. And last but not least, it puts
everything under the control of a logical analogue of teleology called the Telic Principle,
conspansively adjoining to the laws of physics an "extended superposition principle" that
provides irreducible and specified complexity with a mechanism they would otherwise
have continued to lack.

10. Summary: The Bottom Line

To summarize, the CTMU is a theory of reality-as-mind, in principle spanning all of science

while permitting a logical analysis of consciousness and other subjective predicates (this
does not mean that it has “solved all of the problems” of science and the philosophy of
mind, but only that it has laid the preliminary groundwork). It provides the logical
framework of a TOE, yielding an enhanced model of spacetime affording preliminary
explanations of cosmogony, accelerating cosmic expansion, quantum nonlocality, the
arrow of time, and other physical and cosmological riddles that cannot be satisfactorily
explained by other means. The CTMU penetrates the foundations of mathematics,
describing the syntactic relationships among various problematic mathematical concepts
in a reality-theoretic context. It is the culmination of the modern logico-linguistic
philosophical tradition, reuniting the estranged couple consisting of (rationalistic)
philosophy and (empirical) science. It provides an indispensable logical setting
for Intelligent Design. And perhaps most importantly, the CTMU enables a logical
description of God and an unprecedented logical treatment of theology, comprising a
metaphysical framework in which to unite people of differing faiths and resolve religious
conflicts.

© 1998 - 2000 by Christopher Michael Langan (All Rights Reserved)