Christopher Langan

Christopher Michael Langan (born 1957?) is an individual with an estimated IQ of 195 (O'Connell, 2001; Sager, 1999). Pictured. With only a small amount of college, Langan has held a variety of labor-intensive odd jobs including construction worker, cowboy, firefighter, farmhand, and perhaps most famously, bar bouncer. Accordingly, he has sometimes been stereotyped as the sort of individual who combines an extremely high IQ with little or no official recognition in the academic "real world" of intellectual commerce (O'Connell, 2001). Langan currently owns and operates a horse ranch in northern Missouri.

In 2001 Langan was featured in Popular Science magazine, where he discussed his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" (CTMU), a reality theory which describes the intrinsic unfolding of a self-descriptive, self-modeling cosmos. Observing that theories and inferences, including inductively-derived laws of nature, are bound together in a more general relationship between mind and reality, Langan explores the implications of this relationship in various contexts including physics and cosmology, biological origins and evolution, psychology, ethics, and theology. Langan's ideas on physical and biological causality were recently explicated in Chapter 13 of "Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing", a collection of essays published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Langan is a cofounder of the Mega Foundation, a nonprofit organization which nurtures the severely gifted by providing an alternative to orthodox academic fora, thereby encouraging serious intellectual discourse among intelligent people regardless of academic credentials and affiliations[1].

Langan is also a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, an interdisciplinary professional society that "investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism" [2].

See Also

• Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe
• Mega Foundation
• Metaphysics

References

• McFadden, Cynthia. (December 9, 1999). "The Smart Guy". 20/20.
• O'Connell, J. (May, 2001) Mister Universe. Muscle & Fitness magazine.
• Quain, John R. (October 14, 2001). "Wise Guy". Popular Science.
• Sager, M. (November, 1999) The Smartest Man in America. Esquire magazine.

External links

• Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe
• Popular Science article (Interview) (PDF)
• Popular Science article (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe) (PDF)
• The Art Of Knowing: Expositions on Free Will and Selected Essays by Christopher Michael Langan
• Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
• Paper in Progress in Complexity, Information and Design (PDF)
• The State of the HIQ World: Genius versus Academia — Christopher Langan postulates that academia is not necessarily the natural setting for genius