Christopher Michael Langan

Christopher Michael Langan is a noted independent researcher and reality theorist whose extraordinary intellect has not prevented him from living a rough, unsheltered, and exciting life. He is best known for his ground-breaking theory of reality, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), developed in the 1980s and explicated over the last 40 years in a series of articles, essays, peer-reviewed research papers, and books. The CTMU is the first “Self-simulation” theory of reality, a reflexive, tautological, and profoundly self-contained intrinsic language through which reality exists and evolves by “talking to itself about itself”, thus serving as its own theory, universe, and model. Combining physics, metaphysics, and biology in a tight, elegant, and unique logico-semiotic structure called the Metaformal System, the CTMU provides a long-sought bridge between mind and matter, science and spirituality, and the internal and external aspects of human and cosmic existence.

Challenged from early childhood by extreme poverty and inadequate schooling, Chris learned young to value brawn as highly as brains. After working as a cowboy, firefighter, construction worker, and bar bouncer in various nightclubs throughout the New York metropolitan area, he came to the attention of the media in 1999 for combining one of the world’s highest IQs with limited formal education and a bare-knuckle lifestyle. Having conducted original investigations in fields including logic, mathematics, physics, cosmology, biology, philosophy, language theory, theology, economics, and the cognitive sciences, he has contributed articles on such topics to a number of scholarly journals and alternative intellectual periodicals. Some of these have been collected into books, starting with The Art of Knowing in 2002. In 2017, he began publishing a series of papers that have changed the landscape of science and philosophy. The most recent, The Reality Self-Simulation Principle: Reality is a Self-Simulation, was published in 2020 in the peer-reviewed journal, Cosmos & History.