CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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| Quote (dvunkannon @ April 14 2011,15:51) | Chris Langan, ISCID fellow, autodidact, smartest guy in the US, etc., has shown up on Mark Chu-Carroll's Good Math, Bad Math. Hilarity hath ensued.
http://scientopia.org/blogs....re-1323
I think VJTorley was enamored of Langan's CMTU at one time. It has definitely been mentioned before on UD. |
Chris Langan entered the world of UD from stage right a couple of years ago and Dembski absolutely fell in love with him. As this excerpt from your cite shows, Chris can sling obfuscation with the best of them and this is always the best way to Dembski's heart: | Quote | | When theorizing about an all-inclusive reality, the first and most important principle is containment, which simply tells us what we should and should not be considering. Containment principles, already well known in cosmology, generally take the form of tautologies; e.g., "The physical universe contains all and only that which is physical." The predicate "physical", like all predicates, here corresponds to a structured set, "the physical universe" (because the universe has structure and contains objects, it is a structured set). But this usage of tautology is somewhat loose, for it technically amounts to a predicate-logical equivalent of propositional tautology called autology, meaning self-description. Specifically, the predicate physical is being defined on topological containment in the physical universe, which is tacitly defined on and descriptively contained in the predicate physical, so that the self-definition of "physical" is a two-step operation involving both topological and descriptive containment. While this principle, which we might regard as a statement of "physicalism", is often confused with materialism on the grounds that "physical" equals "material", the material may in fact be only a part of what makes up the physical. Similarly, the physical may only be a part of what makes up the real. Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone. |
I'm sure you can see how this would stimulate all of Dembski's erectile tissues. Plus, Popular Science billed him as the Smartest Man in the World. For a while there, we actually thought they might get married.
For a couple of months it was all Chris all of the time both on UD and on ARN. Then I think the BS got so thick even Dembski started to sense that something was vaguely wrong.
I called Dembski about it on ARN, pointing out the obvious fact that Chris Langan was full of shit up to his eyebrows. Dembski got all defensive/enraged. Then Chris made some even stupider remarks and his girlfriend, Gena Lolla-somebody came on and made some even dumber remarks. Then the two of them started fighting the entire world, including ID and then they both got banned from ARN and I lost interest.
Last I heard, Chris and Gena were living happily on a horse ranch somewhere and more power to them. At least the BS will shoot right past the horses, who have a notoriously low comprehension of things philosophical.
Interestingly, I ran into a reference to Chris Langan in a book a few months ago, giving some of his background and using him as an example of someone whose emotional problems screwed him out of the big time.
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