An Email on the Fence
I was just about to send this email, but I'm holding back just to be considerate. Academics are easily scared off, and I might be in a pretty scary mood.
Many readers are familiar with Foundations of Mind, a research group to which I belong. Sean O’Nuallain, the distinguished cognitive and computer scientist who founded the group, is apparently planning a conference to which various academics have been invited. The subject will be the work of Sean’s mentor Walter Freeman III, and especially his thoughts regarding quantum field theory and symmetry breaking as they relate to consciousness and cognition.
Glancing at Sean’s email distribution, I found the names of various people not currently members of the group. They include a few relatively well-known thinkers. One of the names is Federico Faggin, one of three men credited with designing the first commercial microprocessor. Federico reportedly accomplished this feat while employed as an engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor circa 1968-1971.
Now ~84 years old, Faggin has come up with what he seems to think is a “new” theory of metaphysics for which he seems to be claiming exclusive credit. However, first- and third-party descriptions of this theory look very much like the CTMU. These include a description published by an organization, the Essentia Foundation, promoting Faggin’s “innovation” in order to contrast it with its own allegedly even better theory. Like Federico’s theory, it seems to be an attempted CTMU knock-off reminiscent of an all-inclusive New Age catchall or two. CTMU lookalikes are sprouting like weeds, and already the weeds are splitting hairs to see which CTMU knock-off should take the prize!
In 2023, as part of his 2021 book Silicon, Faggin wrote an essay on “The primordial quantum language”. It seems he had realized that the universe consists of a universal substance he decided to name “nousym”, a portmanteau of nous (Greek for “higher mind”) and symbol. “Nousym is a holistic and dynamic substance with extraordinary properties,” wrote Faggin. “It is the ‘stuff’ that manifests in our classical world as the matter-energy of physics. Like Russian dolls, there are virtual realities inside virtual realities, but it is nousym that contains your conscious experiences of all those dolls and the quantum information out of which all those dolls are physically made.”
As all of us know who know anything about the CTMU, it has spent its entire life as a language of classical and quantum reality based on telic monism, which says that the universe consists of a universal protean “metasubstance” accounting for not only the composition of reality, but also the properties of reality including both mind and physical phenomena. The CTMU names and supports these properties from the ground up and the top down as no other theory could possibly do. Yet here I stand, out in the cold with my nose pressed against the Acadummies-R-Us shop window like a Good-Will-Hunting version of Oliver Twist!
Every time I write something, I now have to talk myself into releasing it. This owes to my well-founded suspicion that all I’m doing is rewarding plagiarists with ideas for which to falsely take credit. This is the inevitable result when creepy vampiric billionaires and agency spooks, in their efforts to sculpt the information landscape, make it impossible for their competition to be heard or credited. If you’re relatively mediocre, then you’re safe; if you’re not worth their trouble, they won’t slam the gate on you. Plenty of other mediocrities would be saying what you’re saying anyway.
But if you have anything of real value upstairs, then you must either chain yourself to the control grid or be roasted on it and anonymously served up to any billionaire or trillionaire wannabe who wants a piece.
It’s all about “social justice”, you see. Spreading the wealth.