This is part of a recent email distribution consisting of over 50 recipients, many of them illustrious and/or notorious. Two such recipients are Roger Penrose (illustrious), the venerable mathematical physicist who along with two others won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics, and David Chalmers (notorious), academic pundit famous for an article he once wrote on the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (rewarmed/relabeled Cartesian dualism). Also present: Stuart Hameroff, who with Penrose authored the Orch-OR theory of consciousness, Jack Sarfatti, who has a theory called “PQM” (Post-Quantum Mechanics) which posits that the Bohmian “pilot field” is actually a “mind field”, Jack’s part-time employee “PZ”, and Sean O’Nuallain, computer scientist and cognitive theorist who leads the groups Foundations of Mind and Bionoetics.

Basically, the point I’m trying to make here is that the generic/global problem of consciousness has been solved, in print, in an academic journal. And when I write "solved", I mean solved in a way and to an extent that could not have been duplicated by anyone in academia, and has now been empirically observed not to have been duplicated by anyone in academia for the last several decades.

Sean: "I am not naive enough to expect Stewart [Hameroff] to be interested in fact but nevertheless. Geometries are not susceptible to the arguments on the basis of Goedel incompleteness and inconsistency. That requires systems at least at the level of formal arithmetic which does not include geometries. That has been one of the smoking guns in the Penrose system for some time. He requires incompleteness and inconsistency to motivate the necessity for consciousness but geometries do not give that."

CML: Sean wrote:

“These arguments require a formal system at least at the level of the standard arithmetic which geometries do not attain.”

Good grief. What they require is the logico-geometric CTMU Metaformal System (Langan, 2002/2018, most recently in the FoM/Bionoetics Journal).

I started publishing in the same year that Roger Penrose came out with The Emperor's New Mind. The difference between Roger's situation and mine is simply that he has academic cred that won't quit, he works at Cambridge, and he was never falsely pigeonholed as an "Intelligent Design Creationist". In contrast, all I had was a little network publicity as "the Smartest Man in America / the World", which turned out to be nothing by comparison (IQ had already fallen out of fashion).

Chris Langan's Ultimate Reality

The CTMU and Consciousness