Many people outside of academic philosophy have written up some kind of philosophical system or theory of everything (e.g. see vixra and philpapers). And many of those works would, I think, sustain at least this amount of analysis.
So the meta-question is, what makes such a work worth reading? Many such works boil down to a list of the author’s opinions on a smorgasbord of topics, with none of the individual opinions actually being original.
Does Langan have any ideas that have not appeared before?
I paid attention to this mainly because other people wanted me to, but the high IQ thing also draws some attention. I’ve seen ideas like “theory of cognitive processes should be integrated into philosophy of science” elsewhere (and have advocated such ideas myself), “syndiffeonesis” seems like an original term (although some versions of it appear in type theory), “conspansion” seems pretty Deleuzian, UBT is Spinozan, “telic recursion” is maybe original but highly underspecified… I think what I found useful about it is that it had a lot of these ideas, at least some of which are good, and different takes on/explanations of them than I’ve found elsewhere even when the ideas themselves aren’t original.
I’ve spent 40+ hours talking with Chris directly, and for me, a huge part of the value also comes from seeing how Chris synthesizes all these ideas into what appears to be a coherent framework.
Many people outside of academic philosophy have written up some kind of philosophical system or theory of everything (e.g. see vixra and philpapers). And many of those works would, I think, sustain at least this amount of analysis.
So the meta-question is, what makes such a work worth reading? Many such works boil down to a list of the author’s opinions on a smorgasbord of topics, with none of the individual opinions actually being original.
Does Langan have any ideas that have not appeared before?
I paid attention to this mainly because other people wanted me to, but the high IQ thing also draws some attention. I’ve seen ideas like “theory of cognitive processes should be integrated into philosophy of science” elsewhere (and have advocated such ideas myself), “syndiffeonesis” seems like an original term (although some versions of it appear in type theory), “conspansion” seems pretty Deleuzian, UBT is Spinozan, “telic recursion” is maybe original but highly underspecified… I think what I found useful about it is that it had a lot of these ideas, at least some of which are good, and different takes on/explanations of them than I’ve found elsewhere even when the ideas themselves aren’t original.
I’ve spent 40+ hours talking with Chris directly, and for me, a huge part of the value also comes from seeing how Chris synthesizes all these ideas into what appears to be a coherent framework.