‘World’s Smartest Man’ with 210 IQ On What Happens After Death

Christopher Michael Langan, known for scoring highly on an IQ test that gained him entry to a high IQ society, and for being formerly listed in the Guinness Book of Records high IQ section under the pseudonym of Eric Hart, alongside Marilyn vos Savant and Keith Raniere.

The record was discontinued in 1990, as high IQs are considered too unreliable to document as world records. Langan was later a subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), in which the journalist sought to understand why Langan’s high IQ had not led to greater success in life. The book compared him with Robert Oppenheimer, and focused on their respective environments.

Langan attended high school, but spent his last years engaged mostly in independent study. He did so after his teachers denied his request for more challenging material. According to Langan, he began teaching himself “advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin, and Greek”. He earned a perfect score on the SAT despite taking a nap during the test.

Langan has spent many years working on a hypothesis that reality is a self simulation. He calls the theory the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU).

The “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe” which he maintains “explains the connection between mind and reality, therefore the presence of cognition and universe in the same phrase”. He self-published a book on this theory in 2002.

He refers to this thesis as “a true ‘theory of everything’, a cross between John Archibald Wheeler’s ‘Participatory Universe’ and Stephen Hawking’s ‘Imaginary Time’ theory of cosmology,” additionally contending that with the CTMU he “can prove the existence of god, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics.”

Langan’s thesis is a form of ontological idealism, and a particular form of idealism known as panpsychism. It is a synthesis of three ideas:

1. reality is made of information in the form of language: a syntactic grammar that exists in and of itself;
2. reality is transtemporal: things from one time can influence things in other times; and
3. reality, being a self simulation, contains a substrate of this information, a panconsciousness that emerges from within – that is, from the creator or simulator itself.

He believes that when we die, we transition from one form of being to another within the computational structure of reality, meaning the consciousness, or ‘soul,’ moves to another dimension or plane of existence we cannot access while alive.

It’s not clear what that new dimension would look like, or what happens to the ‘soul’ once it arrives there. But Langan believes traditional views of heaven and hell are too simplistic, whereas his theory posits a transition to an entirely new state of being.

According to Langan, death does not mean that you cease to exist, but that our consciousness moves out of what we know as our world and towards the origin of reality, which isn’t the afterlife.

He discussed the concept of ‘death’ during an appearance on the Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal podcast.

“You can be provided with a substitute body, another kind of terminal body that allows you to keep on existing. Once you transition to this new plane of exitance, you might not even remember who you were before”, Langan said.

“You can have – these memories can be – nothing goes out of existence in the math. Your memories can always be pulled back out, but there’s no reason to do that usually. Why cling to memories of a world in which you are no longer instantiated? So, there are certain automatic psychological things that happen on death, at the moment of death.”

After you die, you’ll be in a state of meditation or something that looks similar.

He added: “Now you’re basically meditating, seeing everything change. However, you exist that way right now.”

“Arguably, all of your lifetimes, if you were to be reincarnated again and again and again, all of those reincarnations are meta-simultaneous. There is a sense in which they all occur at once in the non-terminal domain.”

But this state of being is not the afterlife. It’s more like existing inside a supercomputer where everything is around you, but nothing is occurring at the same time.

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The afterlife is something else entirely. It involves a profound shift in our entire being, moving the ‘soul’ or consciousness beyond the physical or mental self.

So, death isn’t really the end, according to Langan.

Death is “the termination of your relationship with your particular physical body that you have at this present time. When you are retracted from this reality, you go back up toward the origin of reality,” he says.