Thomas Campbell and the Fundamental Nature of Consciousness

One of the most influential audiobooks (three of them, actually) I’ve listened to recently is Thomas Campbell’s My Big TOE trilogy. It has my strongest recommendation, but I understand (becuase of the ideas presented in the book) how my appreciation and understanding of quality is specific to my own consciousness and may not be shared by others. Maybe for people to really understand the methodical, analytical, and experimentation process he went through for over thirty years to come to his conclusions, they have to be at a place of low entropy to begin with. This interview covers just some of the topics in his books, and hopefully it gives a glimpse as to why consciousness may be fundamental to the universe, and we may be living in a consciousness training simulator. What happens is less important than how you respond to it.

Listening to this, I was reminded how we each have our own reality constructed in our minds. This paradigm argues there is no “out there” real physical matter reality any more than the avatars in a video game live in a “real” physical world. To them, it just seems “real” and physical because there are programmed laws and rules for how that world works (can’t walk through walls or fly, unless the game allows it).

This morning I was looking at various reporting and meta study summaries on the effectiveness of masks during this pandemic, and finding various conflicting viewpoints. Same goes for getting or not getting a vaccine. Both groups think they are doing others a favor (protecting their health or protecting their freedom) by the stance they take. This conflict (can they both be right?) was somewhat resolved in my own mind as I listened to this and remembered that each person is filtering information through their consciousness and experience and rebroadcasting new information out around them. I imagined an actor walking around for a movie with a camera strapped to their chest, but not pointing at their face for an action scene (as some movies have done), but projecting outward as a similar “camera angle” colored beam of visual field defining their own reality perception. I imagined sound cones extending out form their ears as well. I visualized seeing a human from above and watching them like a video game avatar moving around, looking this way and that, and seeing their ear cones and visual fields projecting and moving as they did. Each field is a unique color and as many people come together their individual colors fade together to create new information which is received, processed, and projected out again, slightly updating the unique color of the individuated unit of consciousness.

It’s easy to think “Some people are crazy stupid! How could they think X or Y or Z?!?” until you realize they are actually living in a different reality than you are. The constructed game we’re in is individuated and perceived per player. Everything is a probability wave form that can collapse (or not) based on the conscious observation. Some things have very little probability of being perceived differently between two individuated units of consciousness so there is little choice and therefore little opportunity for an increase in complexity of information (evolution of consciousness). Many things, and some would argue the most important things, have a lot of subjectivity and room for quality analysis within them. They are presented differently to different people based on their own filters or their entropy of consciousness.

If you’re looking for a more concrete entry point to all this, check out the delayed quantum eraser experiment (delayed quantum entangled double split experiment). To remain a hard determinism materialist in the presence of these facts is, to me, a bit lazy. You can stay in the “Well that’s just weird and maybe someday we’ll understand what’s going on there” camp or you can engage with the work of people like Campbell and others who have been studying this stuff scientifically using first principles for many decades.