This weeks interview is part 1 of a 4 part interview with Tom Campbell, physicist and author of My BIG TOE. Tom says that we’re living in a virtual reality and we wanted to explore the implications of his theory. There are several ways to take in the interview – Video, Audio or Text… take your pick, you’ll find them all below… enjoy.

The following is a partial transcript of the interview for those who like to read:

What is the nature of reality?

It’s a computed reality, just like the Sims are computed or World of Warcraft is computed. These are all virtual reality games and all virtual reality works in a similar way. A virtual reality cannot compute itself. That means the computer cannot be inside the virtual reality. The elf in world of Warcraft will not look under a rock and find the computer that’s computing his reality. So the computer has to be in some other reality frame that isn’t in the same reality system and the same goes for the elf’s consciousness. We call the elf’s consciousness the player, the person playing the game makes all the decisions for the elf. That means that the consciousness also has to be non-physical and in another reality frame from the elf. Consciousness is in a conversation with the computer the same as if you’re the player who is playing world of Warcraft you’re in a conversation with the computer and exchanging data with the computer. That’s the way our reality works.

Our bodies are avatars, we have consciousness but that consciousness exists in a non-physical reality frame to us and the computer is in a non-physical reality frame to us and consciousness and the computer have to be in the same reality frame because they’re constantly exchanging data and you can’t do that unless you’re in the same reality frame. So that s why I end up with a virtual reality, because I studied consciousness a long time and found out that consciousness was fundamental, and the physical reality was not and the only thing that made sense was that the physical is information based, which means computed, which means virtual…

Listen to the Audio of this show:

Do you have any theory as to the true nature of consciousness?

Consciousness is an information system – what we are conscious of is just information – data that we get through our senses that creates a reality. I have some conjecture about how it started but because we’re consciousness, we can’t get outside of consciousness to see how it started. Just like the elf in world of Warcraft can’t know the true nature of the player because they’re outside of the system. Just like you weren’t in the operating room to see how you were born because you weren’t born yet. So anything that we can say about it is conjecture. I like to admit my ignorance and say I just don’t know. You need to learn to live gracefully with uncertainty.

Can you explain your view of the virtual reality system and consciousness?

I’ve come up with several metaphors about consciousness, but I caution you that they are metaphors. My theory is a logical theory and in order to talk about it we have to give things names and functions. So, the fact that I talk about the larger consciousness system is an information system, that’s a metaphor. Then I talk about the individuated unit of consciousness (IUOC) – that is a piece of the larger consciousness system. The IUOC partitions of a piece of itself that then logs on to the avatar to play a human in this virtual reality – that’s the free will awareness unit (FWAU). The IUOC has the logical function of accumulating all of the experience because our purpose here is to grow up and become love – because that’s how you optimize low entropy or higher evolved consciousness. So, you and I are individuated Unit’s of Consciousness or FWAU’s and so we are the accumulation function, you have to have many life experiences in order to learn, grow up and become love, it’s not an easy thing to learn. So, you have to have more than one experience packet – what other people might call incarnations. I tried to avoid many of these terms that other people use that have emotional baggage so that people could look at these ideas without prejudice. Learning is cumulative – and because learning is necessary to evolve consciousness, you have to have more than one experience packet…

Is our purpose here to help the system evolve by learning?

Consciousness is a social system, the individuated units of consciousness all have free will so it is a system of individuals with free will, and it had to learn that the optimal way to configure a system with free will is through caring and kindness and love and cooperation… that enables the maximum ways to organize.  The opposite of that is fear, instead of moving toward love if we move toward fear we are de-evolving. Fear is a high entropy thing – with fear there is no trust, without trust you can’t build social structures. What happens in a fear-based organization is that because there’s fear that individuals will take what you have, individuals in a fear-based organization tend to band together into little self protection groups so they’re tougher to take things from and pretty soon those groups are warring with each other, so they can get each others stuff because it’s about what you can take and what you can keep. When that get’s stable you end up with 5% of the individuals owning 95% of the resources and there’s a lot of hierarchy and at the bottom you have the peasants… that sounds like where we live – it’s a fear-based reality. That is very sub-optimal as far as creating optimal meaning – the optimal situation is through love, caring and co-operation…

Why would something create a virtual reality system in the first place?

Consciousness trades information, it’s an information system so what IUOC’s do is communicate with each other, but if there are no consequences – it’s like 100,000 people in a chat room with no rules- it’s kinda hard to grow up under those conditions – it really doesn’t matter what you say or what you do because there are no consequences. So, it was really hard to grow up and become love where there were few consequences. So, this virtual reality was made where there was a much tighter rule set – there were a lot more rules that you had to abide by. It’s the rules that make the game – the more rules you have the more complex the game is, the more complex the game is the more strategy you have to have. So, we have a rule set and IUOC’s can log on and make choices that are meaningful, choices that have consequences that you can learn from – moral choices, caring choices or fear choices and domination choices and they learn from the result of that…

What happens when you try to pursue the path of love and life still isn’t easy. When you really endeavor to be a decent person but you’re still not happy?

You’ll often see people who are trying to live a spiritual path and it doesn’t seem like they’re growing, it’s just not working for them, they’re still unhappy, they’re still struggling, yet they’ve been trying to walk the talk. The problem is that they are working at the intellectual level – they are doing things because they think they should, because it makes sense – that’s doing it at the intellectual level. So, you say – being kind sounds like a good thing, so you try to be kind. You see an old lady walking across the street and you want to be kind, so you go help. All of that is intellectual, you’re acting, you’re doing things you think you should do because they sound like good ideas but the difference is you need to be kind, not just act kind, so mostly people on a spiritual journey use their minds to decide what’s the right thing to do and why it’s the right thing to do but when you change yourself, when you actually grow up it’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about being the right person. When you see the old lady you don’t think, I should go help her because I’m a nice person, you don’t think about it at all, there is no analysis needed you just see her and go help, it’s just part of who you are, not who you think you aught to be…

How do you BE kind, rather than just ACT kind?

Being requires a change in you, you get rid of the fear. That doesn’t mean you learn to supress the fear and learn to act better. When you get upset about something – for instance someone says something negative about you and you get upset about that, that’s fear. There is a fear in there of being inadequate, or not being liked or something that creates that anger. I’m not talking about grit your teeth and smile and don’t get angry, I’m not even talking about don’t grit your teeth but just smile and don’t get angry, all that’s acting better – that doesn’t help you grow up. It has to be real so that when that person says that nasty thing in front of people you know, you don’t get upset about it, it just doesn’t matter…

When so many people in the world started off with difficult early lives, where they’ve been conditioned to feel fear through abuse or neglect, etc, how do they release the fears?

Releasing fear is a lot harder to do than it is to say. There are a couple of ways that I can suggest that you go about it. One is that most people are not even aware of their fears, they’re up to their eyebrows in fear and most of their choices are made from fear but they have no idea what these fears are. Beliefs are also hard to see, because we see them as facts, they are just true – that’s the nature of beliefs. The one thing you can see is ego, ego is any negative feeling you have. If you feel angry, upset, annoyed, stressed, unfulfilled – any of a long list of negative things, that’s ego. The ego is a product of fear – if you didn’t have fear you wouldn’t have ego or many beliefs. So if you feel upset, somebody said something rude to you and it upsets you – if you look at why you’re upset, if you take responsibility for being upset… you don’t say “I’m upset because George said something rude”. You recognize that you’re upset because you chose to be upset. You say, okay some fear made me angry as a reaction to what George said. A lot of the fears we have come from childhood. Then we find a fear of not being lovable, or appreciated, or inadequate etc. and George just triggered it. When you get rid of that fear then George can say that thing and it doesn’t matter. You can deal with it instead of throwing gasoline on that fire, which is what you do when you’re coming from ego. So that’s how you can find the fear it’s any time you have a negative emotion…

Would sadness be ego as well?

It can be – sadness can be self pity and that’s nothing but ego. On the other hand, you can be nothing but love and you can see that a lot of people that you care about hurt themselves, and it makes you sad. Because it’s so unnecessary. But you have to let people be who they are, you can’t go in and tell people “okay, I’m going to help you people”, that just makes them feel worse, so you have to let people be on their own path and grow up how ever they do. You can help them though, by giving them an environment in which they feel stronger, they feel empowered to make choices. information system, evolution and the reason we are here is to become love. That’s all a logical process. It’s nice because it tells us what we’re here for and why someone would make a virtual reality in the first place.

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