We Live in a Virtual Reality! Tom Campbell Explains His TOE

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Curt Jaimungal
Main episode with Tom Campbell (Dec 2020): https://youtu.be/kko-hVA-8IU?list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlN6E8KrxcYCW...
Video Transcript:
Once you get that basic concept that we are  consciousness, we are playing a character. Just like you would play an elf in World  of Warcraft, you're playing a character. That character is your physical body.
That's the avatar, your consciousness. Now from that avatar's viewpoint,  the player is non-physical. And the computer is non-physical.
It is a video game, right? It's a virtual reality, a video game. So you're the consciousness.
You are non-physical relative to the viewpoint  inside of the virtual reality, which is your body. So your consciousness is a non-physical thing. But it's really who you are.
That consciousness is the player. That consciousness is making  all the choices for that avatar. If the consciousness doesn't give that avatar,  doesn't make any choices, the avatar just sits there.
I mean, think of your elf that you're playing. If you don't hit a key or move a mouse, you  don't give it any instructions, it just sits there and wobbles. It doesn't do anything.
Well, so all the choices, all the memory,  all the thoughts, all the processing goes on in consciousness. Not in the brain. There really is no brain.
The brain is not even rendered unless somebody opens  a skull and has to look at it. It's just a virtual reality. So see yourself as consciousness, and you make all the decisions, you're making all the choices, and you are not in that virtual reality.
So you are in NPMR. You're non-physical to that  physical matter reality. It's just a virtual reality,  just like World of Warcraft.
It's a game. It's an entity reduction trainer. What happens when there's brain damage, which  seems to occur in physical matter reality?
Right. Exactly. When there's brain damage, what happens is,  remember, this virtual reality evolved according to a rule set.
Right? It's an evolved thing. All right.
So the way the stuff is in that virtual  reality is because of the rule set. The rule set says that we can't flap  our arms and fly, so we can't do that. It's the physics, chemistry, biology.
That's the rule set. All right. So now, here you are, and your avatar gets brain damage.
Somebody hits him on the head with an iron pipe. Now, the rule set says that that's going to  change the constraints on what that system can do. Same with your elf.
If your elf that you're playing in World of  Warcraft falls off a high cliff, and hits the rocks at the bottom, it's going to be damaged. It's going to lose hit points. It's going to have to go someplace and  rest, or eat, or do something else.
It damages it. And now the player has to play with constraints. So you have brain damage.
You're the consciousness. You now have to play an avatar that has  constraints according to the rule set. Okay.
The rule set tells you what the constraints are. Okay. So let's say, I'm going to disembody this  and make some sort of visual metaphor, okay?
So your consciousness is up here, and somehow  it's tapping into a video game that's down here, and it's playing,  and I know what I'm saying. It's just logged on, just like any video game. Right, right, right.
Now, these two have a fight down here. One of them is represented by you, and maybe one is represented by someone else. Okay.
That somehow affects what this guy feels,  because the rule set says, what happens down here affects how you feel. Am I correct so far, or is this off? No, yeah.
All the feelings are in the consciousness. Exactly. Okay.
Now, what makes this consciousness you, because  the way that I'm understanding an identity, which is such a slippery concept, if you examine  it, it's not a well-defined concept to begin with, but let's imagine it is, which is difficult,  but what defines you is something like you have a personality, you have a certain  viewpoint, you have your choices, and so on. But if those can be affected by  what's physical, what's PMR, right, with brain damage or augmentations, then that's affecting the you, which is up here, which I mentioned. It's just constraining you.
So let's say you have brain damage, and now  you can't remember, and you slur your words, and you drag your left foot. Okay. Now, you're the consciousness, and  that's what's happened to your avatar.
Your avatar fell off a cliff  and hit his head on a rock. So now you have to play a character that  slurs its words, can't remember, and whatever. You are limited by what the rule  set says your avatar can do.
So you have a computer, remember? The computer is computing this. Now you're getting a data stream from that  computer, and you're interpreting that data as what's going on in that virtual reality.
So now the computer says that you can't get up and dance, because you're dragging your left foot. You can't go give a speech,  because you're slurring your words. So if you say, well, I'd like to go  give a speech now, you can't get that.
The computer isn't going to draw that in that  reality, because the rule set says, no, you can't do that. Just like if you're playing an elf, and you say, oh, my elf's in a tight situation. Elf, flap your arms and fly.
And what'll happen? Nothing. It won't do that, because the rule set in  World of Warcraft won't let your elf flap his arms and fly.
So you might want to do something as consciousness. But so you have the constraints that you have to work with as consciousness. Now you're the consciousness.
You're making the choices. And you have all the feelings. Part of consciousness is the feeling part.
It's the emotional part. So you're the one that feels the emotions. You're the one that feels the pain.
You're the one that's tongue feels  too fat to get in your mouth. All that's part of what you  interpret the data to be. Remember, you are getting the data that is all  the sense data that this avatar is getting.
It's just like in World of Warcraft,  it's just basically visual and sound. When you do this virtual reality, it's visual  sound and feeling, it's touch, it's smell, it's everything. Okay.
I guess here's my confusion. And I think this metaphor somewhat rectifies it in World of Warcraft. Let's just choose that in World of Warcraft, you have an avatar and you have hit points and so on.
You have a certain set of attributes. Okay. Then what you're saying is it would be a mistake  to identify the you as the avatar rather than the player.
Is that true? Absolutely. So then what's left of the individual once you've scrapped the inclinations  and the set of emotions and the personality?
What's left? Why would that be me?  Why should I identify with that?
Like I'm just being devil's advocate. Well, let me see if I can answer your question this way. So you're a piece of consciousness, and you're going to log on to this avatar.
And you're going to log on to that avatar when that avatar is very, very  young, maybe even before it's born. So, you know, it depends. When there's enough data coming in for you to experience, that's when you'd probably log on.
So you log on, and because you don't come with any history, all of your intellectual  part doesn't come with you. The only thing that comes with you is the  quality you've earned, the amount of entropy that you've reduced up to this point. So I call that quality of consciousness.
That comes with you. And now you're logged on, just as quality of consciousness is logged on to this avatar. And all of the sense data that you begin to get, maybe in utero, maybe being born, maybe  right afterwards, all that sense data, you define that as you, because that's the only  intellectual information that you've gotten.
In other words, that's it. You didn't come with any memory, like, okay, I'm really sitting in my  computer, and it's time for lunch. I'm going to put this game on  hold and go have a sandwich.
It's not like that. You're 100% involved in that player. And everything that that avatar has  done, you feel like you have done.
Because the only data you're getting, defining  reality, is the data the computer is sending you, describing what that avatar is sensing. Now, you have the emotions. You have the feelings.
The avatar is just some eye candy for you to look at so that you can  see the interactions and see what's going on. It's how you interpret the  game map and the players. So you get that data.
That's the data you have. That's how you interpret it. And you learn to interpret it as that infant.
You learn to tell the difference  between a house and your mother. You just learn that through your experience. So here you are, this piece of consciousness, and you learn the difference between mom and an  apple and dad and the car and all these things.
As you grow up, you start building language and  vocabulary and ideas and beliefs and things. So that's your world as consciousness. It's not like you have something else going on.
You're just this piece of consciousness  that's wholly 100% logged on, and you didn't come with any intellectual part. Now, in my model, I call that a free will awareness unit. It's a subset of the individuated unit of consciousness.
So the individuated unit of consciousness just takes a subset of itself and  just its quality and logs on to this game to get the data for that character. So what you are really is an individuated unit of consciousness who has logged on a piece of itself. You put a partition down to that piece of itself, and you log that on to this virtual reality game.
You see, that's the way you should kind of look at the structure. So, yes. Let me see if I can explain it back to you  so you know if I actually understand it.
Okay. I'm just imagining some orb. Okay.
That's just the way my visual systems work. Okay. So I'm imagining an orb over a landscape, and this landscape, the orb can shoot out one of  its tendrils, and then that's the equivalent of logging on.
Okay. And the orb represents consciousness. The orb represents me in some way.
But this orb right now doesn't have  feelings because it's not logged on. I don't know if that's actually  true, but in my metaphor. Okay.
So right now it has no sense data. It somehow puts out an arm, goes into this  little baby, little baby boy who has certain proclivities, and then grows up, and it's  fed that to its consciousness, that orb. Okay.
Then when this boy dies in the physical world, the body dies, let's say,  is the claim that the orb persists, and also that the orb was there before the baby was born, or is  it that the orb was created with the baby somehow? Okay. It's all of the above.
It's a little confusing, but let  me try to lay it out for you. Yeah. Just correct me where I'm somewhat insensate.
So we start with an individuated unit of  consciousness, and that's really who you are. You're a piece of consciousness. Think of it as this big consciousness system, and it just takes a part of itself and  partitions that off and calls it you.
Okay. That's I-U-O-C. It's just a piece of itself.
So you can think of an emulated piece of this larger system. So you're just a piece of the larger system, and all right. So now that's you.
You're the consciousness. Okay. Now, it finds out that you can evolve  more readily if you log onto this game, because this is an entropy reduction trainer,  and what you're trying to do is reduce your entropy.
Okay. So because of that, you take a piece of yourself. Now, you partition off just a piece of yourself that contains your quality of consciousness, and  that piece of yourself now is the thing that's receiving the data stream and is logged  onto the game and is working the game.
Okay. So it has an avatar, and it's experiencing. It's just a piece of myself, though.
Just a piece of yourself. What are the other pieces doing in this example? The other piece is basically going to be the accumulation function of all of your experiences,  because the whole point is to evolve, and to do that is an iterative process.
All of my experiences from past lives? All of your experience from all  the avatars you've ever played, all the choices that you've ever made. All of that is kept and accumulated because it's all part of this growing up process.
If you understand your history, it's easier to make sense of what you're doing. So it's this cumulative function. So that's what your IOC is, that function.
So it takes a part of itself, not the memory of all those past lives or anything else. It takes up just the quality, logs on, becomes you, the little baby boy. You go through life, and that little baby boy gets old and dies of old age.
And now what happens? As soon as he dies of old age,  he's no longer an avatar anymore. Avatar is dead.
So the avatar, you're not getting any more sense data from the avatar. Sense data stopped. Okay.
Consciousness that was this free will awareness unit, this subset. Of the IOC, it starts to take that partition down. It starts to reintegrate  with the individuated unit of consciousness, life over.
So yes, that individuated unit of consciousness is immortal. It lives on through many lifetimes. Just because your elf dies, the  player doesn't drop over dead.
You know, the player continues on. So now that, but instead of being a player where you just have all of  you, you know, you're there, you're in your room, you  know, you have a refrigerator in the next door and you're playing, and you can always put it on pause. We're not doing it that way.
We're going to take a part of you that's going to log on and stay with that game, period. From that point on, it's  just logged onto that game and doesn't do anything else. And it starts not with any memory of what it started with, but just with its quality.
Okay, so we have, so it's just a piece of you. All right, now that you die, that piece of you now, the partition's taken down because it's not logged on. No point logging onto a dead thing.
So the partition's taken down. That free will awareness unit  kind of re becomes a part of the individuated unit of consciousness. And one more lifetime of experience is there for it to try to evolve from its experience.
And then it begins the individual unit of consciousness starts to negotiate for another, another lifetime, another chance to learn things. And it repeats again, it partitions off a part of itself at its now new higher quality of consciousness because you were a good boy and you did a lot of good things. So now you leave the hole a little higher.
It goes back with that little higher level quality of consciousness and starts  the thing all over again. Starts to, you know, connects, logs on to a baby. So that's the way the process works.
So you, the consciousness that's making choices is just a subset of the, of you, your IUC, okay? So you're the cumulative part. If you enjoyed this TOE clipping, then the full video is linked in the description.
You should also sign up for TOEmail, which is again in the description  and the pinned comment. You'll receive immediate  access to all exclusive updates from the Theories of Everything podcast. It also helps me communicate directly with the core TOE community.
You'll also receive my top 10 TOEs. Think of it as the intellectual version of Quentin Tarantino's obsession.
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