My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 1 – Awakening – Abridged Version – Part 8
Awareness
It appears as if biological brain consciousness or digital consciousness systems, operating with high bandwidth input-output (I/O) and very short processor cycle times and memory access times, might theoretically have an exceptional capacity for individual learning and brightness (evolving their own firmware and software). That theoretical potential for the exceptional brightness of a brain or a digital computer could perhaps become actual brightness if the data input-output systems connecting it to its internal and external data- source environments, along with its purpose-goal-intent-action-result feedback systems, generate a rich enough set of uniquely profitable possibilities to provide adequate evolutionary potential to support the development of a high level of mental function. In other words, if the entity interacts (at a minimum receives data and makes choices based on those data) within sufficiently complex environments and develops sufficiently high bandwidth connections to those environments, it will eventually evolve a higher, brighter level of awareness to better utilize that data. If the range of possible choices and the methods of selection between choices are also sufficiently rich and complex, the potential for brightness greatly expands.
Thus, biological systems — living things — evolve, learn, grow, and change purposely.
All life-forms react to both their internal and external environments.
Awareness is a characteristic of consciousness. To some extent, all the earth’s life-forms are aware and conscious. All store and retrieve information more or less continually and therefore have the capacity to learn, to improve themselves, and to become more than what they presently are — to evolve. Some awareness is more or less efficient, brighter or dimmer, than others. It is a continuum. Jellyfish, raccoons, and people are all aware of some things and unaware of other things. It is more a matter of degree and focus than a fundamental difference in the nature of awareness. Limitations on the richness and complexity of the possible interactions and responses that an entity can have with its external and internal environments are what define each entity’s capacity for awareness. The process of developing awareness is the same for all entities, whereas the limitations and the environments of each entity are unique.
By now, it should be clear that developing and evolving awareness is a standard, normal and natural happening among biological entities.
Dim awareness is fundamentally the same as any awareness, only very limited in its scope and complexity. At its dimmest, dim awareness is simply the potential for awareness.
Awareness grows and evolves similarly to how physical bodies have grown and evolved.
Applying the Fundamental Process is natural and intuitively obvious to even extremely dim awareness.
If you think about it for a moment, you will immediately become dimly aware that thought, mind, consciousness or spirit are the only things known to us that are not bounded by our time and space.
As this Big TOE slowly comes into focus over the next three sections, you will eventually come to realize that consciousness is the basic media from which reality is formed — the fundamental non-material material of existence. It will also become apparent that a more structured form of this fundamental primordial consciousness energy can reasonably evolve into an ultra- low entropy consciousness that can generate the operative digital mind required to animate and define the content of our larger reality.
Consciousness provides the basic organizational energy from which all individuated existence is derived. It provides the self-modifiable form, function, and potential energy the Fundamental Process of evolution optimizes.
The Fundamental Process drives change at all levels including the growth opportunities that eventually define individuated consciousness content such as yourself.
The potential energy of digital consciousness is the potential to self-organize, which is derived from the potential of a digital system to reduce its average entropy through evolution. A system able to lower its entropy through self-organization will eventually host some level of consciousness.
It is important not to let our words and their implicit PMR conceptual limitations trap us into believing that reality is, by definition, fully contained within three spatial dimensions and restricted to what we can physically perceive.
Each individual, besides being an autonomous entity, is an integral part of a larger system.
As the bigger picture of a global ecosystem has come into view, some have realized that we have responsibility as well as rights of plunder by virtue of superior force. A viable and stable ecosystem must achieve and maintain balance. That we humans have the capability to seriously disturb that balance is the source of our responsibility.
Our natural environment does not constitute the only global ecosystem. Eventually, among the human population, we will discover (and learn the rules and dynamics of) global technological, political, social, and economic ecosystems. In global systems, individual players always have bit parts, yet all are vitally important, even from a system perspective. In general, the larger the system, the smaller the part any one participant plays. Each individual entity (including you) plays out its unique interactive part and absolutely affects the whole whether or not they are aware the whole exists. Same individuals and groups affect the larger system more than others and thus must assume a greater responsibility commensurate with their greater impact and influence.
A complex ecosystem can maintain balance only if a great ability to use, exploit, and destroy is tempered by an equally great responsibility to conserve, replenish, and protect. Ability must be balanced by responsibility, force with caring, and fear with love. With great responsibility comes great challenges and great opportunity. The bigger your perspective and understanding, the more effective and productive you can be within your system.
Your ability to take intelligent action depends upon the depth of your vision and the quality of your understanding. The smaller your perspective and understanding, the more likely you are to inadvertently shoot yourself in the foot. Low quality consciousness does not see the Big Picture and makes short-sighted decisions for near term gain. To a being of low quality, feel-good appears more important than do-good which appears more important than be-good.
Theoretically, we humans are intelligent and educable. However, let me remind you that intelligence and education are attributes of individuals, not groups — you cannot pass the buck or abdicate your personal responsibility (rely on somebody else to solve a shared problem) without becoming part of the problem.
Large ecosystems come in layers. To capture the point of this discussion, you must generalize the above thoughts to a much bigger picture. We are participants in an evolving consciousness ecosystem. The consciousness system in which we participate is the mother of all others. It is the largest, most complex ecosystem we can interact with. It supports all other ecosystems. Our physical universe is a small virtual habitat within this larger consciousness system. The same ecological issues, concepts, conclusions, and lessons-learned that we discussed earlier in this aside apply directly to you and your relationship to the consciousness ecosystem. Science is science, the principles are the same. .Reread this short aside with each observation about us and our physical ecosystem being applied and reinterpreted to describe our interaction with the larger consciousness ecosystem — you will gain a new perspective.
It is not a lack of intellectual capacity that is at the root of humankind’s self- inflicted difficulties and dysfunctional behavior. The fundamental problem is the lack of quality in consciousness. Quality is the issue, not quantity or capacity. We obviously have more processing capacity within our consciousness than we have the quality, maturity, or wisdom to put that capacity to good use. As a species, we are out of balance — and that is not good.
Mother Nature, who is talented at evolving interdependent complex systems, always produces self-balancing systems.
Within biological systems, the most obvious example of an unbalanced system leading to self-destruction is a quickly growing cancer. In contrast, within consciousness systems, the most obvious example of an unbalanced system leading to self-destruction is ignorance, fear, desire, need, and ego — a lack of quality.
What is creating evolutionary pressure if we are no longer preoccupied with the traditional issues of survival and species propagation? We have become aware enough and capable enough that self-improvement is now our main goal. Most importantly, that means spiritual evolution, or equivalently, the improvement of the quality of our consciousness. Self-improvement could also mean the development of science and application of technology that might eventually result in spindly arms and legs, or merely developing a more civilized civilization. It could also mean something as quick and direct as human genetic engineering.
Self-improvement is the result of an internal pressure created by the Fundamental Process. Evolution expressed through a high level of sentience becomes the urge to grow (reduce entropy)
Clearly, self-improvement represents the major evolutionary pressure driving change in contemporary humankind
Our level of awareness has delivered us to the point where we have within our grasp the potential to dramatically affect the direction and speed of our evolution.
Without a doubt, improving the quality of our individual and collective consciousness is the most important and critical aspect of self-improvement (evolution) facing the human race as we move into the twenty-first century.
Balance is always important. If our technical know-how gets too far out in front of our ability to apply its results wisely, we will lose our balance and fall flat on our face — perhaps irretrievably. Ours is a particularly critical time. The choices we make during the next half- century will dramatically affect the outcome of the next half millennium.
Improving the quality of our consciousness is, and always has been, fundamental to our evolution but today it is also critical to our survival and to the continued success of the Homo sapiens experiment. If we accomplish a significant improvement in the quality of our consciousness first, if we can lead with our quality, the rest of our options will be guided by our wisdom and we will leap boldly ahead. If, on the other hand, the quality of our consciousness lags, and we do not accomplish a sizable measure of spiritual growth first, we will have the cart in front of the horse, so to speak, and it is going to be a wild and dangerous ride.
Isn’t the evolution of consciousness a fascinating process? I suggest that we invest some serious effort in improving the quality of our consciousness.
it is self-improvement, the reduction of system entropy, that provides the evolutionary pressure
we must first understand how consciousness improves itself by achieving higher levels of internal organization (entropy reduction).
Only after a certain level of awareness, competency, and tool use has evolved can evolution be influenced by individual intent.
Every evolving complex system will eventually either keep growing (entropy decreases) or run out of evolutionary gas (entropy increases or stays the same). This is true of all large complex systems (consciousness systems, earth’s ecosystem, the solar system, technological and organizational systems, computer systems, the internet, and biological systems including physical human beings).
It makes sense that evolutionary pressure operating upon a complex system of consciousness would encourage that system to invest in improving the extent and quality of its own awareness (the ability to profitably interact and organize).
Self-improvement has become humanity’s primary evolutionary motivator as well. The external environment for humans is essentially subdued; consequently, we have become our only major threat. The greatest challenge to our species today is to survive the self- destructiveness of our own low quality of consciousness. We must now learn to master the internal environment. Our success at gathering knowledge and making tools has placed a great capacity to destroy in hands animated by low quality, underdeveloped, immature consciousness. The need for rapid self-improvement has become critical. Will the individual conscious beings that collectively define humanity grow up (lower the entropy of their consciousness or equivalently raise their spiritual quality) enough to make the choices that will allow their species to prosper?
Might this maturing of the spirit or quality of mankind happen sometime soon or do we need to experience more pain before a significant number of eyes and minds begin to open? Remember, growing up is not a group or political activity, it is a personal activity. Groups raise their average quality level only as the individuals within those groups make a personal effort to increase their individual quality. Self-improvement of the species in general is up to you as an individual. Nobody has more potential to contribute than you do. Only individuals acting as individuals can make a difference.
Survival and procreation are giving way to self-improvement as the defining evolutionary constraint for human-kind. Genetic engineering and psychotropic drugs are a quickly growing reality. The control we can exercise over our physical bodies is rapidly increasing. If the maturation and quality of our consciousness were as precociously developed, it would provide grace, stability, and balance to our great leaps into the unknown. We are slowly taking the reins of physical evolution into our own hands. Climbing out of the petri-dish and into the lab, we are becoming a co-designer — a partner in the evolutionary process.
Systems are simply an organization of individuals whose synergistic interaction produces collective results. Systems of systems are developed in the same way.
All growing systems, including consciousness systems, evolve toward minimizing average entropy by generating more profitable levels of organization.
Recall that higher levels of organization leading to lower average entropy define self-improvement within a consciousness system. The Fundamental Process in interaction with consciousness produces an evolutionary pressure that pushes all consciousness entities toward self-improvement.
If somewhere within the far reaches of your intuition the phrase “patterns of patterns” suggests some sort of undefined fractal process as the ultimate creator of complex structure, you are on the right track. Hang on, we’ll get there eventually.
Some patterns might indicate a subsequent or a preceding pattern or define pattern interaction. Rules are themselves none other than knowledge-based or experienced-based patterns for the reliable definition, repetition, and interaction of other patterns. Rules defining the formation of patterns, as well as pattern interaction and relationship, would evolve naturally from the evolutionary pressure of self-improvement. With the concept of rules come the concepts of control and hierarchy.
Simple binary patterns, and the rules (instruction-set) defining relatively few operations, have evolved into today’s computer technology.
Unquestionably, it is the patterns, the patterns of patterns (and the rule-sets that evolve to define, regulate, and order them) that constitute the basic ingredients of almost everything we directly experience. For just one example, imagine a human brain’s pattern of cellular organization, and its patterns of neuron and electromagnetic activity. For other examples, think of the city you live in, the economy in which you work, and the political and cultural patterns that order your life. Civilization is about ordered patterns
In the last chapter we concluded that evolving consciousness may be constrained by accessible memory.
Purpose differentiates success from failure and provides the necessary rationale and direction to achieve lower entropy configurations that appear as system self-improvements.
The same Fundamental Process is universally applied to all interactive or intra-active systems
Nevertheless, the results of applying that simple process differ widely according to the capabilities and constraints that define each system. A system’s capability is intrinsic to the nature of the system while its constraints are defined by its internal and external environments.
Just as evolving non-living, non-growing entities naturally move toward higher entropy, consciousness naturally moves toward lower entropy. Dimness gradually gives way to brightness as entropy is lowered. The quality of consciousness also increases as entropy is decreased — we call this growth of quality, spiritual growth
internal energy can sometimes drive consciousness to greater entropy and lower quality.
Searching for a fourth and higher dimensions in terms of geometry is also not particularly helpful to the understanding of the larger reality. Reality is not fundamentally geometric. We think it must be geometric because our little picture view is centered in 3D geometric reality and we naturally tend to expand upon what we know. PMR is geometrically constrained by the space-time rule-set; however, the space-time rule-set is only a local rule-set and does not apply to the larger reality.
Because the larger reality and the subset of the larger reality that serves as our local reality are constructs of consciousness, we could say metaphorically that they exist in mind-space or thought-space.
Improved organization implies reduced entropy
Time
Time is a technology, a construct of a self-modifying evoking consciousness, an artifact of a system of energy improving its internal organization.
Time separates the “before” state from the “after” state. Change creates the notion of time. Awareness of change necessitates the idea of a personal time.
Scrupulously avoid making assumptions and creating beliefs (pseudo-knowledge) to fill in for what you cannot understand.
Pseudo-knowledge is useless except as a pacifier for a needy ego.
Appreciating your limitations is the first step toward obtaining wisdom. At the same time, creating apparent limitations where none actually exist by getting stuck in belief traps is a great waste of potential. Read the previous two sentences again. Do you see the importance of discovering Big Truth, and why you should spare no effort to clearly understand the difference between actual and apparent limitations? Make a note: The ability to accurately assess one’s fundamental limitations differentiates the wise from the foolish.
The incredible evolutionary profitability of time is immediately obvious.
The evolutionary pressure of self-improvement moves consciousness toward higher quality and lower entropy states — which is equivalent to moving consciousness to brighter, more aware, and more highly organized internal configurations. Lower entropy produces higher quality, which means that the consciousness system has more energy available to do work
Great potential is a two edged sword. We are all passengers in this local reality rocket where the technological manipulation of our internal and external environments may soon produce more dramatically accelerating change. We must depend upon the quality of our political, ethical, economic, technical, and philosophic institutions to grasp the opportunities and deliver the advantages, while avoiding the pitfalls.
Before you begin lamenting the incompetence of your public institutions you should understand that quality, understanding, and wisdom are individual attributes. The quality of the individuals within a society defines the quality of that society’s institutions. There is no one to whom you can pass the buck — collectively, the citizens of planet earth more or less get what we deserve. The average social, economic, educational, or government institution reflects the quality of the average individual that produces and populates it. You individually are either an integral and active part of the solution or you are a part of the problem — there are no innocent bystanders. The onus is on everyone to substantially raise the quality of their personal consciousness.
Compelling a solution by the application of external force is usually counter-productive and never a good long-term solution.
The point is that the evolution of consciousness, as all big system evolution, is an accelerating natural process. To make that concept and some of its attendant issues more intuitively understandable, I have simply pointed to the evolution of technology as a well-known example.
Nonphysical mind can change (grow, evolve) more quickly than the physical body because it contains more degrees of freedom and fewer constraints. There is, for a long time, a steady acceleration in the growth and development of consciousness. This means the rates of growth continually increase. This acceleration allows each newly evolving expression of consciousness to be more efficient and productive more and more quickly. Learning, like any other cumulative function, cannot experience large positive acceleration forever, but you would be surprised at how far consciousness can progress before the Fundamental Process begins to channel the greater part of its energy toward only the better opportunities.
In the consciousness realm, the acceleration effect represents a steeper and smoother function of self-improvement vs. time as brightness increases its capacity to learn as well as the quality and depth of its understanding.
As awareness masters and refines its evolving mental capabilities, a new, more complex motivation arises as a result of, and in conjunction with, the imperative to implement the Fundamental Process. The complexity and interactive properties of the mental processes being evolved eventually produces the functions of intention, feedback, interaction, synthesis, and integration.
Look at what we have been able to accomplish with only three primary colors, twenty-six letters and a limited array of sounds. All of our communications, art, literature, collective memory, science, and technology rest upon specific combinations, sequences (in both time and space), arrangements, and patterns of this relatively small set of fundamental variables — and we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.
It is these second order processes within consciousness that are responsible for the eventual development of values. When awareness and the complexity of choice reach a sufficient level, the concepts of enjoyment, aesthetics, ideals, and quality begin to modify our expression of the Fundamental Process and our motivations in partnership with it. These comprise a set of third order functions that subsequently influence the outcome of the Fundamental Process of evolution. Given enough awareness and complexity, we have fun. We make music. We produce art. We are the creator and the consumer. We have preferences, likes, and dislikes. Good and bad become defined. We develop values and make moral choices. Birds sing and soar; dogs fetch tennis balls and chase Frisbees.
Play is widespread among highly evolved creatures of all sorts. If having fun wasn’t profitable to Big Picture consciousness evolution, it wouldn’t come so naturally or be so popular. Sentient critters have inside environments as well as outside environments to pay attention to and interact with. In fact, the more sentient we become, the greater our quality, the more important our internal environment becomes to our evolution.
Physical space, and your experience of it, is an illusion, a trick of your individuated mind, a virtual reality within the actual reality of your consciousness.
The reality in which we interact with each other is a virtual classroom or learning lab designed to help us reduce our individual entropy and grow the quality of our consciousness. As consciousness, that is what we do; that is how evolution challenges us. That many implications of our rule-set await our discovery (the physics of the future) simply makes that classroom more interesting, challenging, and educational. New discovery creates better understanding as well as new opportunities to learn.
Sometimes an evolving consciousness system may in time develop terrific complexity and seemingly endless potential as the Fundamental Process iterates upon itself repetitively, eventually evolving into something that begins to mimic its source. When the wheel turns full circle and the successful product of the evolutionary drive toward self-improvement begins to take on the characteristics of its source, it becomes a partner in the process of consciousness evolution.
In scientific terms, a lower entropy consciousness system has more power — more energy available to do work — a higher, more useful level of organization.
Additionally, a lower entropy consciousness eventually develops the ability to use directed conscious intent to reduce its entropy further.
We sentient conscious beings are, as individuated subsets of consciousness, a bounded subset of highly organized, evolving, interactive reality cells.
Physical experience is generated when the perception of an individuated consciousness (sentient being) is constrained to follow the space-time rule-set.
Consciousness evolution does not progress through a process of successive epiphanies. Significant entropy reduction is accomplished through an iterative process that slowly accumulates a large number of nearly infinitesimal profitable choices to produce significant growth. Trying to grow your consciousness in great leaps impedes progress by distracting you from the hundreds of small profitable choices you have the opportunity to make every day. Your consciousness quality rises and falls based upon the intent that animates your everyday interactions.
Open minded skepticism requires no closure, and thus, accepts its limitations. It does, however, require that you put aside your normal knee-jerk responses (which have been conditioned by your ego, beliefs, and fears) in order to recognize all the possibilities.
Activities that do not contribute significantly to the positive evolution of your consciousness are not important.
Consciousness and evolution have few limits placed upon their combined creativity.
Do not let your beliefs and the limitations of your current knowledge limit your notion of what is possible. Letting your ignorance define the limits of an acceptable reality is bad science; unfortunately, it is also the norm. That is why young scientists make most of the dramatic breakthroughs. When you believe that you know, but do not, you cut yourself off from the possibility of ever knowing. The knowledge that lies outside the possibilities allowed by your core beliefs is beyond your intellectual reach — entirely invisible to your self-limited vision. You simply cannot see beyond the walls you have constructed regardless of how hard you are trying to do exactly that and no matter how strongly you believe that your vision is clear and unimpeded. To see a bigger picture, to view what lies beyond, you must first tear down the wall or at least some portion of it. Human cultures are little more than communities of shared belief where common belief- blindness leads to erroneous conclusions that are universally held as obvious truth.
The fundamental evolutionary process seems to work everywhere — life or conscious awareness or individuated sub-systems of consciousness are merely the result of a purposeful, self-interacting complex system with memory, evolving its way through a large and diverse set of environmentally constrained possibilities.
Evolution produces life-forms that are suited to their particular environment. That is how we and all the critters (including one celled critters) and plants turned out as we are — we fit (are efficient and effective in) our environment. An environment beyond our imagination will evolve forms and functions beyond our imagination to suit itself.
It is a generally accepted idea among scientists that if we (or at least something vaguely like what the earth has produced) cannot exist, grow, and evolve within some postulated reality or host environment, then it is not possible for sentient life to flourish within such a place. The belief that any life-forms that might exist “out there” must be similar to the life-forms of earth is a product of little picture thinking. Without a doubt, we have a very limited view from where and what we are and thus should be doubly careful not to constrain the possibilities we can grasp merely because we do not already know the answers. Such arrogance creates the walls of its own conceptual prison.
There is no need to make judgments or jump to conclusions. Do not believe anything, for or against. Maintain an open mind and realize that you are only at the beginning of this journey.
Because I am taking most of you on a trip far beyond your wildest musings, you should expect (this early in the unfolding) to feel somewhat ambivalent, lost, and — please — always skeptical.
If you have little experience systematically exploring the larger reality of inner space, what you read here will no doubt seem abstruse, unsubstantiated and beyond knowing. It is not. It only seems that way from the perspective of your culture and your self-limited experience. Consider how a five-year-old child, or your favorite pet critter, views and understands the larger world it lives in.
this next section — Section 3 — is all about you.
Because it is about you, it is bound to be exceptionally interesting — how could it be otherwise? In Section 3 (“Man in the Loop”) we will make the first tentative connections between all the weird off-the-wall concepts in Section 2 and what they could possibly have to do with you and your physical and mental reality. I think you will like this next section more than the previous one, because it will give you some things to think about that you do have the experience to evaluate and it will be less abstract.
If you have made it this far and still have the desire and gumption to go on, award yourself four beautiful gold stars for your intellectual tenacity and inquisitiveness.