My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 2 Discovery – Abridged Version – Part 6
Big pictures are inherently difficult to see from the perspective of little pictures. Far out, unexpected, out-of-the-box paradigm shifts are always required. Oh no, don’t look so disheartened — it is not impossible, just challenging. The fact that transcending belief and expanding your awareness is difficult to accomplish is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a necessary feature of all successful consciousness systems.
Can clams and bumblebees learn (modify their actions and intents through experience)? Of course they can learn. Using memory, processing, and feedback to achieve self-modification (in reaction to internal and external environments) lies at the heart of our definition of consciousness. Consciousness has the natural, innate capacity to learn. Learning is purposeful self-modification created by the exercise of a free will that utilizes memory, processing, and feedback within a complex interactive environment. Learning, evolution, and growth — the steady decreasing of entropy — is impossible without the functional condition or attribute that we call free will. Are you beginning to see that free will, learning, and evolutionary growth opportunities are natural and necessary attributes of an evolving individuated consciousness?
Consciousness cannot exist without the ability to make self- determined, self-modifying choices. Without free will, there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no free will. Consciousness and free will cannot be separated — they are simply different aspects of the same thing. We shall see that it is our narrow, beginning-less, PMR-centric concept of causality coupled with our misunderstanding of the properties of consciousness and reality that tricks scientists and philosophers into believing that free will is logically separable from consciousness.
The concept of evolving consciousness without free will is a mistaken and illogical theoretical construct that self-destructs in static, meaningless, determinism. The unintentional, but usually implicit, assumption of dead (directionless, non-growing, non-evolving, purposeless, non-living) consciousness creates a conceptual sinkhole, a philosophical dead end. A deterministic reality model can logically only chase its own tail. Though self-consistent, it leads nowhere and produces no useful output because its implicit little picture assumptions are fundamentally flawed in the Big Picture where consciousness lives, grows, and evolves.
Let’s look at free will from an evolutionary perspective. Consider that evolution can increase the capability of an individual or species only within the limits of the natural capacity of that individual or species. A free will needs only to be free enough to make choices within its own local logical system and decision space. Within its local reality system, a sentient entity must be free to make choices that directly affect future choices. Note that complex interactive environments, intent, memory, processing power, feedback, and self-modification are the enabling mechanisms of both free will and consciousness. Free will and consciousness co-evolve as mutually reinforcing aspects of the same AUM system-thing. Free will evolves as a natural and necessary attribute of living consciousness.
Only consciousness systems that evolve a practical implementation of free will can continue to progress toward some measure of greater personal profitability. Without a measure of cumulative profitability (self-improvement), there can be no evolution or progress. Dead consciousness would never evolve or progress; it could accomplish nothing, not even existence. Beginningless little picture logic (see Chapter 18, Book 1) may grant theoretical existence to a deterministic dead consciousness that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, but a larger view that better understands the origins and properties of consciousness realizes that “dead” and “non-existent” are logically equivalent when applied to consciousness.
Consciousness integrated with a free will is how the AUM organism must evolve in order to evolve at all. Free will is inherent to our governing rule-set. It is the nature of evolving consciousness (or evolving anything) to make specific choices from the billions of available possibilities. Results reflect massive complex interaction, ever-changing self-modifying feedback loops, and are cumulative. Learning takes place relative to the choices made. Look around — that scheme represents the fundamental nature of individual and collective sentient entities. That all sentient entities seem to reflect the fundamental properties and processes of evolving consciousness is an important data point to consider.
A consciousness system containing many individuated units is similar to a body of cells, or an internet composed of billions of individual computers — no one in particular is in control. Choices are made, information packets go here or there, results are the aggregate of a billion independent and interdependent decisions. These results drive further decisions, which drive further results. No individual plans it, or controls it, or runs it. It changes and evolves on its own according to its capacity, its environment, and the constraints placed upon it. The individual decisions and choices of each cell, internet user, or consciousness-unit are made according to immediate self-interest — however self-interest is defined or perceived at that moment. Free will is inherent to each cell, internet user, or unit of individuated consciousness. The decision space may be relatively small at the cellular level, but if there is sentience, there is also a finite decision space to support the existence and functioning of that sentience.
Consciousness and free will go together like inhaling and exhaling, like mammals and sexuality, like chickens and eggs. Like birth, life, and death, consciousness and free will represent a practical combination of attributes necessary for the balanced functioning of a real (as opposed to theoretical) evolving system.
Our free will does not need to come from some theoretical consideration or independent process — it is simply part of the system, inherent to the existence and processes of evolving consciousness. The rule-set that defines our local reality must necessarily express free will because that is how choice-making evolving consciousness operates. If one conceives of free will as being theoretically derived from some independent random process, a circular logic trap is created. Recall Chapter 18, Book 1 where we discussed the PMR belief that everything must be caused by something else (no beginnings are allowed). This belief logically forces us to account for the independent existence of the egg before we can allow the possibility of the chicken — or vice versa. So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The question itself carries the assumption of a causality that eliminates the possibility of a constructive logical answer. From a larger perspective, the answer is obvious; It is clear that neither came first they evolved together — just like consciousness and free will.
The appearance of a logical problem is created by an illogical question. Don’t get caught up unproductively in the chicken vs. egg logical tail chase. It may appear to be a great mystery, but is only a misguided question based upon a poor understanding of the logical requirements of beginnings and the inappropriate application of the little picture’s objective causality (see Chapter 18, Book 1).
Scientists, philosophers, and theologians should resist looking for a process that creates free will, or equivalently, eliminates determinism. That bucket has a hole in it. Free will does not have to be constructed out of smaller parts, or derived through a controlled analytic process — that represents a typically PMR little picture misunderstanding based upon a belief in causal processes that cannot logically support beginnings. Chickens before eggs? Eggs before chickens? Do you see the flawed logic that makes these questions appear deep instead of dumb? It is a similarly flawed logic that supports the concept of determinism by evoking a little picture causality that is devoid of an appreciation of a larger reality which is based upon dynamically evolving consciousness.
So, which came first — consciousness or free will? Do we conclude from our little picture logic that neither can exist? That sums up the position of contemporary science and philosophy: Mind is nothing beyond physical brains and biochemistry, all reality is physical, and all information is theoretically knowable and eventually predictable. That these beliefs run counter to the carefully collected data of everyday experience, are inconsistent with each other, and do not make good scientific sense is conveniently overlooked to appease the demands of little picture causality in particular, and scientific dogma in general.
With an open mind and fresh vision, it is not difficult to see that most scientists, and philosophers too for that matter, have employed cultural belief and professional dogma to paint themselves into an intellectual corner. That free will and consciousness must evolve together as natural and necessary attributes of any successfully evolving sentient energy-form is a thesis that solves many outstanding problems of science and philosophy. Apply this concept to a sufficiently complex digital energy-form like AUO and you get AUM and you — along with a lifetime guarantee of free daycare and pre-school services within PMR.
You know what is said about cornered critters being particularly dangerous. Every word of it is true and I would be remiss if I did not also warn you. Be careful, your professional and personal credibility can be savagely attacked and badly bitten by a vicious and tenacious dogma. In fact, most organizations and academic institutions, with fine reputations to uphold, have guard dogmas patrolling their halls. These old, mean-tempered, intimidating, politically powerful creatures are entrusted with enforcing a conceptual correctness that everyone who is important can be proud of. In the high entropy real world of PMR where ego-politics powers almost every nuance of every activity, you need to learn to apply gentle soothing strokes, scratch them behind the ears, and always carry an extra hotdog in your pocket. Perhaps fighting fire with fire is a good idea in some circumstances, but combating ego with ego in a dogma fight is always a disaster for everyone involved.
Our conceptual limitations often generate logical contradictions. Mind-matter, wave-particle duality, and entangled pairs fall into this same causality-confused basket. The Big Picture expresses the true nature of reality, while the little picture expresses the shared delusion of a group of individuated consciousnesses enrolled in the PMR learning lab (this concept is developed more thoroughly in Sections 4 and 5) The conflicts and paradoxes you see are not real and do not exist in the Big Picture. Logical conflicts and paradoxes appear to exist within the little picture view because of the erroneous assumptions of little picture science.
An analog: The professional magician only appears to saw the lovely lady in half. Spending your nights worrying about the apparent impossibility of the lady paradox (how ladies can be sawed in half and then be put back together again) and concocting complex theories of tissue micro-fusion are generally non-productive and will never yield a satisfactory solution because the obviously correct (I saw it with my own eyes) assumptions the magician (your culture) has led you to believe are, in fact, wrong.
When our belief in PMR scientific causality dramatically fails before our eyes, we have a tendency to build up elaborate theoretical structures to maintain our belief and save the sacred dogma of traditional objective science. Resist the urge to make free will or psi more complicated than they are. It is not that you have consciousness, but that you are consciousness.
Determinism is a philosophically unproductive, unworkable theoretical possibility based upon omniscience or perfectly defined process for everything everywhere. It has no supporting real data and is generally based upon religious dogma (god knows everything) or erroneous little picture assumptions (scientific dogma — science knows, or can know, everything).
Without free will, consciousness is not consciousness — it is merely purposeless process. It is theoretically impossible to take the wetness out of liquid water or the coldness (relative to standard room temperature) out of ice. Consciousness without free will is like warm ice or dry liquid water. The concept of consciousness without free will creates a logical inconsistency. Because we of limited PMR vision do not appreciate the nature of consciousness, we separate the concept of free will from consciousness and try to give it a unique causality, an independent theoretical basis. The result is that we end up chasing our logical tail to conclusions that run directly counter to our everyday experience of individual consciousness.
Because of our little picture perspective, we project our PMR sense of finite knowledge into a theoretical assumption of omniscience, which eliminates free will and reduces consciousness to an analytical PMR physics or computer science problem. After that we are stuck with nowhere to go. No growth, no choice, no intent, no evolution, no personal consciousness, no purpose, no point. Determinism rules the land of limited dead knowledge. A complex consciousness ecosystem designed by evolution to be simultaneously out of control, in balance, and in a continual state of redefining itself leaves omniscience theoretically impossible.
The egg cannot logically exist without a prior chicken, and the chicken cannot logically exist without a prior egg — therefore, it is logically (given the implicit assumptions) impossible for either to exist. In terms of chickens and eggs, that conclusion is as dumb as it is logical. One might say that this conclusion is locally logical within the restricted solution space where the assumptions hold. In terms of consciousness, free will, and determinism, a similarly flawed process appears to provide an acceptable solution for many techies who have no logical way to derive a separate free will from the local causality of PMR.
Each conscious entity is exercising its free will to make choices within its own limited reality. Each knows little to nothing of what lies beyond. Think about each entity’s free will in terms of practical operational requirements. Whether an entity is bright or dim, carbon- based, silicon-based, or reality-cell-based, it must make unique intent- guided choices within its operative finite decision space in order to find more profitable ways of existing and doing business. An operational free will is based upon each entity’s specific memory, processing capability, and past and present input data (experience). Experience data are gleaned over time from the entity’s perception of their internal and external environments. Think of free will as a practical evolutionary device of consciousness rather than a theoretical process of thwarting determinism with true randomness.
Functional free will, at whatever level of application, requires no more than the practical ability to make intent based choices where the intent is a function of the quality of the consciousness making the choice. If such a mechanism for making profitable choices at the local level (perhaps based on an evaluation of past choices) can be arranged, consciousness can provide the instrument for its own evolution.
Perfect knowledge (the omniscience needed to support determinism) does not, will not, evolve because it is not a practical possibility within real, interactive, self-modifying systems that are large and complex. From the perspective of evolution, a stagnant determinism is not profitable to the system. Self-improvement, learning, and meaningful goal-directed growth are profitable to the system — and these, by definition, cannot exist within a deterministic system. The meaningless random results of meaningless random processes can produce no increase in cumulative profitability. Such a system cannot support the properties and quality of consciousness as we experience it. An evolving consciousness system like ours cannot be supported by either a wholly random or a wholly deterministic system because there can be no cumulative profitability in either.
Are you beginning to see the connection between free will and our two basic assumptions (consciousness and evolution — see Chapter 24, Book 1)? Given the dynamic duo of consciousness and evolution as we have described them, free will falls out as a necessary logical result of their interaction. It is not an added ingredient that somehow must be accounted for. Free will is simply the result of consciousness energy and evolutionary process slipping into bed together for a joyous moment of creation that has not yet ended. From that union, all reality and existence flows. Our two basic assumptions not only allow and account for free will, but logically demand it and then create it out of a successful synergistic interaction.
All of reality, as far as we can know it from the data gathered thus far, fits the form of an evolving consciousness system that has obvious rules, focus, and purpose. Growth toward greater profitability permeates all existence. There is no indication that existence is either random or without dynamic purposeful profitability, however, there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence to the contrary. If you have no experience of PMR’s purposefulness or of the attributes of consciousness — even if you are totally without knowledge of your greater purpose and completely distrustful of your intuition and subjective knowledge — still, you can find no indicator pointing to a random, static, or deterministic reality.
Construing ignorance of purpose as purposelessness is a logical error. Existentialism made this error because, although it clearly saw the crippling limitations of many little picture belief systems, it was unable to transcend its own little picture belief in a universal causality. With no beginning (understanding of consciousness and our connection to it) and no end (evolutionary purpose of consciousness), existentialists are left drifting and rudderless.
Consciousness and free will are of the same evolutionary root. Like the trunk and branches of a single tree, they must grow together — inseparably joined and successfully evolving as one entity.
Quantum mechanics bothered many scientists (including Albert Einstein) because it seemed to posit a statistical basis for our reality. It seemed obvious that sentient beings and their reality were fundamentally more real, solid, and dependable than could be attributed to a statistical representation. However, when you understand the digital nature of consciousness, realize that PMR exists within a calculational subspace (dimension of reality) of TBC, know that we physically interact according to a shared rule-set that defines the perceptions of our individuated digital consciousness, and appreciate the interactive nature of intent, free will, and choice-making that leads to entropy reduction in complex systems, it is not at all surprising that our fundamentally digital-mathematical rule-based perception of existence should display statistics at its root. The surprise would be if anything other than digital, quantized, statistical, entities were found at the most fundamental level of our reality.
Efficient learning requires definite structure. A system without structure has no potential for profitable growth. Everyone knows that a lack of structure is antithetical to the successful development of children. Structure, by its nature, sets limits or provides constraints. Optimizing our evolutionary opportunities requires the constraints of the PMR rule-set. The appearance of a deterministic casualty is the result of a limited understanding extrapolating the restrictions of an imposed local structure upon all of existence.
By design, little picture knowledge appears (from the view of PMR) to be deterministic — an erroneous conclusion based upon the success of science in discovering more and more of the space-time rule-set that defines our local PMR causality. However, there is more to the experience of PMR than the rule-set that defines the possible interactions within PMR. We need to account for the experiencer as well as the logical constraints of the experience. PMR is a virtual reality that is designed to produce a certain type of constrained experience for the benefit of interactive units of individuated consciousness. Consciousness awareness is the active element that experiences the opportunity to exercise its intent as it interacts with virtual mass, energy, time, and other consciousness units that also possess free will.
Only when mind and consciousness are assumed to be nothing other than PMR physical brain phenomena does PMR begin to appear totally deterministic to some philosophers and scientists. These folks believe that their conscious awareness is derived completely from a complex physical bio-computer (brain) which interacts with its physical environment. Not a bad guess, given the viewpoint from which it arises. I support the notion that computers can develop consciousness but that is not the rationale behind this particular assumption. The assumption of a physically-based consciousness is a logical requirement of the little picture — it is made to maintain the belief that reality cannot be other than physical — that our causality is universal.
Consciousness that is experienced within the PMR training simulator may appear to be brain centered, but that connection is only a shadow on the wall of the PMR cave. Consciousness is the invisible media upon which your individuated awareness floats — much like the fish that cannot perceive the unchanging water it swims in (see Chapter 23, Book 1). The evolution of consciousness follows a greater purpose, logic, and causality that provide the key to a better more productive understanding of both the little picture and the bigger picture. A nonphysical consciousness-based Big Picture reality enables the full range of our accumulated human experience to make good sense within a single integrated and coherent theoretical structure.
Science has the mission to pursue all knowledge leading to a better, more profitable understanding of the natural world — not merely the slice that falls within the confines of its traditional belief systems. Discovering fundamental truth and developing useful solutions are what science is all about. To find truth you must go wherever it leads. Belief-blinded closed-minded individuals who travel the path of least resistance and derive their respectability from supporting the beliefs held in common by their peers choose the safety of the herd over the ability to discover Big Truth. To maintain that respectability and the ego and material rewards that come with it, these individuals give up the ability to understand what is critically important to them and to their professions. A sad story of self-inflicted wounds which is so common that it defines normalcy and sets the standard for professional success.
Consciousness exists in many forms and at many levels, capacities, and scales — each built upon and extended from the others through the repetition of a simple process iterating its way toward an improved profitability. The result is a cascade of evolutionary creativity that aggressively explores all of the forms, configurations, and embodiments that consciousness systems can employ to improve their profitability. This energetic living complex pattern of evolving consciousness is what we have metaphorically referred to as the consciousness-evolution fractal. It is the nature of a fractal processes to generate monstrously big pictures by recursively applying a few basic rules and assumptions.
It is a mistake for an entity within this vast reality fractal to believe its own tiny local reality subset of the greater consciousness ecosystem is The One, The Only, The Center, the pinnacle of creative expression. Individuals with little picture views can see nothing other than themselves emerging from the possibilities of existence. Such a limited vision produces not only a misplaced determinism, but robs its owner of the knowledge he or she needs to actualize their personal potential.
Only a failed and desperate theory (cultural, social, theological, or scientific) will feel the necessity to deny the existence of the facts it cannot explain. The facts of science, consciousness, free will, paranormal events, and the human spirit are left lying about everywhere; open your eyes, explore them for yourself; they are not secrets, nor are they difficult to find once your mind is opened to the possibilities.
Let’s make a quick connection between free will and psi phenomena. Both are part of our reality because they are natural attributes of consciousness.
At the experiential level, imagine psi phenomena as a brightly colored flower enticing those who have some potential to profitably understand it, and as a prickly, scary, or ridiculous weed to most others. Anyone can experience psi phenomena or psi effects. Many can wield a shadow of its power but only those who understand it deeply can effectively use it as a springboard to significantly reduce their personal entropy and the entropy of the system of which they are a part.
Let’s get more specific by defining “psi effect” as an acausal (outside PMR causality) phenomenon that is attributable to the operations of consciousness. From this more technical definition, let’s explore a few semantic twists and turns. One could argue that free will is a psi effect because free will and psi effects are fundamental, interdependent attributes of consciousness. Similarly, describing or defining consciousness simply as “psi” can be supported from a general conceptual perspective. A free will effect is a psi effect is a consciousness effect
Consciousness is the energy system from which our reality is created. For us, consciousness is the root of all reality. What we call psi effects and free will are direct expressions of the fundamental attributes of that consciousness system and of how that system operates and evolves.
All is consciousness. Consciousness is all. Do not think of NPMR and PMR as separate places with fixed mental pathways between them: That is a sometimes convenient, but misleading concept. The psi uncertainty principle, as a part of the PMR rule-set, provides necessary structure to PMR by imposing limits. You cannot build a physical or nonphysical bridge between PMR and NPMR. The physical bridge cannot be solidly connected to NPMR, and the nonphysical bridge cannot be solidly connected to PMR. You are the bridge, which is why you cannot build one exterior to yourself. Consciousness is personal.
You are an individuated unit of consciousness hallucinating a physical reality (perceiving a virtual physical reality). As such, you can, within the limits of your quality and ability, experience and apply free will and psi effects because you are consciousness. However, you cannot make your hallucination (virtual physical reality) exceed the limits and function of its defining rule-set.
Because the experience of consciousness is essentially a personal one, the private message of My Big TOE is for you, dearest reader — yes, just for you. The real power to effect significant positive change lies not with governments or professions, nor with science and the technology it spawns. The real power behind meaningful progress and growth, at any level of aggregation or organization, is the quality of the individual consciousnesses driving the action. Raising that quality can be accomplished only by the self-directed personal evolution of each individual. Clearly, the private message of My Big TOE is offered up for your personal use and benefit. Its potential value lies not in the words, nor in the ideas, presented. The potential of its value is the possibility of positively influencing the potential of your value — a potential that is profound and beyond estimation.