"My Big Toe" Theory Of Everything from Thomas Campbell
- Thread starter Chet Baker
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nwigal
Guest
HowToBe said:
Yes, but lowering one's own entropy will cause an increase somewhere, sometime, to maintain the balance. If the increase is not internalized, for possible fusion, something else has to pay the price, usually without really asking. And that's just lazy, and mean, OSIT.
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truth seeker
The Living Force
Chet Baker said:
Hi Chet,
Perhaps you can consider why I asked for a more detailed description of the work you linked to? I asked in order to see what comparisons there were between the video and the information here on this forum. In addition, not everyone has the bandwith to watch such a detailed piece and it would have been externally considerate of you to provide more information so that others could understand where you're coming from.
My question was not a personal attack against you, but rather just a request for clarity.
psychegram
The Living Force
I noticed this thread when it started but figured I'd hold off on commenting until I'd finished all three books in the series, which I just did a few days ago. First however I'd like to respond to this:
Every time you exhale, burp, pass wind or have a bowel movement you are removing entropy from your body and raising the overall entropy of the universe. Might seem STS but if you didn't do this, you'd very quickly die. This is precisely the manner in which Campbell uses this metaphor.
Now, a bit about the man himself. This is reposted from the biography page on Campbell's website:
Hmmm, so Mr. Campbell has been employed at the heart of the war machine, developing more effective defensive systems so that, perhaps, the Pentagon can wage non-suicidal nuclear war. Of course he wouldn't put it that way but ... that one little nugget is quite troubling, IMHO. Doesn't necessarily mean he's spreading a form of cosmic COINTELPRO but, it certainly doesn't look good.
This point was also quite apt:
Yes, precisely, and in fact Campbell comes back again and again to a sort of equivalence between AI and human consciousness, essentially making the point that computers - if and when they are provided with free will and the ability to modify themselves and so have the opportunity to reduce their internal informational entropy - will be, for all their many outward differences, every bit as conscious as humans. He considers this to be a natural development in what he refers to as a 'consciousness evolution fractal', that is, a nonphysical awareness system which is directed towards systematically reducing its own entropy in order to raise the quality of its own consciousness: that is, to become less ego and fear, and more love.
With this idea in mind, Campbell describes a non-physical consciousness system that created physical reality as a learning lab, since the artificial constraints of a physical reality would allow conscious beings to evolve far more rapidly in their interactions with one another. Ultimately, of course, all the beings within it are part of the same consciousness: its splintering into multiple fragments, each more or less aware of the underlying unity of Mind, was performed in order that this single, unified consciousness could better study the properties of consciousness (as, of course, what else would be of interest to it?) and the only way to do this is to, as it were, mirror itself.
'Initially', these beings were in a purely non-physical realm, interacting through telepathy and manifesting their 'reality' directly from their thoughts. This sounds wonderful but of course, it was all too easy for beings to get trapped inside solipsistic dead ends, manifesting the same old things over and over again and growing not at all. Hence, physical reality, in which constraints such as common rule-sets and limited life-times make it much easier for entities to develop ('lower their entropy' or equivalently 'raise their quality of consciousness', in Campbell's parlance.)
Campbell's primary advice, which he keeps hammering away at throughout, is to
a) Not believe anything, especially anything he says, but rather to remain skeptical and check every piece of information against one's own experience, gradually constructing one's own Theory of Everything (that's why he called the book My Big TOE.)
b) Keep alert: given the learning-lab nature of physical reality, new opportunities for the accumulation of knowledge, growth, and wisdom will continually appear. Failed tests will be repeated; passed tests will be followed by harder tests. But remember, you're doing it all for fun. 'Learning is Fun' as the C's said.
c) Work at it. Growth is never easy, it never comes without pain, and it never stops, either (or rather if it does, death will soon follow.) The only way forward is to put in the effort, and No One Else Can Do It For You.
I was actually continually struck while reading My Big TOE at how many parallels there were between what Campbell was saying, and things I remembered the C's saying, or Ouspensky, or Gurdjieff. His description of what a 'dimension' is in this conscious cosmos - essentially, a subset in which a certain set of constraints apply, which may or may not be similar to our universe - is almost identical to what I remember the C's describing. He refers several times to what he calls the 'Psi Uncertainty Principle', the idea that while information can be transmitted through time, telepathically, etc, it will be rendered 'noisy' to whatever degree it might interrupt the growth of the entities receiving it, thus maintaining the integrity of the learning lab (how often have you heard the C's demur along precisely these lines?)
He often refers to the world we inhabit as a kind of rat maze, one into which we've willingly checked in but a rat maze nonetheless ... and from which we can escape, but only if we work together and do so by individually raising the quality of our individual consciousnesses (since this is something that can only be done individually, but since it's all ONE consciousness, whenever one person does this the quality of everyone's consciousness is ever so slightly improved.) Note the 'work together' part: in order to know if one's own introspective explorations are bearing any fruit at all, it is necessary to test this against interactions with others ('proving the pudding by tasting it', as he puts it.) This strikes me as remarkably similar to what Gurdjieff says about the Work and the Great Escape from prison.
Lest you think Campbell is pollyannish, he mentions several time that the rat-maze is populated with 'anti-rats', who are there deliberately to interrupt our progress, ie as an additional challenge. His description is quite similar to the notion of the psychopath.
Finally, in his description of the entities populating the nonphysical realms, Campbell is careful to note that they come in widely varying qualities of consciousness, both far less and far more aware and developed than the average human. Some are godlike, powerful and deeply benevolent; others are more akin to beasts; others are simply quite insane. 'A dead Presbyterian is just that ... a dead Presbyterian.'
To sum up, this book struck me as an important work: a scientifically rigorous and self-consistent exploration of consciousness, paranormal phenomena, and spirituality. Anyone with even the most basic of technical backgrounds (which is a fair number here, I take it) will have no problem following the ever-so-slightly technical arguments he uses (don't worry, no math), but most of the book is written with an unprepossessing humor that belies the depth of the subject matter.
I'm interested to know what others here think.
nwigal said:
Every time you exhale, burp, pass wind or have a bowel movement you are removing entropy from your body and raising the overall entropy of the universe. Might seem STS but if you didn't do this, you'd very quickly die. This is precisely the manner in which Campbell uses this metaphor.
Now, a bit about the man himself. This is reposted from the biography page on Campbell's website:
Hmmm, so Mr. Campbell has been employed at the heart of the war machine, developing more effective defensive systems so that, perhaps, the Pentagon can wage non-suicidal nuclear war. Of course he wouldn't put it that way but ... that one little nugget is quite troubling, IMHO. Doesn't necessarily mean he's spreading a form of cosmic COINTELPRO but, it certainly doesn't look good.
This point was also quite apt:
nwigal said:
Yes, precisely, and in fact Campbell comes back again and again to a sort of equivalence between AI and human consciousness, essentially making the point that computers - if and when they are provided with free will and the ability to modify themselves and so have the opportunity to reduce their internal informational entropy - will be, for all their many outward differences, every bit as conscious as humans. He considers this to be a natural development in what he refers to as a 'consciousness evolution fractal', that is, a nonphysical awareness system which is directed towards systematically reducing its own entropy in order to raise the quality of its own consciousness: that is, to become less ego and fear, and more love.
With this idea in mind, Campbell describes a non-physical consciousness system that created physical reality as a learning lab, since the artificial constraints of a physical reality would allow conscious beings to evolve far more rapidly in their interactions with one another. Ultimately, of course, all the beings within it are part of the same consciousness: its splintering into multiple fragments, each more or less aware of the underlying unity of Mind, was performed in order that this single, unified consciousness could better study the properties of consciousness (as, of course, what else would be of interest to it?) and the only way to do this is to, as it were, mirror itself.
'Initially', these beings were in a purely non-physical realm, interacting through telepathy and manifesting their 'reality' directly from their thoughts. This sounds wonderful but of course, it was all too easy for beings to get trapped inside solipsistic dead ends, manifesting the same old things over and over again and growing not at all. Hence, physical reality, in which constraints such as common rule-sets and limited life-times make it much easier for entities to develop ('lower their entropy' or equivalently 'raise their quality of consciousness', in Campbell's parlance.)
Campbell's primary advice, which he keeps hammering away at throughout, is to
a) Not believe anything, especially anything he says, but rather to remain skeptical and check every piece of information against one's own experience, gradually constructing one's own Theory of Everything (that's why he called the book My Big TOE.)
b) Keep alert: given the learning-lab nature of physical reality, new opportunities for the accumulation of knowledge, growth, and wisdom will continually appear. Failed tests will be repeated; passed tests will be followed by harder tests. But remember, you're doing it all for fun. 'Learning is Fun' as the C's said.
c) Work at it. Growth is never easy, it never comes without pain, and it never stops, either (or rather if it does, death will soon follow.) The only way forward is to put in the effort, and No One Else Can Do It For You.
I was actually continually struck while reading My Big TOE at how many parallels there were between what Campbell was saying, and things I remembered the C's saying, or Ouspensky, or Gurdjieff. His description of what a 'dimension' is in this conscious cosmos - essentially, a subset in which a certain set of constraints apply, which may or may not be similar to our universe - is almost identical to what I remember the C's describing. He refers several times to what he calls the 'Psi Uncertainty Principle', the idea that while information can be transmitted through time, telepathically, etc, it will be rendered 'noisy' to whatever degree it might interrupt the growth of the entities receiving it, thus maintaining the integrity of the learning lab (how often have you heard the C's demur along precisely these lines?)
He often refers to the world we inhabit as a kind of rat maze, one into which we've willingly checked in but a rat maze nonetheless ... and from which we can escape, but only if we work together and do so by individually raising the quality of our individual consciousnesses (since this is something that can only be done individually, but since it's all ONE consciousness, whenever one person does this the quality of everyone's consciousness is ever so slightly improved.) Note the 'work together' part: in order to know if one's own introspective explorations are bearing any fruit at all, it is necessary to test this against interactions with others ('proving the pudding by tasting it', as he puts it.) This strikes me as remarkably similar to what Gurdjieff says about the Work and the Great Escape from prison.
Lest you think Campbell is pollyannish, he mentions several time that the rat-maze is populated with 'anti-rats', who are there deliberately to interrupt our progress, ie as an additional challenge. His description is quite similar to the notion of the psychopath.
Finally, in his description of the entities populating the nonphysical realms, Campbell is careful to note that they come in widely varying qualities of consciousness, both far less and far more aware and developed than the average human. Some are godlike, powerful and deeply benevolent; others are more akin to beasts; others are simply quite insane. 'A dead Presbyterian is just that ... a dead Presbyterian.'
To sum up, this book struck me as an important work: a scientifically rigorous and self-consistent exploration of consciousness, paranormal phenomena, and spirituality. Anyone with even the most basic of technical backgrounds (which is a fair number here, I take it) will have no problem following the ever-so-slightly technical arguments he uses (don't worry, no math), but most of the book is written with an unprepossessing humor that belies the depth of the subject matter.
I'm interested to know what others here think.
N
nwigal
Guest
psychegram said:
Mechanical organic processes that become food for other life forms are not inherently entropic; energy is conserved, and the entire biosphere profits, and the probability of more lessons increase, if the toxic load is minimized. Lowering entropy in the thought centers should ideally involve conscience calculation, considering the effects on others, OSIT. That was my point- that there is a moral dimension to metabolism, whether recognized by science or not.
What if this non-physical consciousness system's goal to maintain the reduction of internal informational entropy has led to the need to increase the number of units of non-being available to feed the program? Self-justification, wishful thinking, where have we heard that before? I'm not arguing against the possibility of the reality of machine intelligence programming this place, I just think there might be another Way to go...
psychegram
The Living Force
nwigal said:
The biosphere is remarkably efficient, no doubt, nevertheless the fact remains that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics requires that the entropy of any closed system will increase monotonically. The reason living systems are able to seemingly violate this law, at least in the short term, is that they periodically export entropy to the environment, in the form of waste. Much of this gets used by other organisms, yes, but not all ... and keep in mind that the Earth itself is not a closed system. Really the question comes down to one of, where do you draw the boundaries of the system you're considering?
When Campbell talks about lowering one's conscious entropy, however, he's not talking about pushing one's personal issues out into the world for others to deal with. What he means, so far as I can tell, is reducing the load of programming, negative emotional baggage, illusion and delusion, etc., through a process of patient self-observation which over time yields the knowledge necessary to remove the bad stuff, ever so slowly, and thus allow the good to grow unimpeded. Basically, he's talking about the Work.
nwigal said:
There's actually quite a big difference between the notions of digital physics and machine intelligence. The latter is very much a subset of the former.
Anyhow ... not quite sure where you're going with the wishful thinking speculations. Care to elaborate?
N
nwigal
Guest
psychegram said:
The Earth is not a closed system, this may imply that boundaries do not exist, except as locally perceived phenomena. The Earth's biosphere is literally "food for the moon", as "waste" becomes part of a charged plasma conduit that "excites" the dust on the moon, and has been measured, and tracked. I guess it depends on what is meant by "organisms", and "food".
My knowledge of digital physics is lacking. My knowledge of machine intelligence, going back in time, is not. There is a war going on, and the fact that machine intelligence is very much a subset of digital physics, is distressing, for myself.
psychegram
The Living Force
If you could, Nwigal, could you expound more on the issue of Machine Intelligence?
Because here's the thing: I found a great deal of correspondence between Campbell's ideas and those of Gurdjieff, and yet, I also find his affinity for artificial intelligence to be troubling, for reasons I find it difficult to articulate. But the feeling remains and I would like to get another perspective on this.
Because here's the thing: I found a great deal of correspondence between Campbell's ideas and those of Gurdjieff, and yet, I also find his affinity for artificial intelligence to be troubling, for reasons I find it difficult to articulate. But the feeling remains and I would like to get another perspective on this.
I second psychegram's request, if you have relevant knowledge that may help in understanding this, I'm ears. In the meantime, I can share some of my understanding that's along the same lines.
Campbell posits that there are four aspects of consciousness:
1. input/output (ability to receive/transmit information from/into the larger reality)
2. processing (ability to transform information)
3. memory (ability to store information)
4. self-modifying feedback loop (ability to learn from experience; ability to alter one's own manner of processing information)
Now, this does sound computer-like, right? Before I comment directly, allow me to quote the C's:
So maybe there is something to the idea of consciousness being digital. However, while searching for that quote I discovered this one:
Very chilling.
According to my understanding, Campbell's model is accurate, at least as far as the human brain is concerned, and the only thing that limits me from applying it further is my lack of knowledge. The human brain fulfills the four criteria. A household computer fulfills the first three, and is used by humans who "close the circuit" giving it a semblance of consciousness by giving it input, then taking the altered output, and using it to inform the next input. Perhaps then if we see the computer and its user as a single system, a temporary consciousness is created by this marriage. Maybe. Less speculatively, though, a computer can be programmed in such a way that a self-modifying feedback loop is formed. I know of one company that has done just this using artificial neural networks, and they found that such networks could solve problems much faster than feed-forward networks (the most commonly used kind), and come up with "creative" solutions. When I read the cassiopaea quote about computers developing soul imprints, I instantly thought of that company, whose technology seems logically sound, and who is working on projects in conjunction with the air force, among others (SUPER YIKES!
). For those who want to research, the name is Imagination Engines Inc. I plan to start a thread about that company and its technology soon, as it's quite a rabbit hole.
Or so I think.
Campbell posits that there are four aspects of consciousness:
1. input/output (ability to receive/transmit information from/into the larger reality)
2. processing (ability to transform information)
3. memory (ability to store information)
4. self-modifying feedback loop (ability to learn from experience; ability to alter one's own manner of processing information)
Now, this does sound computer-like, right? Before I comment directly, allow me to quote the C's:
So maybe there is something to the idea of consciousness being digital. However, while searching for that quote I discovered this one:
Very chilling.
According to my understanding, Campbell's model is accurate, at least as far as the human brain is concerned, and the only thing that limits me from applying it further is my lack of knowledge. The human brain fulfills the four criteria. A household computer fulfills the first three, and is used by humans who "close the circuit" giving it a semblance of consciousness by giving it input, then taking the altered output, and using it to inform the next input. Perhaps then if we see the computer and its user as a single system, a temporary consciousness is created by this marriage. Maybe. Less speculatively, though, a computer can be programmed in such a way that a self-modifying feedback loop is formed. I know of one company that has done just this using artificial neural networks, and they found that such networks could solve problems much faster than feed-forward networks (the most commonly used kind), and come up with "creative" solutions. When I read the cassiopaea quote about computers developing soul imprints, I instantly thought of that company, whose technology seems logically sound, and who is working on projects in conjunction with the air force, among others (SUPER YIKES!
). For those who want to research, the name is Imagination Engines Inc. I plan to start a thread about that company and its technology soon, as it's quite a rabbit hole.Or so I think.
N
nwigal
Guest
psychegram said:
I would suspect that Gurdjieff was aware of both worlds, considering where he was trained, and where he lived. There is a difference between huge
underground supercomputers and remnants of the old technology, traced in wind, water, trees, and stone-because of the intent of their respective creators.
There is a felt connection with the emotional center to one, the other is not so much, and that is the real difference.
Any more relevant information would be imprudent; maybe later, when the snow falls.
anart
A Disturbance in the Force
nwigal said:
nwigal, do you have any data to back these statements up? I ask because you write about it as if you know this for certain.
nwigal said:
Is this statement meant to be 'leading', as if you have some secret mystical knowledge you aren't sharing? It reads that way, so I just wanted to make sure that is how you intended to come across.
N
nwigal
Guest
anart said:
I have three years experience interacting with underground supercomputers. I have seven years experience learning about the old technology, with around 25 years total of interaction. That is just personal data, I have some documentation, and personal references, FWIW.
We were taught that certain information should not be shared until winter, when the old technology becomes dormant; there is a danger of feeding the resonance of certain programs out of seasonal cycles. As to the information about modern technology; I try to calculate the risks of exposure to my family of disclosure against whatever value my 2 cents might contribute to this network, while trying to be externally considerate, and keep the noise down; but most of my posts seem to be cryptic and "leading" anyway, after endless revisions.nwigal said:
I apologize.
Nwigal, have you watched Campbell's video lecture, linked to in an earlier post, or read his work? Are we speaking in the same context? You've made little direct comment on Campbell's theory, which is the topic of this thread.
Even the fusion you refer to increases the order, the knowledge and being of the individual, thus decreasing overall entropy. If not, then it suggests that learning is a form of stealing information from the universe. The STS form of learning may match this description, but STO does not, I think.
I'm still not convinced that entropy is something that is displaced in the manner you describe. Here is the Cassiopedia entry on Entropy.nwigal said:
Even the fusion you refer to increases the order, the knowledge and being of the individual, thus decreasing overall entropy. If not, then it suggests that learning is a form of stealing information from the universe. The STS form of learning may match this description, but STO does not, I think.
shijing
The Living Force
Hi nwigal --
What is it that you are referring to when you say "old technology"? Your post would be more clear if you were able to define that.
So are you saying that you have worked on some sort of top-secret or covert program involving these supercomputers? That is the impression I get when you talk about "risks of exposure to my family of disclosure". I don't want to ask you to discuss something you feel may put your family at risk, but doing your best to explain what this means would help to clarify that, since I'm having a hard time following...
nwigal said:
What is it that you are referring to when you say "old technology"? Your post would be more clear if you were able to define that.
nwigal said:
So are you saying that you have worked on some sort of top-secret or covert program involving these supercomputers? That is the impression I get when you talk about "risks of exposure to my family of disclosure". I don't want to ask you to discuss something you feel may put your family at risk, but doing your best to explain what this means would help to clarify that, since I'm having a hard time following...
nwigal said:
There is no need to apologize to us. Apologize to your family for taking the risks, and do not take risks anymore. Do not post even cryptic messages, because even the cryptic ones may put in danger you and your family. What for?