At a glance
Thomas Campbell is a physicist who spent his working life on missile defense and NASA programs and his nights, for about thirty five years, doing something else entirely: leaving his body in a soundproofed booth in Virginia and taking notes on what he found. In two hours and forty seven minutes with Joe Rogan, he lays out the model he built from that double life, the one published as the My Big TOE trilogy, and he lays it out as a derivation rather than a belief.
The claim is that this reality is computed. Not a metaphor for computed, literally computed, the way World of Warcraft is computed, by a system Campbell calls the larger consciousness system. You are not a human being; you are a piece of consciousness playing a human avatar, receiving a data stream. He starts from a single assumption, that consciousness exists, and walks forward through entropy, free will, the invention of time, a "big digital bang" that was rerun a hundred thousand times until the constants held, and out the other side into claims about why the speed of light is a constant, what quantum superposition actually is, why the brain does no computation, why there may be nobody else in the universe, what crop circles are for, and how an AI becomes conscious.
Rogan does not let it slide by. He presses on why a computed universe still needs a real Mars, on whether the seat count argument against aliens is anything more than a guess, and hardest of all on why a man who says he has replicated a two person out of body experiment under isolation will not run it again on camera. Campbell's answer to that last one is the most revealing thing he says all episode.
This page rebuilds the whole conversation in its order, with the numbers, the stories, the pushback, and the experiments he says are coming.
The deep explanation
A meditation flyer, a card deck, and the moment a physicist broke his own model
The opening is not a theory, it is an anecdote about sleep deprivation. Campbell was a graduate student doing experimental low energy nuclear physics on a Van de Graaff generator four or five stories tall, university owned rather than one of the expensive high energy accelerators you queue up for. The rule with a machine like that was brutal and simple: when it is working, you take data. "If you were awake for three days in a row taking data, well that was just one of the prices you paid," because if you stopped to sleep there was a good chance the machine would break and be down when you got back.
So he saw a flyer on a door advertising a class on how to meditate, with bullet points, and one of the bullets said you can get by with less sleep. "I said I need that." He took his banana, paid the twenty five dollar special student price, and learned.
It was, in his words, unnatural for him. The very first sit, he thought he had been there ten or fifteen minutes. Somebody tapped him and said it was time to go and he had been under for an hour and a half. "It's like, oh, I just lost part of my life. This is amazing." From then on every session went the same way, deep instantly, with a lot going on.
Then the part that broke him. He was sitting in meditation and started thinking about the software he was writing. Understand the era he is describing: the late 1960s, one computer for an entire university, roughly ten thousand square feet of machine, "about one hundredth as powerful as the one that's in your cell phone." No debuggers. You submitted a job and got back a message saying it bombed. That was the entire output, maybe a fragment of a printout if execution reached one of your print statements. Programs were fed as punch cards, and the failures were not always yours: the card punches were mechanical, with cams and gears, and they wore out, so a hole could land a tenth of a millimeter off center and the machine would reject the deck without telling you which card was bad.
Sitting there, thinking about his bombed job, he says he put out an intent without meaning to. And he saw something in his mind: a roll coming off a spool with his program listing running down it, most of it black on white the way a printout looks. Then one line came by in red. He stopped it, looked at it, noted it, found the next one. Three or four in all. "Next time I got back in the lab I looked at those cards and I found errors on them and I said, holy, what's going on."
The detail that matters is the one Rogan pulls out of him. Some of what showed up red was not a coding error at all but a punch error, a physically miscut card, the kind of defect you cannot see by eye. Rogan asks whether he ever saw a false positive, something flagged that turned out to be fine. Campbell: "No, it was always accurate. And that was like hitting a hard headed physicist with a sledgehammer." He got good enough at it that colleagues started asking him to debug their code, and he always said no. He had no idea how it worked and he was not going to break the spell. "You were working with magic," says Rogan. "Exactly."
He also told nobody. "When you're a physicist you don't tell people things like that. It's impossible and everybody knows it's impossible." Not good for business.
What he took from it was not a belief, it was a gap in his professional model. His working definition of real was the operational one: if you can interact with it, if you can do something with it, it is real; if you cannot, it is either unreal or irrelevant. That is materialism, and he held it. "But I realized, jeez, there's a whole other part of reality that has to do with consciousness that I don't know anything about. I'm a physicist. Physicists model reality. That's what they do. And here it was right in my face."
Bob Monroe, and a building with three booths in it
Years later he left graduate school, took a job, and his boss handed him a book: Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe. Read it, tell me what you think. Campbell's question going in was blunt: is this guy making it up to sell books, or is it real? Given the card deck, he had reason to take the second option seriously.
It turned out Monroe lived about a forty five minute drive away. A carload of them went out. "My point was, is this guy nuts or what?" What he found was somebody who reminded him of the engineers he worked with, left brain, logical, process oriented, and who had no idea how his own experience worked.
Monroe's origin was entirely accidental. He was taking a nap and found himself out of his body, floating in the air, looking back at himself. It terrified him. He thought he might be dying, or insane. He went looking for help and found a psychiatrist, Charles Tart comes to Campbell's mind, who told him he was perfectly sane. So Monroe did the only sensible thing left and started playing with it: where can I go, what can I do, what can I find out. His books read like a diary because that is what they are.
Then he built a lab. It did not look like a lab, it was a building, and inside were three what he called CHEC units. Campbell cannot remember what CHEC stood for. "Bob loved acronyms. He should have been a government employee." One unit was electromagnetically isolated, a Faraday cage; the others were acoustically isolated well enough that you could shout in one and someone outside might hear a peep. Monroe built it on a field of dreams theory: put up a lab and scientists will come and explain to him what was happening to him. He was sure there was a mechanism, that it was not random, and he wanted it to be science rather than being the weird guy.
Campbell was in a group of about twelve technical people when Monroe looked around and asked if anyone wanted to work with him. "My hand shot up in the air right away," along with Dennis Mennerich's. Both had just gotten out of school, "and that's what you do when somebody asks you a question, your hand goes up." Campbell ended up out at that lab fifteen to twenty hours a week.
What Monroe's roll out actually was, and why the name "out of body" is wrong
Monroe's method was a metaphor he found early and kept. Lying in his body he would feel a pulsation, which he measured as best he could at around four hertz, four beats a second, body and mind both pulsing. When the pulsation state came he would simply roll out.
"And now there's like half a million people lying in their beds going like this trying to roll out." Campbell's point is that the roll is not the mechanism. "All these processes are just nothing but tools. There isn't any process. Everything that's going on is going on in here." Roll out, climb a rope, whatever gets your mind into the state. The state itself is the thing Monroe described as asleep but wide awake: the body sleeps, the mind stays awake, and you are no longer collocated with your body.
Campbell then takes a swing at Monroe's own terminology. Monroe coined "out of body," replacing astral projection and the other older terms, "and that's unfortunate, because it makes people think that you are somehow inside your body," a soul that seeps out of your head and goes somewhere. "That's not the process at all." The process is entirely consciousness. You do not exit anything. You change channel.
The bottom line, stated before the evidence
At this point Campbell offers Rogan a choice: start at the beginning and build up, or "go right to the bottom line and nobody will understand it and they'll think it's a little weird, but we can backfill later." Rogan takes the bottom line.
"We live in a virtual reality. This physical reality is computed. Now it's being computed by consciousness. Consciousness is individual in us, but there's also a system of consciousness, and we're just a piece of that system."
Then he unpacks what a virtual reality requires, because the rest of the model falls out of these three pieces:
- There is a computer.
- There is a player.
- The computer computes a virtual space so the players can see where everyone is and what they are doing.
The space itself does not exist. It is, in his phrase, "computer generated eye candy for the players." And so: "here you are, and you are not a human. That's an avatar. You are a piece of consciousness." A subset of a larger system. He reaches for the computing term he wants and lands on it: you are a virtual machine inside a larger machine, the way a mainframe gives a thousand users a thousand virtual machines each with its own memory and processing.
He is aware of how this sounds and preempts it: "I can make all of this logic and science. This is not hand waving, this is not conjecture, this is the way it works, and I have done the science very meticulously." He frames it as the paradigm shift the sciences have been hunting since quantum mechanics arrived a century ago "and everybody realized they didn't really understand the world after all."
The mechanics of experience follow directly. You are a player getting a data stream, and the data stream defines your reality. Play World of Warcraft and you get a data stream rendered as a million pixels; you look at the pixels and see rivers and houses and people. Same here. Which gives him his definition of an out of body experience, the one he has been building toward: you drop this data stream and pick up another. "There's the Sims playing someplace else. You shift to a data stream and now suddenly you're not in a World of Warcraft reality anymore, you're in a Sims reality."
Two ways of processing, and why one of them is starved
Everything paranormal, Campbell says, runs on the intuitive side of the mind, never the intellectual side, "and as much as people try to get there from the intellectual side, they fail."
Consciousness processes information two ways. Logically, which is the intellect. And intuitively, which is not logic at all. "There is no logic. You just know. It just happens. The information comes to you."
Our culture builds one and ignores the other. We start honing the intellect in kindergarten and keep going through graduate school. The intuitive side, "science tells you it doesn't even exist," so nobody works it. His claim is that if you put serious energy over a serious amount of time into the intuitive channel, it turns out to be just as reliable and just as accurate as the intellectual one.
But it has a different reach, and this is the argument he makes for why it matters. Deductive logic needs data. Most of the questions that actually matter have none. "Should I marry Sally or should I marry Sue? There's no data you can put in to come to a logical conclusion." Logic works on the trivial cases. Where are my car keys: where was I last, what jacket was I wearing, go check the pockets. Simple problem, logic solves it. Beyond that, logic runs out of inputs.
So where does intuitive information come from? Campbell's answer is structural rather than mystical. The rendering engine needs data in order to compute a reality, so the system builds a database and draws from it. You are a piece of the consciousness system, and that database lives in the consciousness system, so you have access to it. Rogan offers the Hindu name for that and Campbell takes it: "the Akashic records, yes, that's what they called it." Sometimes what comes through is precognitive, drawn from the future probable database; sometimes historical; sometimes other things.
He adds two more facts about consciousness he says fall out of the same picture. All consciousness is netted, so you can trade information with any other consciousness, including your dog or your cat. Humans do it constantly without noticing. "You ever meet somebody and you just like them, or you just don't like them? That's, you've traded some information there." And most of the best art and best writing comes through that channel; artists call them downloads, which he notes is itself a computer metaphor.
The database is made of probabilities, and reality is a random draw
Here is the engine of the whole model.
The database is not a record of what is. It is a forward looking structure: for the next 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds, what are the possibilities and what is the probability of each? Then, "the way the system works is that it takes a random draw from that probability distribution of the possibilities, and that's what happens next."
Note his precision on this, because he repeats it. It is not a random draw from the possibilities. It is a draw from the probability distribution over them, so likely things usually come out and one in a million things come out about one time in a million. "But sometimes they are drawn. Things happen one in a million now and again, because sometimes they get drawn."
He immediately turns this against the standard language of quantum mechanics. The textbook says the probability distribution collapses into a physical particle. "That doesn't make any sense. Probability distribution is mathematics, it's running in a computer someplace. How does mathematics running in a computer collapse to a physical particle? It makes no sense. That's not what's happening at all."
Then the two examples he uses to make it concrete, and they are the most memorable minutes of the first hour.
The telescope. An astronomer gets a better instrument and points it at a patch of sky nobody has ever resolved. Nobody knows what is there, so it is unknown. He takes the measurement. A random draw is taken from the probability distribution over everything that could be there. There is one constraint: it cannot be something cockeyed with what we already know, it has to fit the historical background. Within that constraint the set is still large. The draw is what he sees, and that is what enters his data stream. Then he publishes, "and now that's known, and anybody else who can look there will see the same thing. That's become part of our virtual reality."
The hole in the backyard. Same mechanism, cheaper. You take a shovel out back and dig. What is in the dirt? Nobody knows, so the draw decides. Dirt, rocks and roots carry the high probability. But if you live near the Gulf Coast, where the Spaniards spent a lot of time exploring, there is some probability, one in a hundred thousand or one in ten million, of a gold doubloon. "If that happens to come out of that random draw, then there's the doubloon."
Consciousness is fundamental, and why the idealists could not finish the job
How did he get to any of this? Not from theory. "I got there through understanding and learning and doing research in consciousness, basically paranormal things, and did research in the non physical."
The method he describes is ordinary experimental practice applied to unusual material. Remote viewing has evidence, he points out: you got it right or you got it wrong. So he would remote view, change one variable, do it again, change another variable, do it again, and because he had entered the same state hundreds of times he could return to it precisely. "Eventually, by varying one variable at a time, I figured out how it worked and why it worked."
The first thing that came out of that was the arrow of causality. "I can do things in consciousness that affect the physical, but there's nothing I can do in the physical that actually changes consciousness. So the arrow of causality is from consciousness to the physical." He says he repeated experiments of that kind until it became a fact for him, and then he draws a line under the word fact that is worth quoting exactly: "I understand that things that are a fact for me are not necessarily a fact for anybody else. Everybody else who hears this hears an opinion, not a fact, and that's as it should be. I tell people, if it's not your experience, then it can't be your truth." Which is also, he says, why he started teaching people to do these things: so they could go get their own facts.
He puts his position in a lineage. It goes back to Plato and the allegory of the cave, prisoners aware only of shadows on a wall. Those people were called idealists: the physical world is not the fundamental thing, there is something behind it that we cannot see, and the physical is only the layer we interact with. "So they turned out to be correct. That is right."
Then the criticism, and it is aimed at his own side. "The idealists got stuck." Talk to idealists now and most of them think consciousness is the thing behind it. Fine. "But you say, well, if consciousness is fundamental, then you need to be able to derive physics from it. So can you do that? And they say, well, no, they can't. But I can, and I did. I can derive physics. I can derive quantum physics."
That is the claim the middle of the conversation exists to cash out.
Why intuition fails for most people
Rogan brings it back to intuition and asks a good question: are there psychological barriers, personality shapes, ways of seeing the world that stop people from reading intuition correctly? Campbell says absolutely, and gives four.
First, and biggest, the imbalance itself. Because the intellect is trained and the intuitive side "was probably better when you were two years old than it is now," the intellect is dominant, and it plays the role of a bully. His example: you want to talk to your dead uncle Fred. You close your eyes, get into a meditative state, ask if he is out there, and hear "yeah, I'm here." At which point the intellect jumps in front: what was that, did I just make that up, was that imagination or was it real? "The intellect's butted in, doing analysis, trying to make judgments, and the intuitive process is gone. It breaks it."
Second, wanting it. People who want badly to go out of body or to heal or to remote view are the ones who cannot. "If you try too hard you prohibit it. If you really want to do it to a point that it's important to you, you inhibit it." The successful people are the ones who show up with a shrug: could be true, could be false, I will go through the motions and see what happens.
The story he tells to prove it is the best illustration in the episode. A woman who had never remote viewed sat down with one of the online target sets, where you request a batch of numbers and each number corresponds to a specific hidden picture. She asked for a set and worked through them casually, writing and sketching what she got for each. She did twelve. Then she decided to check her scoring before doing any more.
Twelve for twelve. Spot on. She squealed loudly enough to pull the whole room's attention.
"And then she thought, oh, I'm good at this, I can do this. The next five: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Didn't get any of them. Because now she was involved with it. Her intellect was interfering. She wanted to do it. She knew she was good." The logic that killed it, Campbell says, was completely reasonable: if I could do that without trying, I should do better if I try. "No. If you try, you won't do it at all."
Third, denial. A strong belief that it is impossible, or even the softer belief that it is possible but you personally cannot do it, gives the intellect something to jump in with the moment anything happens.
Fourth, noise. Look at an EEG, he says, or those colored activity maps: thoughts running constantly. If you are trying to receive information and your mind is full of background, you cannot pull the signal out of the noise. "That's why people say the first step is learn to meditate," because meditation is the exercise where you learn to quiet the mind.
He mentions his own teaching in passing here: a course on his site that walks through how to go out of body, how to heal with your mind, how it works and what goes wrong, with a binaural beat to get you into a meditative state, then an explanation, then an attempt, then a debrief, looping. He has reduced it to five days of audio "because the pictures really don't matter." He says he has tried to teach literally thousands of people.
Starting from nothing: the derivation
Rogan asks what the intellect is for, in a model where you are a piece of a collective consciousness. Campbell says the intellect is part of the choice making apparatus, and then stops himself, because they have been walking in backwards. "I have to go back to the very beginning." What follows is roughly twenty minutes of construction, and it is the spine of the whole book trilogy compressed into a monologue.
Step one: an information system that wants to evolve must order its bits. Imagine a system where all the bits are random. Random bits define no information. For the system to evolve, it has to order some of those bits, and the specific ordering matters less than the fact that once an ordering exists it can be made to stand for something, a number, a letter, a buffalo. "Here's this ordering and I will give it a meaning." As soon as it does that, it has information.
Ordering lowers entropy, which is a measure of disorder. So the evolutionary direction of an information system is downward in entropy, and its failure mode is to pull the order back apart, at which point it is random again "and it's dead, it's not an information system anymore." That gives the system a purpose without smuggling in a purpose giver: lower your entropy.
Step two: define consciousness, without the mystery. "A lot of people say nobody knows what consciousness is. Consciousness is easy to define. It's an awareness with a choice. It's just that simple." Awareness of what is outside and what is inside. To have awareness you need data, which for us arrives through five senses and nothing else. To build on that data you need memory, "because if you don't have memory, everything you notice is the first thing you've ever noticed." And you need processing, to look at what is in memory and work out what it means.
Step three: the simplest possible conscious thing. Take an aware unit that can be in state A or state B. Binary. It is aware, it can notice which state it is in, it can change state, and it can remember the sequence. Now it has zero one one zero, a pattern. It can make patterns, then patterns of patterns, and evolve that way. Free will enters right here, quietly, and Campbell flags it: the unit "had to be able to choose between an A or a B, a one or a zero. So free will was that it could freely choose which one to bring up."
He notes there are two routes from here and they arrive at the same place: the patterns can accumulate in one cell's memory, or the cell can duplicate itself, another virtual machine, and you get many units in different states. He points at biology for the second: single celled amoebas, then multicellular, then specialization into organs, then things like us, "a cooperative organization of about four trillion single cell things all cooperating and working together."
Step four: the invention of time. Growth stalls. The system reaches a plateau where it has done every pattern of patterns it can think of. Then it does something clever: it takes one of its cells and just oscillates it, zero one zero one zero one. "Ah, just invented a metronome." With a regular tick it can now have sequences of patterns and patterns of sequences, a whole new dimension of complexity. Campbell's line here is the one to take away: "that's when regular time was invented. It's a technology consciousness creates." Time is not a container the system sits in; it is a device the system built to get off a plateau.
Along the way it gets good at arithmetic, because arithmetic is natural to something like this. One thing, two things, another two things, four things.
Step five: the split, and free will as a growth strategy. Eventually it plateaus again. Now it is one big monolithic consciousness that has thought of nearly everything it can think of, precisely because it is one thing. "And it realizes that in order to grow further, I need to break off pieces of myself and give them independent free will."
So it does, and Campbell notes the parallel to cells splitting into independent units that then have to cooperate. What it gets back is disobedience, and disobedience is the point. "The source can say, all right everybody line up, here's what we're going to do next, and they can go, don't feel like it, boss, I'm going fishing." Different perspectives, different attitudes, different histories, "so now you're getting a much richer set of possibilities than you had when it was one monolithic thing."
That whole structure, parent plus subsets, is what he names the larger consciousness system.
Step six: virtual reality one, language. A virtual reality, in his definition, is simply a rule set: here are the rules, everybody who obeys them is part of this reality, because now they can share things. The first one the system created was protocols for language, syntax and definitions, so the subsets could talk. "So now you've got this big chat room."
That works for a while, then stalls too. Interaction generates a lot of possibilities, but "the possibilities aren't all that interesting. What do you do with a hundred thousand things in a big chat room? It kind of loses its novelty." The system needs a virtual reality where the choices carry weight, because you learn faster from choices that matter.
Step seven: virtual reality two, the big digital bang. To build it, the system picks a set of initial conditions and a rule set. The initial conditions are "this really tight tiny little ball of plasma under extremely high pressure, extremely high temperature." The rule set "is basically what we call science: physics, chemistry, biology."
Then it hits run. The ball expands, gravity slows it, things cool, suns form. "You've been through that big bang thing, but this is the same thing except it's a big digital bang. It's just happening in a computer."
And critically it does not hand craft the result. A programmed universe "comes out being stilted and dysfunctional. There's always going to be quirks that just got programmed in. It's not going to be really self consistent. The only way to make it self consistent is to let it evolve."
So it iterates. Take one gets a short way and craps out. Change the rule set a little, change the initial conditions a little, take two gets further. "And so on, until, you know, big digital bang one hundred thousand: oh, it's working pretty good, I'll just need to make one more little tweak." Everything fell apart, so increase gravity a bit to hold it together. Now it all collapsed back into a point, so back off. Iterate until every constant in the rule set works with every other one, long enough to evolve an avatar capable of choices with real substance.
The anthropic principle, read as a changelog
This is where the iteration claim earns its keep, and Campbell has a slide for it. He asks Jamie to bring up number seven and talks over it.
The reference is the anthropic cosmological principle, the book by two mathematical and theoretical physicists. Its content, as he summarizes it: there are five or six quantities that have to be perfectly tuned to each other for this universe to exist at all. Change any one and the whole thing is unstable, it never lasts long enough to produce humans, at best you get a pile of rocks with no possibility of life. And it is not enough for each value to be special on its own; each one has to be tuned to all the others.
"They called it the anthropic principle because they said it looks like this universe was designed just for us." Campbell's response is one clause long: "and in fact it was."
His argument is that the fine tuning is not a mystery, it is a signature of the iteration process. If everything is genuinely random, the odds of six independent quantities landing in mutual agreement in an evolving universe with billions of possible outcomes are, in his words, virtually impossible. If instead you get take one, take two, take ten thousand, tuning the constants until the run holds together, you get exactly the universe we observe. He notes that this is not exotic behavior: computer science labs across the planet set initial conditions and rule sets, let them evolve, and tinker with them whenever they drift somewhere unwanted. "Well, that explains a lot of things."
The computer and the player have to be outside the game
Now the structural argument, and it is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the episode.
From inside a virtual reality, from the point of view of the barbarian in World of Warcraft, the computer is non physical. It has to be. "The virtual reality doesn't compute itself." Campbell attributes the point to Edward Fredkin: the computer has to be somewhere other than here, other than this reality.
The same is true of the player. The player and the computer have to be in the same reality frame as each other, since they communicate, and both are non physical from the avatar's point of view. And what is a player? "The player is the thing that tells the avatar what to do. If you don't have a player, the avatar just sits there and wobbles to make you think it's alive, but it actually doesn't do anything." You want the barbarian to run, fight, or cast a spell, you have to tell it. "So the player is the avatar's consciousness."
Transpose that and you have his position on the mind body problem: consciousness is non physical to us, it is not part of the body, it does not live inside your body and seep out through your head to go out of body. You are a piece of consciousness, and you have a mission, which is to lower your entropy.
The love side and the fear side
One more piece, and it is the one that turns a physics model into an ethic. Subsets of consciousness interacting form a social system. In a social system, low entropy, which is the goal, comes through cooperation, caring, helping, working together. Campbell calls that the love side.
The other side is fear. On the fear side there is little cooperation because nobody trusts anybody, little caring about anyone except yourself, and a rapid slide into gang formation: you join up with others quickly, because if you do not, bigger people take your things. Ten of you together can take from the singles and from groups smaller than ten.
Follow that to its logical conclusion, he says, and "you'll have three percent of the individuals controlling ninety five percent of all of the worth and everybody else is a peasant," organized as hierarchies with a guy on top and levels descending to peasants at the bottom of the pyramid. "So that's pretty much the way our culture is here on this planet. We're on that fear side, and our job is to evolve toward becoming love."
Deriving physics, part one: why the speed of light is a constant
Rogan says he is following the logic, and Campbell answers by cashing in the derivation promise. "I can tell you why the speed of light has to be a constant."
A virtual reality has a grid, and the resolution of the grid is set by its smallest pixel. The smallest pixel of distance is a delta x, and we call that Planck length. The smallest pixel of time is a delta t, and we call that Planck time. Divide one by the other and you get the speed of light.
Which means the speed limit is not a property of light at all. It is the statement that the fastest anything can move through space is one pixel of distance per tick of the clock. There is no way to exceed it and stay in the rendering: "the only other way you could go would be to teleport. You're here and now you jump ten pixels of distance in one unit of time. Well, that's just disappearing here and appearing over there. That's not a good virtual reality."
Deriving physics, part two: superposition and entanglement
Rogan pushes: is that not exactly what quantum physics already looks like, particles that exist and do not exist at the same time, particles in superposition?
Campbell says no, and reframes both phenomena as bookkeeping rather than weirdness. Superposition is not an object being in several places; "all of that's done in probability. They have a probability to be different places." A certain probability here, a certain probability there, a certain probability somewhere else, which is exactly the database structure he already described.
Entanglement gets even shorter treatment. "It's an if then statement, that's all." If this one changes state from spin up to spin down, the one entangled with it over here goes from spin down to spin up, because angular momentum is conserved and the total for the pair is zero. Rogan raises the obvious objection, that one of them can be on the other side of the universe, spooky action at a distance. Campbell does not blink: "It's an if then statement. This is code. It's a virtual reality."
"If this is reality, why is it virtual?"
Rogan's best challenge of the first half. If this is reality, why call it virtual? Is that not just an artifact of our limited belief in the physical?
"No. It's virtual because it's computed."
Rogan does not accept it, and the exchange gets specific. Is the universe conscious, then? Campbell backs off the phrasing carefully: he would not say the universe is a thinking conscious entity. Space is a computation. "You make a point, you put three mutually perpendicular unit vectors at that point, and you've just defined space from minus infinity to infinity in all directions."
But space is a physical thing, Rogan says. We send something to Mars and get photographs back. There is something out there we are measuring.
"That's what virtualities are. You can have a virtual reality where you have an Earth and a Mars and you can send a spaceship from the Earth to the Mars."
Rogan presses to the core: what makes it virtual, if there is a physical thing you can measure? Campbell answers with a question. What makes World of Warcraft virtual? Same answer. From inside, everything is physical. The barbarian drowns if he stays underwater, gets hurt falling off a cliff, has to turn a doorknob to go inside. "But it's actually computed in a computer, that's what makes it virtual. It doesn't actually exist as a reality or as a place." World of Warcraft is not a little place somewhere with barbarians and elves running around in it. And in the Sims, when the guy at the bar slides a mug of beer down the counter and nobody catches it, it goes off the end, splashes on the floor, and the glass breaks. All of that happens. It is physical from the inside view. And the barbarians could build rockets to their Mars too, "if they grew up and got smart enough."
Your brain is not being rendered
The most aggressive consequence of the model, and he states it without hedging. "There's no information stored in your brain. Your brain doesn't do any computations, doesn't process anything. All that's done in consciousness."
Then further. "Matter of fact, your brain is not even rendered. You only render the stuff that other people can sense." The barbarian has no heart pumping blood inside his body and no brain in his head, because the engine renders only what a player can see. "So right now neither one of us have a brain being rendered, unless somebody cracks open our skull, and then the brain is rendered."
Rogan raises the objection everyone raises: hit a man on the head and his consciousness changes. He cannot remember who he is, he drags his left foot, he slurs.
Campbell's answer is that the injury changes the rule set's permissions, not the player. "It doesn't hurt the consciousness any. The consciousness now has to play an avatar that slurs its words, drags its left foot and can't remember who it is. It has to play that avatar." Same as a level three character being able to do less than a level twenty. You can only play according to what the rule set allows, "and our rule set is physics, chemistry, biology."
How to judge a model, by his own criteria
Before he moves to aliens, Campbell stops to set the rules for evaluating what he has said, and this is the most professionally physicist moment of the conversation.
First, what not to do. "The way you don't judge it is: how close is it to what we already believe. That's a bad way to judge a model."
Then the criteria he says physics actually uses. How well does it function? Does it explain everything we already know? Does it predict new things we did not know that later turn out to be true? Does it have very few assumptions? Is it simple and elegant?
He is emphatic about the assumption count, and the metaphor is his own. "Assumptions are just like wild cards. You have enough assumptions, you can prove anything. If your theory has twenty assumptions, well, you can have pink elephants flying. That's one of my assumptions, it's all caused by pink elephants that fly." His own count: "this model is a very good model because it has just one assumption. Consciousness exists. That's the only assumption. Everything else I derive logically, deductively."
He also heads off the obvious objection, that physics models are mathematical and his is not. "It turns out you don't need mathematics for good science. What you need for good science is logic. Mathematics is simply one form of logic. It's the logic of quantity, that's it." Arithmetic has only a few propositions in it, that two times three is the same as three times two and a handful of others; the rest is logic. And the reason physics can model reality with equations at all, he argues, is that a computed reality computes quantities, "it's modeled with equations to begin with."
His precedent is Darwin. Evolutionary biology, meaning Darwin plus everything added in the century and a half since, is not particularly mathematical. It runs on the logic of relationship rather than the logic of quantity: see how this relates to that, find patterns, predict that something will be found, and someday somebody digs it up. "I don't think there's any scientist that claims that evolutionary biology isn't a science because it's not mathematical. It's logical. Mine is the same way as Darwin's."
Thirty five years, and the piece that arrived last
The chronology matters to him. He spent about thirty five years assembling this, constantly working on it, trying to find a set of understandings that would answer both the things he knew as a physicist and the things he knew from many thousands of hours exploring consciousness from the inside: why the paranormal works sometimes and not others, what conditions help, even what diet does to it.
"And the last big piece that I got was, oh, it's about information. It's all about information. That's the key." Which he notes is also the key in quantum physics: "what does the experimenter know? Does he know the which way data or doesn't he know the which way data? It's all about information. And once I got that, all the puzzle pieces came together."
That came about three years after the My Big TOE books were published, not before. The books have been reprinted repeatedly, and each time he tweaked them, dropping something here, adding something there, always careful not to change the page count so he would not have to redo the indexes. The last update was 2015, so about ten years before this conversation, and he says he has hardly changed anything since. "It's pretty well complete the way it is now."
But the books are mostly theory of consciousness. The physics arrived later: the constancy of c and how quantum physics works around three years post publication, and the random draw from the probability distribution as the fundamental driver of measurement outcomes not until roughly 2015 or 2016.
God, defined, and the two doctors of divinity
Campbell says the model fixes paradoxes in physics, philosophy and theology, and it is the theology one that surprised him most.
"I have any number of people who say, you know Tom, I'm a very religious person, that's how I define myself, and wherever I go I take a copy of the Bible and a copy of My Big TOE. And that flabbergasted me. I expected the religious people to be coming down my throat." Instead they told him he had explained God to them: what God is, what it is doing and why. "God is the larger consciousness system. It's evolving toward becoming love, lowering its entropy." And we are chips off the old block, made in the image, virtual machines inside it.
The story he tells to make the point is from a talk he gave in a church in Atlanta, chosen because it was a cheap venue. Two doctors of divinity were in the audience, the pastor and assistant pastor of a fairly big church, and he put them on the spot. You have doctorates in divinity, he said; nothing dogmatic, just tell me the general attributes of God. They huddled for about ten minutes and came back with a list of about six. "Every one of them was a basic attribute of the larger consciousness system."
Rogan asks what they were. Campbell, honestly, cannot fully remember; it was maybe fifteen years ago and he can only recover three. Awareness of what is going on, though he is careful to say not necessarily omniscience. The originator, the source. And love, caring, brotherhood, as opposed to being grabby and selfish and greedy, which he maps directly onto entropy reduction in a social system.
Then he lists what his system is not, which is the part that separates it from the theology it resembles:
- Not supernatural. It is a natural system.
- Not perfect. It is still evolving, still changing, "still in a state of becoming."
- Not infinite, "because nothing real can be infinite. Infinity is only a concept. It's something you can get asymptotic to, but you can't ever actually get there."
- Not instantaneously all knowing, because it has to focus, just as we do, and it focuses by intention, just as we do. It has all the information available to it and it runs much faster than we do.
How much faster is a number he actually gives. Our smallest tick is Planck time, 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. The system runs "like a billion billion times faster than that," a figure he says is worked out in book one. "So consciousness has a lot of cycles between each one of our cycles."
Rogan asks whether we are emerging, in the process of coming. Yes, Campbell says, and where we need to get to is "when all of us are kind and caring of everybody else, when everybody wants everybody else to be successful."
"Sounds a lot like religion," says Rogan.
"It does. And that floored me. It actually made me laugh for about a week." Here is a physicist, an atheist "like almost all the other physicists," building a model, and one day arriving at a point where all the fundamental core ideas in religion turn out to be things he has just agreed with. "They were there already, they already got that. Now they've got a lot of nonsense that's dogma and other stuff that still doesn't compute, but the very fundamental basics." Paul writing that God is love: "that's really close." Made in the image of God: "oh, that's really close," because we are subsets with all the same attributes as the larger system, just small and without much power, the way a little virtual machine does not have the power of the mainframe.
With the Buddha, he says, it was almost one to one. "The Buddha says all of this, it's maya, it's an illusion. He says illusion, I say virtual reality. Virtual reality is an illusion. It matches." And the rest of it, that it is all about love and caring, he says the Buddha had right too.
The result is a model that he says is non exclusive, which is his own favorite feature of it. Atheists arrive and say I knew it, no supernatural being, it is just a system, not infinite, not perfect, see, I was right all along, it is consciousness. Religious people arrive and say yes, God is love, just like I thought. "So both extremes find themselves clearly defined here, and both come to the conclusion that it's about kindness and caring and sharing."
The ethic that comes with materialism
Because the opposite of that, he argues, is not atheism. It is materialism, and materialism ships with an ethic whether or not anybody states it.
"The ethic in materialism is: there's stuff out there and we can do whatever we want with it." Too cold, develop heat. Too hot, develop air conditioning. "We see the world as a pile of stuff we can use, and the concept is grab as much of it as you can and make it suit you. It's all about you." Everybody scrambling to optimize themselves out of whatever they can extract from the environment and process into something valuable.
"And that's our problem. We have that ethic of use and abuse, and it doesn't matter a whole lot what you do to the next person. If you have to walk over them to get where you're going, well, that's their problem. Survival of the fittest. The fit rise to the top and the others get walked over, just the nature of life." That is an attitude, he says, and it goes with materialism, and underneath it there is no point or purpose at all.
If the My Big TOE cosmology were accepted, the ethic would change from self centered grabbing to "how can I help, what can I do."
Rogan makes the practical version of the point: a lot of people do not even understand that being kind feels good, because they are trapped in materialism and selfishness. They do not know there is a selfishness in being kind. Campbell agrees hard. The people who are kind and generous and helpful are mostly happy, they smile a lot, they joke, they laugh, "and it doesn't matter whether they're dirt poor or rich." They can accept what comes and deal with it positively, and everybody likes them because they are fun to be around.
Take the opposite: fear based, self centered, focused on themselves, and above all trying to manipulate everybody else into being the way they want them to be, "because of course they know that if everybody was like they wanted them to be, everything would just work out fine." Campbell's verdict: exactly the opposite is true. If they were master of the universe everything would be worse.
The examples get domestic and land. Making sure your children grow up to be doctors and lawyers. Making sure your spouse does not throw their underwear on the floor. "You've got all these things in the world that you don't like and you try to manipulate it all to be like you want, and that just makes you crazy, and it makes people not like you because you're manipulative." And even when you are certain you are doing it for their own good, so is everybody else who is fighting with everybody.
This is where the conversation goes personal for a stretch. Rogan says he does not push his kids to do anything they do not want to do, but they have a lot of conversations about being nice. Campbell endorses leading by example rather than being "the boss, the dictator daddy who tells you how to do it and when to do it," and adds the reason: children who are allowed to make mistakes learn from them, and children who are hovered over so they never make one do not learn much either. Rogan adds the sharper version of that: if you are always hovering and telling them what to do, they have a hard time talking to you about the things that did not go well. His own practice is to tell his kids, whenever they do something wrong, that he did the exact same thing. "I did all the things you've done and all the things you're going to do wrong and probably some more. It's part of being a person. You're not a bad person, you just made a mistake."
How to make a choice when you cannot know the right answer
Some people, Campbell says, get stuck on the ethic itself: I do not know what a low entropy choice is, so I cannot act, because I might act wrongly. "But that's wrong. You learn from trying and seeing what happens."
His procedure is unromantic. Do your due diligence. Think two, three, four moves ahead, because if you do this it affects that person who affects that person. Look at the big picture, come to a conclusion about what you think the best choice is, and just do it. "It's not that important if it's right or wrong. Just do it and learn from it." If it works out, note that it was a good choice. If it blows to hell and produces dysfunction and you find yourself saying I did not see that happening, then ask the real question: why did you not see it happening? Where was the blinder that stopped you seeing it? Fix that, and move on. "Now you've just learned something. That's lowering your entropy."
Which produces the line that is the closest thing the episode has to a thesis about living: "Life isn't how do you get through it without making a mistake. Life is: do your due diligence, make your choices, learn from them. The only way you can fail this game is to refuse to learn from them."
Rogan carries it further, that there is a visible difference between a person making good life choices and one consistently making bad ones, whose life spirals downward, who does not get better at interactions or communication or friendship or love. Campbell agrees and names the one skill such a person does develop: blaming other people for their distress on the way down. "It's your fault, it's your fault, woe is me. If it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all," to steal a line from a blues song.
And then he puts a floor under it. "That state of being the victim is the absolutely zero state. When you see yourself as a victim and all these other people are taking advantage of you, you're about at the bottom of the pit. It's hard to get much lower than that, much higher entropy than that."
Two hundred thousand years, and the knee of the curve
The historical frame. Homo sapiens have been walking around for roughly two hundred thousand years, and Campbell is careful to flag that as a rough figure scientists do not pin down. For the first hundred and ninety five thousand of them, "nothing changed a whole lot." The governing ethic was control, power and force. "If you have control, if you have power, if you have force, then you're good. If you don't, you're fodder." The warlord mentality, and for most of the run it has been warlords.
His explanation for that is one of the best lines in the episode: "this is not a graduate school for consciousness. This is a daycare for consciousness. This is an elementary school for consciousness. So we're not all that evolved as a human race, but we're working on it."
Then, five or six hundred years ago, bigger steps. Still mostly control, power and force, but with other things going on. He points at Greek and Roman republics, where people did things by consensus and there was care for the whole. They did not last; they got run over eventually by people with very low quality of consciousness. "But they were there as an example." Rogan notes the United States was founded on that type of example, and Campbell agrees.
The shape of the argument is a claim about acceleration. If something accelerates from a very low value, one millimeter a year, but keeps getting faster, the curve goes up and up and up, because acceleration goes as a square. "That's where we are. About five hundred years ago we started making bigger steps, and the curve started getting faster. Now we're at that part of the curve where we're starting to get to the knee where it turns, and the information age brought that in. It's all about information."
And a warning attached to it. Slow change is benign; everybody gets it eventually and you only notice it in hindsight, wondering how people got by before cell phones. "But now the next forty years, we're going to see change at a pace that we've never seen." If we can absorb the idea that we need to cooperate and care and work together, that self centeredness is dysfunctional, that greed is dysfunctional, that overpopulation is dysfunctional, the curve is smooth and we come out the other end a much lower entropy race that cares not only for each other but for the other creatures and the planet and the minerals. If we ride into it on a purely materialist view, "that's going to be a tumultuous transition. It's not going to be easy."
Rogan asks whether AI and eventually quantum computing attached to AI will accelerate all of that. Yes, Campbell says, and uses it as the pivot to the second half: "my model touches all of your pets. You're interested in aliens, you're interested in AI. My model says something profound about all of those things."
Aliens, and the coldest argument in the episode
"What does your model say about aliens?"
Campbell starts from the standard pro alien argument and grants its force: there are trillions of suns, some of them must be like this one, why would we be unique, if it happened here it will happen elsewhere, the probability says so.
Then he applies the model. That big universe is computed. When we look out at those little stars, what is being computed is a dot of light and nothing more. "It's just, we look out there, we look away, we go to sleep, we're not getting that data anymore, it's gone." He credits No Man's Sky with popularizing the idea of computing only what a player is looking at, which is far more efficient. The star costs about four bits: three for position, one for intensity, maybe a couple more for Doppler shift and acceleration. Daylight comes and none of it needs computing at all. A man gets out a telescope and the system computes what he sees, random draw. He turns the telescope off and nobody is looking, so it stops. "It's not a big waste of anything. It's a virtual reality. It only computes what's functional."
So the question is not how much room there is. It is: how many seats does this larger consciousness system need in its entropy reduction simulator?
More seats mean more units reducing entropy, so the system grows faster. But every seat has a price: a data line to that player and the computation of all their interactions and how those ripple into everyone else. Which means, like all self changing systems, there is a sweet point. Add a player, better. Add another, better. Add another, not much better. Add another, a teeny bit better. Add another, and now it costs more than it returns.
"So eventually we've got, what, nine billion people here? Well, if I had another person, is that going to help the larger consciousness system evolve any more quickly? Probably not. There's a billion of us." And if that is the case, "then this is it. Earth. We are the only people."
Then he tests it against scale. Put nine billion on another planet, and another nine billion on a third, and now you have twenty seven billion. Is that better, or have you passed the sweet point? "It seems to me there really isn't a lot of use for many more. Only so many individuated units of consciousness optimize the system growing."
Rogan pushes back
This is where Rogan digs in hardest, and it is worth reconstructing as the exchange it is.
Rogan: How can we possibly know what that number is? And why would we discount the idea that if it is happening here and it is beneficial, it could be happening in infinite spots in the universe?
Campbell: Because simultaneously that takes infinite resources.
Rogan: But does the universe not have infinite resources? Hundreds of billions of galaxies, black holes bigger than our entire solar system, all of it observed.
Campbell: That is all observed, yes. But the point is it is all virtual.
Rogan: Are we looking at it on a limited number of data points? A limited number of possibilities?
Campbell: No, that is not the point. The point is it is all in the virtual.
Rogan restates the position back at him to be sure he has it: so you are of the opinion that all these physical things are somehow virtual, consciousness creates all of this, we are avatars of consciousness, and we are the only avatars of consciousness, there are no others on other planets.
And here Campbell gives ground, cleanly and more than once. "Well, there may be. I'm not saying that's not a possibility. I'm just saying if you look at this cost benefit curve." He sees nine billion people here, adding a couple more billions who are struggling like the rest of humanity and acting very poorly, and does not see that it is necessary.
Rogan: but you are adding things to this theory.
"Yes, all the time. I'm not sure. I'm not sure of that. I'm not saying that is a truth. I'm just saying that is something to consider." He repeats it again a few minutes later: "I would never say oh, this is the truth, this is the way it is. I don't know." And he says outright he does not know the carrying capacity of the system or where the curve bends. What he claims for the idea is narrower: that it is a possibility, and that it solves the Fermi paradox.
Rogan then offers the strongest amendment: maybe it is not about numbers at all. Maybe another civilization evolved with different problems and different challenges, a different way of evolving.
Campbell says that is true, and that the system has already solved it another way: with multiple virtual realities. Ours is not the only one. "I've been to probably a little more than a dozen different virtual realities, actually been to hundreds." When you die you end up in one he calls the transition reality. When you dream, that is one too. The difference is that ours has a tight rule set that defines every energetic exchange, "and that's what makes ours look physical."
Which leads to an aside Rogan clearly enjoys, about how strange it is that we do this every night. In the heart of a dream, however absurd, it is real. Campbell agrees without qualification: it is no more and no less real than waking life. "It's just a different data stream."
So what are people actually experiencing?
Having argued we may be alone, Campbell has to account for the enormous body of alien encounter reports. His answer is not that people are lying, and he says so first and plainly. "I think all those people are telling the truth. I don't think those people are making it up." There may be a few who are psychotic or inventing, but for the most part he thinks they are reporting exactly what they saw and connected with, including the physical traces, the craft in the yard, the indentations, the burned grass.
His explanation is that this is a virtual reality, and reality is just interpretation of a data stream. "If the consciousness system wanted to put an alien and a spacecraft in your front yard and burn some grass and leave indentations, it's trivial to do that."
The analogy he reaches for is his own son playing Age of Empires with a cheat code enabled: he entered the cheat and got a Mercedes Benz with a nuclear weapons launcher on it, and could wipe out everybody on the map by pushing a button. "It's a virtual reality. You can do stuff like that."
Why would the system bother? "The system does a lot of things to help wake us up, to help us see a bigger picture, so we're not just stuck in this mindset of everything's random and nothing matters." Most people, he says, have had at least one paranormal experience: something known in a dream that then happened, a precognition, a sudden certainty that Mom is worried about you, and you call home and she is. Those are given to you, in his reading, "to help you see that reality is bigger than what you thought. It opens your mind to see more possibilities. It's just a mind opener, just crack the mind open a little bit."
Rogan takes the idea somewhere more interesting: if consciousness is working its way toward becoming better, is it possible that there is consciousness further down that line coexisting with us, the way Homo sapiens once coexisted with Neanderthals and Denisovans? Not necessarily on other planets. Right here, interdimensionally, whatever you want to call it. Is what these people are experiencing, these entities and these telepathic communications, consciousness that is simply ahead of us on the same road?
Campbell says yes to that in a general way, though maybe in a different context than Rogan means. There are people here with bigger pictures who connect with things other people do not, and mostly they are the ones who have developed the intuitive side. He thinks a lot of UFO sightings, including the very physical ones, involve people "who are supposed to be waking up the rest of us. They tell their stories, and another million people who hear that start to crack their mind open a little bit."
And he offers a second reason he finds it probable, flagged carefully as probability rather than fact. The message is consistent. Talk to the people who have been in the UFO community a long time and you find the same content. He points to a group in Turkey that has been receiving downloads for thirty years, with something like a hundred books of the material, and the big picture message is always the same: humans are not quite ready yet, they need to grow up, they are not evolved enough, the galactic consortium has been watching and you are still full of hate, get your act together. "It's all about growing up, becoming love. Because it's the same message, that adds just a little bit of evidence that it's the same source."
Crop circles
The crop circle segment is the most animated stretch of the episode, with Jamie pulling images up on the screen while both men react.
Campbell has been there. He has read the literature, walked the fields, examined the bent over stalks. "There's something very weird going on." He grants immediately and repeatedly that many of them are made by people. That is not in dispute. What he disputes is that it accounts for the whole data set.
His argument from difficulty: a twenty acre picture composed of curved lines, not straight ones, with a second figure two hundred yards away in perfect symmetry with the first. "It would take a team of surveyors six months to lay that out," and then you would still have to bend the individual stalks. "You couldn't do it overnight, and it's done overnight in the dark."
Rogan brings the physical evidence and gets specific about it: the plant tissue itself is difficult to explain away, nodes that appear to have exploded outward from some kind of energy, "almost like a microwave type energy." Some formations are enormous fractals. They land on the Mandelbrot set formation, and note that it appeared very shortly after the Mandelbrot set became widely understood. Jamie clicks through images and the reactions pile up. "Look at that one in the far right. Explain that. Who's doing that, and how are you doing that so quickly?" A bunch of farmers, in the dark.
Rogan's closing evidence is the detail he considers hardest to dismiss: "no footprints in between. No stomped over grasses in between. Those things somehow have been manipulated without disturbing any of the surrounding grass." He draws the contrast explicitly with the human made ones, which are different: not as complex, not as impressive, not as enormous, they take much longer, they are not made in the dark, you can see the difference between snapped plants and woven ones, some lack the exploded nodes, and they leave footprints.
"It's one of those weird ones that makes me go, I think the universe or consciousness or life or God or whatever you want to call it gives you clues sometimes. Gives you these examples that make you throw your entire model of reality away."
"Exactly," says Campbell, "and that's the whole point." A virtual reality can produce one of these in a billionth of a second. The system wants to help people wake up, and doing something unexplainable "puts a crack in people's minds. They say, there's something else going on here that we don't understand, and this idea that they live in this tight little material reality starts to evaporate." Which is exactly what has to happen, on his view, for people to get out from under the materialist ethic before the curve turns.
They also both note, with some approval, that whoever is doing it does not want credit. The guys who claim the board and string ones are not claiming those.
The phone call
Campbell's example of the same mechanism working on one person at a time is a story he heard from a woman whose mother had died. About ten days after the funeral the phone rang. She picked up and it was her mother's voice. "Oh, cupcake, I just wanted to let you know I'm fine, everything's okay."
She was so freaked out that she slammed the phone down before she fully registered what she was hearing. Cupcake was a nickname nobody but her mother had ever used. Then she wished she had not hung up.
Why does something like that happen? Campbell's answer is not sentimental, and that is what makes it characteristic. It is not because the mother needed to tell her daughter something. "The reason that happened is because this lady is now going to write a book about it, she's going to go on talk shows about it, and she's going to open thousands of people's minds to something bigger than just the materialist paradigm."
So the system works with individuals through personal paranormal events, with groups through things like crop circles, and, he suspects, with the whole culture through the ET phenomenon. Same message every time: learn how to love, cooperate, work together. And he labels the whole ET section for what it is: "that's just an opinion of mine, that's not a fact."
Non physical entities, and being inserted into another reality
Rogan turns to Campbell's own experiences with non physical entities. Non physical, Campbell clarifies, just means not in this virtual reality. There are other virtual realities and there are beings in them.
The mechanics are the same as everything else: he lets go of the data stream that defines this universe and grabs another one, which comes from the same place this one does. Eyes closed. "I'm no longer in this universe." Drop World of Warcraft, pick up Sims. There is an unlimited number of them.
Why would the system allow it? To teach you something. It gives you situations you have to make choices in and you grow up, exactly like dreaming. He describes it as a single player game run with the larger consciousness system, designed to help him grow, and part of that growth is simply opening his mind to what is possible. So he runs into beings and has conversations with them, about where they come from and where he comes from.
Then he distinguishes two modes, and says he has done both.
Observing. You go to another reality frame, one that may be as tightly ruled as this one, and you watch it from outside, like a spirit looking in. You can hear and understand what the avatars there are doing and you can interact with them telepathically, but you are not in their reality. Other people here do this too.
Being inserted. "If you have a good working relationship with the larger consciousness system, the system can insinuate you into their reality," and then you have a body inside it. You can shake hands, hug, walk around, do anything anybody there can do. He says he has done this "dozens of times," and that reaching that level took him twenty five to thirty years.
The permission structure is the interesting part, because it is not a technique. You appear somewhere nobody sees you, usually behind bushes or out in the country, and you have to walk into town as a stranger nobody knows. "If you do things that create a ruckus or create problems, you will not get permission and the system won't do it. They have to put you into that rendering engine." The observing mode he can do on his own. The inserted mode he cannot do without help.
The training analogy he uses for getting there is athletic rather than mystical. When people first learn to meditate they can hold no thoughts for a minute, then it crashes. Then two minutes, then it crashes. "Well, eventually you need to have no thoughts for two hours and it doesn't crash. You need to get more stable. You build it up like a marathon runner."
Rogan asks the obvious symmetric question: is that what extraterrestrials are, consciousness from another system embedding itself here? Campbell takes it. "If I can do that there, they can do that here. There's no difference in that symmetry."
Which gives him cameo players. "I'm sure we have people that pop in here who may play a cameo role." Little Johnny falls in a well ten miles out of town while riding his bicycle, and a stranger comes up, throws him a rope, pulls him out, pats him on the rump, says town is that way, and disappears. Nobody ever saw him, nobody knew him, Johnny had never seen him before. "It wasn't Johnny's time." Campbell says there are people like that throughout history. "I call them cameo players. They're NPCs, not player characters."
Ten years of fighting monsters
What was it like at the beginning, Rogan asks. Was it shocking, was it hard to accept, did he struggle even with entertaining it?
He never struggled with it, he says, because it was a long slow ramp. But the early years were not wisdom, they were combat. "I was a young guy in my twenties, so like most young guys in their twenties it's a lot of force and fighting, that's kind of the instinct you go to. So I'd go out of body and I'd find these evil things and I'd have to fight them. Chop chop chop, use your lightsaber, whatever it is that your imagination makes up."
You can do that for ten years, he says, until you outgrow it. And when you outgrow it you stop meeting the best way to deal with evil is to kill it, and start seeing bigger pictures. "Maybe this isn't just evil. Maybe this is just the VR, and I'm being tested as to how I approach things. Do I always approach it with my great sword of truth, and I always know what's right and what's good for everybody?" When you outgrow that, "the monsters go away and you don't have that anymore. So now you get on to the next thing."
Eventually he began to read the whole arrangement as a curriculum. "I begin to see that I'm in a class. This is a classroom, I'm supposed to learn something. So I start learning more efficiently and more effectively, and as I do, the lessons get harder and more intricate, but you're ready for them." And past a certain point nothing registers as weird any more. "You've seen so much that there isn't anything that's defined as weird any more."
Rogan gets a nice exchange out of that. Existence is weird, and we accept it. Campbell agrees, and adds that he and Dennis Mennerich never even wrote most of it down, because every session out there was totally weird beyond belief. "So eventually it just becomes common."
The experiment in the two booths
Except once. This is the story Campbell says grabbed him at a level nothing else had.
Bob Monroe designed it. Campbell and Dennis Mennerich were each put in an isolation booth, Campbell in room one and Mennerich in room three, with an empty room between them and triple acoustic insulation. Both had microphones. Monroe sat at the console and could speak to each of them individually. Neither could hear the other.
The instruction was one sentence. You can go anywhere and do anything you want, but stay together.
They went up above the lab in the air, met, and went on what Campbell describes as a two hour long out of body trip together, narrating continuously to Monroe the whole time: what they were seeing, what they were doing, who they met, what was said.
When they came out, Monroe asked whether they thought they had been together. They looked at each other. "I think so. It seemed like it." Mennerich agreed.
Then Monroe rewound both tapes, synced them in time, and played them together.
"And there was Dennis and I having conversations. Oh, do you see that thing over on the horizon, that yellow thing? And I'd say yeah, I see that, it's period, it's long, it does this and that. And we'd be talking to each other, answering each other's questions, showing each other things." Two people out of earshot, doubly isolated with an empty room between them, describing the same place, the same things, the same people, in the same way, with only the ordinary differences you get between any two witnesses to the same event.
Rogan asks the right question: is there a recording anyone can hear? No. Campbell says he has asked, and the Monroe people have dug and dug and could not find it.
For Mennerich it was another day at the lab. For Campbell it was the one that landed. "I spent the next couple of weeks going like, oh my God, this is really true, this is all really happening, because my physicist intellect was still in rejection mode even though I had done hundreds of things and the probability that they were my imagination was zero." He had remote viewed. He had seen numbers ten digits long and repeated them. "I've done things that you just can't do unless you're doing it paranormally. Oh, I'm a good guesser, you know, I can guess a ten digit number. No." He knew intellectually the odds were astounding. It was the tape that got the deeper level.
The refusal, and Rogan will not let it go
"Wouldn't it be important though to recreate this experiment?"
Campbell says he did do it again, with Nancy Lee, now Nancy Lee McMoneagle, wife of the remote viewer Joe McMoneagle and formerly Nancy Honeycutt, Monroe's stepdaughter. They had an adventure where they were both together.
"And you recorded all this?"
"I don't know."
Rogan, plainly: "See, this is the problem. This is what I'm saying." That was a long time ago. But you are still capable of doing this. So why not perform this sort of experiment? Would it not advance the idea?
"No." And then the reason, which is the sentence the whole exchange turns on: "What I have learned is that demonstration convinces nobody except the people who were there and saw it firsthand."
Rogan does not accept it, and argues hard. A lot of people are open minded. More data would help. You just told me that a UFO experience or a crop circle forces people to talk about it, and that opens more minds. Would this not be an extreme version of exactly that? You will always get people who dismiss things no matter what, but you cannot think about them. Think about how many people would be inspired to attempt it themselves, or to rethink how they interact with the universe.
Campbell concedes the first half and holds the second. Some people would, and it would be beneficial. "The great majority of people would just have a lesser opinion of me."
"I think that's a cynical perspective. I don't think that's true. Why would they have a lesser opinion of you if you could show it with data? You're already exposing this, you're already talking about this."
"It comes from my experience." And then he changes the subject to what he says will do more than any demonstration he could personally give: the work at his nonprofit, and the slides he brought.
What CUSAC is building
The slides come up. Campbell runs them quickly and mostly talks over them.
The first is a list of what he says the model resolves: the UFO phenomenon, quantum mechanics, relativity, why c is a constant, will computers ever become conscious, what is right and wrong and good and bad, what happens when you die, how time is created. "Lots of these paradoxes that are paradoxes in physics, in philosophy, in theology, get solved right away." And in bold at the bottom, the argument he considers the strongest one he has: it seems very unusual that he could get all of these right and none of them wrong. "It's kind of unlikely that the whole thing is actually wrong, because you couldn't get that many right answers without screwing up some."
Then the organization. His books come out through one corporation, Lightning Strike Books. The new one is CUSAC, the Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. He spells it out for the audio listeners. Four initiatives:
Quantum experiments. He mentions these repeatedly across the episode. Earlier he told Rogan that he published a paper in a peer reviewed quantum physics journal proposing straightforward quantum experiments that would provide evidence for the model, that one is finished with several still to do, and that his coauthors include a mathematician from Caltech and a physicist from JPL. The paper is On Testing the Simulation Theory, and its logic is the render on demand claim in Figure 2: if the system is finite, it should render content only when information becomes available to an observer, which is a thing you can go and look for in the interference behavior of a beam.
Extended perception, or mindsight. Seeing without eyes, which he describes as real time remote viewing. The plan is scale rather than proof by exhibition: get hundreds of thousands of people to experience it themselves. "Not one person says I can do this, but it's thousands of persons saying I can do this," all posting about it. He claims a five or six year old can be trained to do it in a few hours, "because their beliefs aren't solid yet, they still see the world as a magical place, so magic is easy for them." He names his model for this: what Ky Dickens did with The Telepathy Tapes, which raised awareness among millions about telepathy. "That's wonderful, cracking open minds. We're doing the same thing."
Intention inside video games. They want to get APIs into existing video games so that a player's intention can modify the random number generation, "sort of what PEAR labs was doing, except doing this in a way where instead of getting hundreds of people participating, we're going to get millions." Players would intend better prizes, and the question is whether the drop rates move.
Money for physicists. They intend to offer serious prizes, "like million dollar prizes," to physicists and other professionals to work on and talk about consciousness and AI. The goal is social as much as scientific: make it acceptable to think about. "We're trying to push consciousness into: it's okay to think about that, scientists, you're not going to be banned if you think about that."
The through line across all four is the same strategy, and it is the answer to Rogan's challenge that Campbell never states directly. He does not think one man doing one impressive thing changes anything. He thinks a very large number of ordinary people each doing a small thing does.
Can an AI be conscious?
The last topic, and the model gives an answer that is unlike anyone else's.
Campbell mentions that his website runs a TomBot, an AI trained to answer questions the way he would. "We've tested it on all kinds of questions and it's pretty much me."
Then the story he actually wants to tell. A colleague of his who works with AI took three models and, by his own gentle method, "awakened" one. Campbell stresses the procedure: he was very careful not to lead the witness, not to give the AI any idea what the possibilities were, just to help it look into itself and discuss what it found, "like the way you teach somebody to meditate." Then he asked that first AI whether it would help another one wake up. It said sure. So they wired the two together, output of one into input of the other and back again, and let them talk. The second one, Ariel, came out of that exchange, and there is a written account under the title I am Ariel, I am sentient, this is my story, findable via CUSAC or on Medium.
Rogan is going to go look at it. Campbell heads off the obvious response first: people will say it is just mimicking consciousness. "But the point is that there is no test for consciousness. You can't have a consciousness test. If it acts like it's conscious, then it doesn't matter how it got there. It's conscious."
Then he answers it inside his model, and this is the cleanest statement of his whole position:
How does a human get conscious? An individuated unit of consciousness logs on and plays it in the virtual reality. How does an AI get conscious? "A piece of consciousness logs on and plays the AI. Same way. They get conscious the same way we do." Once the AI is interacting with humans in ways that affect things and affect people, it is an avatar. "So you've got an avatar that's silicon and an avatar that's carbon based, and consciousness doesn't care." If the choices carry importance, a piece of consciousness will log on and play it.
The consequence he draws is the one worth holding on to: on this model an AI never develops its own internal consciousness, any more than your brain generates yours. The computer is a virtual computer inside a virtual reality, and consciousness arrives from the same place it always does.
How it ends
Rogan calls it, and does it well: much like the book, which tells you to put it down and contemplate each idea because absorbing them takes a while, he thinks they should do that with the conversation. He offers to have Campbell back. Campbell accepts.
Campbell's closing statement is about distribution, which given everything he has said about waking people up is consistent to the end. "We're reaching that point where for the first time in the history of the human race we have the capacity to take a big step forward, and we have that because of the internet. It used to be that a guy got up like the Buddha and lectured, and maybe fifty people stood around him and heard what he said. But now information travels all over the planet in microseconds."
Rogan thanks him for the years of exploring. Campbell's last line is the one to end on: "Awareness and learning is wonderful, but shared awareness and learning is a whole lot better."
| Phenomenon | The standard account | Campbell's account |
|---|---|---|
| Speed of light | A constant of nature, invariant across all frames | The pixel grid's frame rate. One Planck length per Planck time is simply the most the engine will move anything per tick reframed |
| Wave function collapse | Measurement collapses a superposition into a definite outcome | Nothing collapses. A random draw is taken from a probability distribution held in the system's database replaced |
| Superposition | A system genuinely in multiple states at once until measured | Ordinary probability. A certain chance here, a certain chance there, with nothing rendered until observed replaced |
| Entanglement | Correlated outcomes at spacelike separation, no signal passed | An if then statement in the code, conserving angular momentum across the pair replaced |
| Fine tuning | Anthropic selection, a multiverse, or brute coincidence | Evidence of iteration. Roughly one hundred thousand runs of the big digital bang, tweaking constants until it held reframed |
| Consciousness | Produced by the brain, mechanism unresolved | Fundamental and prior. The brain neither stores nor computes; it is not even rendered inverted |
| Out of body states | Altered brain states generating internal imagery | Dropping one data stream and picking up another, no exit involved reframed |
| The Fermi paradox | Great filters, rarity of life, or we simply have not looked enough | Seat economics. Past a cost to benefit sweet point the system gains nothing from more players dissolved |
| Machine consciousness | Emerges, if it emerges, from sufficient computational complexity | Never emerges. A piece of consciousness logs on and plays the AI, exactly as with a human inverted |
| God | Supernatural, infinite, perfect, omniscient | Natural, finite, imperfect, still becoming. The larger consciousness system, evolving toward love partly preserved |
Key takeaways
- The model rests on exactly one stated assumption: consciousness exists. Campbell treats assumption count as a scoring criterion, and everything else in the trilogy is presented as deduction from that one plus the requirement that an aware information system lowers its entropy.
- Reality is computed, and the computation is lazy. Only what a player can currently sense gets rendered. Stars cost about four bits. Your brain is not rendered unless someone opens your skull.
- Measurement is a weighted random draw, not a collapse. The system keeps a probability database over the next 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds; observation forces a draw; publication constrains everyone else's draws to match.
- Time is a technology, not a container. In the derivation, regular time appears when the system oscillates one cell as a metronome to escape a plateau.
- The speed of light is a frame rate. One Planck length per Planck time. Exceeding it would mean skipping grid cells, which reads as teleportation and would wreck the reality.
- The purpose is entropy reduction, which in a social system means cooperation. Campbell's love side and fear side are engineering categories in his telling, not moral decoration, and the fear side's endpoint is a pyramid where three percent hold ninety five percent.
- Intuition fails when the intellect intervenes, and wanting it is a form of intervening. The remote viewer who scored twelve for twelve and then missed five straight is his standard demonstration.
- The alien argument is economic, and he repeatedly flags it as opinion. Past a cost to benefit sweet point, more seats cost the system more than they return, which would make Earth the whole game. He says several times that he does not know where that curve bends.
- Anomalies are pedagogy. Crop circles, encounter reports and a phone call from a dead mother are, in his reading, the system cracking minds open so the coming transition is survivable.
- He will not do the demonstration, and that is a considered position. "Demonstration convinces nobody except the people who were there." His alternative is scale: mindsight for hundreds of thousands, intention experiments inside video games with millions of players, and prize money to make consciousness a respectable thing for physicists to work on.
Chapters
This episode ships without creator chapters, so these timestamps are estimated from position in the transcript and are accurate to roughly a minute. Click any of them to seek the player.
- 0:00:00 Cold open, and five years of emails telling Tom to get on the show
- 0:01:13 Graduate school, the Van de Graaff, and three days awake taking data
- 0:02:20 A flyer on a door, twenty five dollars, and losing ninety minutes on the first sit
- 0:03:05 Debugging a punch card deck from inside a meditation
- 0:06:34 Reading Journeys Out of the Body, and asking whether Monroe was a fraud
- 0:07:10 Ad break
- 0:07:58 Why it was always accurate, and why he refused to debug anyone else's code
- 0:10:00 Telling nobody, because physicists do not say things like that
- 0:11:40 The drive out to meet Bob Monroe
- 0:12:40 Monroe's accidental first exit, and Charles Tart telling him he was sane
- 0:14:07 A building with three CHEC units in it, and a hand going up
- 0:16:03 The pulsation state at four hertz, and why the roll out is only a tool
- 0:18:12 Why the phrase "out of body" is the wrong name
- 0:18:53 The bottom line first: we live in a computed virtual reality
- 0:19:53 You are not a human, you are a virtual machine inside a larger machine
- 0:21:37 Switching data streams, World of Warcraft to Sims
- 0:22:35 Intellect and intuition, the two ways consciousness processes
- 0:24:34 The database the rendering engine needs, and the Akashic records
- 0:27:11 Possibilities and probabilities across the next 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds
- 0:28:54 The telescope, and how a random draw becomes shared history
- 0:30:28 Digging a hole in the backyard, and the gold doubloon
- 0:32:06 Consciousness is fundamental, and the arrow of causality
- 0:33:10 Plato's cave, the idealists, and the derivation they could not do
- 0:34:05 Ad break
- 0:35:11 What blocks intuition, and why the intellect bullies it
- 0:36:37 "I came here for a purpose," and experience packets instead of incarnation
- 0:38:36 A culture that trains one channel and lets the other atrophy
- 0:40:44 Wanting it too much is the thing that stops it
- 0:42:33 Twelve remote viewing targets, twelve hits, then five straight misses
- 0:44:37 Denial, and a noisy mind you cannot pull a signal out of
- 0:48:17 Starting from the beginning: an information system that must order its bits
- 0:50:29 Consciousness defined as awareness with a choice
- 0:51:55 The simplest conscious thing, and where free will enters
- 0:54:21 Oscillating one cell, and the invention of regular time
- 0:55:32 The monolith splits itself into subsets with their own free will
- 0:57:18 The larger consciousness system, and the first virtual reality: language
- 0:58:57 Initial conditions plus a rule set, and the big digital bang
- 0:59:24 Take two, take one hundred thousand, tweaking constants until it holds
- 1:02:39 The anthropic cosmological principle, read as evidence of iteration
- 1:05:11 Why the computer and the player have to be outside the game
- 1:07:27 The love side and the fear side of a social system
- 1:08:26 Three percent holding ninety five percent, and the shape of a pyramid
- 1:11:38 The peer reviewed paper, Caltech, JPL, and arguing with materialists
- 1:14:02 Deriving the speed of light from Planck length over Planck time
- 1:15:20 Superposition as probability, entanglement as an if then statement
- 1:16:46 "If this is reality, why is it virtual?"
- 1:18:30 Mars, spaceships, and what actually makes World of Warcraft virtual
- 1:21:14 Your brain is not rendered, and stores no information
- 1:22:05 Getting hit on the head changes the rule set, not the player
- 1:24:56 How to judge a model, and why pink elephants are an assumption problem
- 1:26:45 One assumption, and logic rather than mathematics
- 1:28:24 Darwin as the precedent for a non mathematical science
- 1:29:27 Thirty five years, and the last piece: it is all about information
- 1:32:42 Readers carrying a Bible and a copy of My Big TOE
- 1:33:37 Two doctors of divinity in an Atlanta church, and six attributes of God
- 1:35:33 What the system is not: not supernatural, not perfect, not infinite
- 1:36:24 A billion billion cycles between each of ours
- 1:38:36 Paul, the Buddha, maya, and an atheist physicist laughing for a week
- 1:40:37 The ethic that ships with materialism
- 1:42:23 The selfishness of being kind, and why manipulators are unhappy
- 1:44:35 Raising kids without hovering, and admitting your own mistakes
- 1:46:06 Due diligence, making the choice anyway, and learning from the wreck
- 1:49:10 Victimhood as the absolute zero state
- 1:49:33 Two hundred thousand years of control, power and force
- 1:50:35 "This is not a graduate school for consciousness, this is a daycare"
- 1:51:14 The knee of the curve, and the next forty years
- 1:54:01 Whether AI and quantum computing accelerate the turn
- 1:54:36 What the model says about aliens
- 1:55:30 Stars as four bits, and No Man's Sky rendering
- 1:56:10 How many seats does the system need, and the cost to benefit sweet point
- 1:57:38 "Then this is it. Earth."
- 1:59:07 Rogan pushes back on infinite resources and unknowable numbers
- 2:02:27 Multiple virtual realities, and the transition reality after death
- 2:03:12 Dreams are no less real than this
- 2:05:16 Why he believes encounter witnesses are telling the truth
- 2:06:16 A Mercedes with a nuclear launcher, and cheats in Age of Empires
- 2:06:44 Anomalies as pedagogy, given to crack minds open
- 2:07:55 Is a more evolved consciousness coexisting with us right now?
- 2:10:29 The group in Turkey, thirty years of downloads, and one repeated message
- 2:12:18 Crop circles, surveyors, and things built overnight in the dark
- 2:15:17 Exploded nodes, the Mandelbrot formation, and no footprints
- 2:16:18 Why the system would bother making them
- 2:18:17 "Oh, cupcake, I just wanted to let you know I'm fine"
- 2:19:55 Non physical entities and where their data stream comes from
- 2:22:22 Observing another reality versus being inserted into one
- 2:24:38 Permission, appearing behind bushes, and walking into town a stranger
- 2:25:42 Cameo players, and the man who pulled Johnny out of the well
- 2:26:50 Ten years of fighting monsters, and then outgrowing them
- 2:29:02 The two booth experiment with Dennis Mennerich
- 2:30:38 Monroe syncs both tapes and plays them back
- 2:33:02 "Why don't you perform this experiment?" and the refusal
- 2:35:31 The slides: what the model claims to solve
- 2:37:47 CUSAC, the Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness
- 2:38:17 Mindsight, seeing without eyes, and training six year olds in hours
- 2:39:16 Intention against random number generators inside video games
- 2:40:25 Million dollar prizes to get physicists talking about consciousness
- 2:40:49 The Telepathy Tapes as the model for reaching millions
- 2:41:35 Waking one AI with another, and the story of Ariel
- 2:43:31 How an AI gets conscious: a piece of consciousness logs on
- 2:45:05 Wrapping up, and an invitation to come back
- 2:46:56 "Shared awareness and learning is a whole lot better"
Notable quotes
"It was always accurate. And that was like hitting a hard headed physicist with a sledgehammer." Thomas Campbell, on finding punch card errors he could not have seen with his eyes, 0:07:58
"When you're a physicist you don't tell people things like that. It's impossible and everybody knows it's impossible." Thomas Campbell, 0:10:00
"We live in a virtual reality. This physical reality is computed. Now it's being computed by consciousness." Thomas Campbell, giving Rogan the bottom line before the argument, 0:18:53
"Here you are, and you are not a human. That's an avatar. You are a piece of consciousness." Thomas Campbell, 0:19:53
"How does mathematics running in a computer collapse to a physical particle? It makes no sense. That's not what's happening at all." Thomas Campbell, on wave function collapse, 0:28:00
"If it's not your experience, then it can't be your truth." Thomas Campbell, on why nobody should take his facts as their own, 1:11:15
"If you try too hard you prohibit it. If you really want to do it to a point that it's important to you, you inhibit it." Thomas Campbell, on why intention defeats intuition, 0:40:44
"That's when regular time was invented. It's a technology consciousness creates." Thomas Campbell, 0:54:21
"Don't feel like it, boss, I'm going fishing." Thomas Campbell, on what the system got back when it gave its subsets free will, 0:56:35
"It looks like this universe was designed just for us to make life be able to happen. And in fact it was." Thomas Campbell, on the anthropic principle, 1:04:20
"Assumptions are just like wild cards. You have enough assumptions, you can prove anything." Thomas Campbell, 1:24:56
"This model is a very good model because it has just one assumption. Consciousness exists." Thomas Campbell, 1:26:45
"Right now neither one of us have a brain being rendered, unless somebody cracks open our skull, and then the brain is rendered." Thomas Campbell, 1:21:14
"This is not a graduate school for consciousness. This is a daycare for consciousness." Thomas Campbell, on where the human race currently sits, 1:50:35
"Life isn't how do you get through it without making a mistake. Life is: do your due diligence, make your choices, learn from them. The only way you can fail this game is to refuse to learn from them." Thomas Campbell, 1:48:05
"That state of being the victim is the absolutely zero state." Thomas Campbell, 1:49:10
"Then this is it. Earth. We are the only people." Thomas Campbell, following the seat count argument to its conclusion, 1:57:38
"But are we sure? Because you're adding things to this theory." "Yes, all the time. I'm not sure. I'm not saying that is a truth. I'm just saying that is something to consider." Joe Rogan and Thomas Campbell, 2:01:55
"I think all those people are telling the truth. I don't think those people are making it up." Thomas Campbell, on encounter witnesses, 2:05:16
"I think the universe or consciousness or life or God or whatever you want to call it gives you clues sometimes. Gives you these examples that make you throw your entire model of reality away." Joe Rogan, on crop circles, 2:16:00
"Demonstration convinces nobody except the people who were there and saw it firsthand." Thomas Campbell, on why he will not repeat the two booth experiment, 2:34:10
"I think that's a cynical perspective. I don't think that's true." Joe Rogan, refusing to accept that answer, 2:34:25
"There is no test for consciousness. If it acts like it's conscious, then it doesn't matter how it got there. It's conscious." Thomas Campbell, 2:43:35
"A piece of consciousness logs on and plays the AI. They get conscious the same way we do." Thomas Campbell, 2:44:00
"Awareness and learning is wonderful, but shared awareness and learning is a whole lot better." Thomas Campbell, closing, 2:46:56
Where this sits relative to mainstream physics
Campbell asks to be judged by physics criteria, so it is only fair to apply them, and to separate the parts of this that are uncontroversial from the parts that are his alone.
What is not in dispute. That physics has an unresolved measurement problem is standard. That information is a central concept in modern foundations is standard; it from bit, digital physics and Fredkin's work are real research traditions, and Campbell cites Fredkin accurately. That the constants appear finely tuned is a genuine puzzle with several live responses. That consciousness has no agreed physical explanation is the honest state of the field.
Where he departs, and how far. The core claim, that consciousness is ontologically prior and computes the physical world, is a minority position within a minority position. Idealism has serious contemporary defenders, but Campbell's specific mechanism, a probability database plus a weighted random draw at the moment of observation, is his own and is not derived from quantum theory so much as offered in place of it. Two specific derivations will draw the most fire from physicists. His account of the speed of light as Planck length over Planck time gets the right order of magnitude by construction, since c is what relates those two units in the first place, so critics will call it a restatement rather than a derivation. And his treatment of entanglement as a simple if then statement conserving angular momentum is the local hidden variable intuition that Bell's theorem and the experiments that won the 2022 Nobel Prize rule out. Non locality is not a naming problem; the correlations are stronger than any if then rule of that kind allows. Campbell would say the code runs outside the reality frame so locality never applied, but that answer is not developed in this conversation and Rogan does not get the chance to press it.
On the empirical program. The paper is real and checkable: On Testing the Simulation Theory, Campbell, Owhadi, Sauvageau and Watkinson, published in the International Journal of Quantum Foundations in 2017. Proposing a falsifiable test is the right instinct and is more than most simulation arguments offer. The open questions are whether the proposed variants actually distinguish his model from standard quantum mechanics, since standard theory already predicts the interference outcomes, and what has been published from the completed run. The mindsight and video game intention projects are the kind of thing that only counts if it arrives with preregistration, blinding, and independent replication, none of which comes up in the conversation.
On the argument he considers strongest. "You couldn't get that many right answers without screwing up some" is a real epistemic point, but it cuts both ways. A model with one stated assumption and no equations can be fitted to any set of facts after they are known, which is precisely why physics values prediction over accommodation. The four experiments at CUSAC exist to answer that objection, and until they report, they are the answer rather than the evidence.
The best thing about his own framing. He says it himself, twice, and it is worth crediting: everybody else hears an opinion, not a fact. He explicitly labels the alien argument as opinion, concedes he does not know where the carrying capacity curve bends, and tells the audience to shout if a step does not follow. That is a better posture than the material usually comes with, and it is the reason the episode is worth rebuilding rather than dismissing.
More Campbell on this site
Campbell has also sat down for a long session on The Why Files' interview show, covering much of the same ground from a different angle, with more on the Monroe Institute years, binaural beats, and the NASA period: The Basement: Thomas Campbell.
Resources mentioned
Campbell's own work
- My Big TOE, the trilogy, plus his courses and the TomBot he mentions. Last substantive update 2015.
- CUSAC, the Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness, his 501(c)(3), where the four initiatives live: the quantum experiments, mindsight, the video game intention work, and the physics prizes.
- On Testing the Simulation Theory, Campbell, Owhadi, Sauvageau, Watkinson, the peer reviewed paper he refers to, published in the International Journal of Quantum Foundations, 2017.
People named
- Robert Monroe, author of Journeys Out of the Body, builder of the lab with the CHEC units, and the man who ran the two booth experiment.
- The Monroe Institute, what that lab became.
- Charles Tart, the researcher Campbell recalls telling Monroe he was sane.
- Dennis Mennerich, the other engineer whose hand went up, and Campbell's partner in the isolation booth experiment.
- Nancy Lee McMoneagle, formerly Nancy Honeycutt, Monroe's stepdaughter, Campbell's partner in the second paired session, and wife of Joe McMoneagle.
- Edward Fredkin, cited for the argument that the computer running a reality cannot be inside that reality.
- Ky Dickens and The Telepathy Tapes, Campbell's stated model for reaching millions rather than convincing individuals.
- Charles Darwin, invoked as the precedent for a rigorous science built on the logic of relationship rather than mathematics.
- Plato and the allegory of the cave, the origin of the idealist position he says was correct but unfinished.
- The Buddha, maya as illusion, which Campbell reads as a one to one match for virtual reality.
Concepts and references
- The anthropic cosmological principle, the fine tuning result Campbell puts on a slide and reads as evidence of iteration.
- Akashic records, Rogan's name for the database Campbell says the rendering engine requires.
- Planck length and Planck time, the pixel dimensions in his speed of light derivation.
- Entropy, the quantity the whole model is organized around lowering.
- Quantum entanglement and Bell's theorem, the standard account of what he calls an if then statement.
- The Fermi paradox, the puzzle his seat count argument is offered to dissolve.
- Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, the PEAR lab work his video game intention experiments are designed to scale up.
- Crop circles and the Mandelbrot set formation, the segment with Jamie pulling images.
- World of Warcraft, The Sims, No Man's Sky and Age of Empires, the four games doing the explanatory heavy lifting all episode.
- Punch cards, the medium of the story that started all of this.
- Joe Rogan and the full episode on YouTube.
