Review of Tom Campbell's My Big TOE

I agree with him on some basic metaphysical points, namely the principles of idealism, which are not new. But the devil is in the details. I agree with some details, but not with others, especially the claims of links with modern physics. I gave a popularized introduction to the conditions for linking physics with spirituality in this video.

I will focus here on some of the main points of disagreement, for the reason that I generally see it much more interesting to focus on the points of disagreements than the points of agreement, because I consider the work of understanding and correcting any mistakes that could have been committed, as the condition for progress towards the development of a picture of reality that effectively approaches the truth; and in that way, get better honest and genuine chances to appear credible and more widely accepted; while an attitude of staying passionately attached to a given theory mixing truths with errors to the point of wanting to dismiss and censor any criticism perceived as an offense, can only result in always keeping the same ridiculousness attached, and therefore giving food for legitimately persisting discredit by skeptics in the long term.

I mean, if anyone wonders why skeptics keep their position, then well, do they really want to understand the cause of this and how it could be changed, or does it feel much better to persuade oneself to be perfectly right and just blame skeptics for their closed-mindedness ? Maybe, those who love to teach the need for people to change themselves as the condition to change the world would rather have a look at a little mirror and start the work there.
So, my goal here is not to make people think that some popular references of idealism and spiritual realities are ridiculous in some ways, as I guess lots of people of reason already noticed this without my help ; but to try helping the chances for things to go otherwise by making the issue explicit, pointing out what exactly needs to change, in case some people seriously wonder and are ready to work in this direction.

Introduction to the lacking genuine connection with physics

His ideas are very far from fulfilling the quality standards which professional physicists, at least David Wallace, would require of a work in quantum foundations, expressed here

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15293/1/quantum_metaphysics_revised%20v3.pdf

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15292/1/leeds_realism.pdf

I’d even say that the physical part (copied from Brian Whitworth) of T Campbell's theory, explains less than 0.001% of modern physics, instead of all of it. I mean, modern physics is something extremely precise and mathematically elegant, while he only tries to explain it as if it was an extremely dirty and approximative pseudo-theory. Someone who really tasted the amazing theoretical elegance of modern physics could not bear such an insulting “explanation” for it, which would actually require the divinely designed conspiracy of trillions of different arbitrary tricks in the underlying algorithms just for the sake of hiding the dirtiness of the underlying computation method and give, as an miraculous illusion, this amazingly cleaner and simpler effective appearance of the known laws of physics.

Who invented the idea that Tom Campbell was a physicist ?

He denied it himself, as you can see in this video (1:30 - 2:00): he only did some kind of applied physics and never claimed to understand any theoretical physics. So if he ever introduced himself as a physicist in some other places, that would be another contradiction (or a misleading statement, as if a background in experimental physics had any relevance to such a theoretical and metaphysical research that could stand comparison with the actually required theoretical physics background).

I know, I know, the usual orthodoxy among spiritual people is to hate mathematics and be proud of it, and thus to deny any relevance of theoretical skills for their topics of interest in favor of purely experimental conceptions of science that look so much more sexy...

Actually there can be no lesson to draw from any experimental results if you don't know any meaningful theory able to interpret them.

Examples of what Tom Campbell claims to explain, but that is ridiculous

From my-big-toe.com/theory/philosophical-foundations

"space and time seem to be quantized into the smallest logical units which physicists call Planck length and Planck time (representing the simulation’s pixel grid, or "resolution")"

Quantum mechanics does not present any concept of quantization of space and time, but only one of quantization of energy for specific kinds of systems, namely those which are spatially bounded in some sense. But any actual understanding of the concept of quantization in quantum physics is hard mathematical stuff, which should not be confused with the simple idea of discreteness (I can't explain the difference in a few words and that is the point). Such a hypothetical concept of discreteness (pseudo-quantization) of space and time (to not be confused with the mere fact that the expression of current theories break down near the Planck scale), remains not only extremely speculative but nobody has a clue how a theory with such a feature could be mathematically specified and still give back the known physics in effective domains. The reason is that standard physics crucially has rotational symmetries which a pixelized space-time would not have.
Such a way of describing physics only in terms of some of the wildest speculations around it rather than the actual content of established physics, is typical of those who never studied physics in a more serious way than by popularization magazines and other fanciful rumors.

"the speed of light in vacuum represents a speed limit for the transfer of information in the universe (as you would expect to find in any simulation)"

The speed of light has never been begging for an explanation. Moreover there is no sense referring to it without its counterpart of the relativity principle (analogues of rotational symmetries for space-time), another continuous symmetry which a digital simulation hypothesis cannot account for.
The speed of light constrains the computing possibilities of a physical computer that would be itself subject to the laws of physics. But if the computer which simulates the physical universe itself suffers such a limitation then the turtle which carries the world is standing on another turtle all the way down.
If the simulation hypothesis could be taken to explain the limit to the speed of light in such a way then how could that same explanation also serve as an explanation of quantum entanglement with its violation of Bell's inequalities, thus to deny any fundamental limitation of information transfer by the speed of light, which is suggested elsewhere ?

Nonsense: abuse of the word "entropy"

Entropy is a concept of physics. And it has a very precise mathematical definition, discovered by John von Neumann. Nothing suggests that Tom Campbell ever cared to learn that definition. And everything suggests the exact opposite, namely, his way of taking the same word, claiming to give it the same meaning, to describe non-physical concepts just based on some very loose ideas about entropy assuming similarity with physical entropy but actually very far from the definition of entropy in physics, and where that definition is obviously inapplicable. It is just ridiculous to insinuate that those stories he tells about entropy has anything to do with what physicists mean by this word. And if it is not the same (it is just a metaphor), then there is no reason for it to behave in any similar manner (arguments from a presumed similarity are baseless).

Since the word "entropy" is used throughout his Big TOE and no proper meaning for this word can ever be found which would be anyhow coherent with the way it is used there, I have to dismiss it all as a big bunch of pure nonsense.

Contradiction about his plan of experiment

He created a "Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness". But to connect with science would require to comply with the principles of science, and one of these principles is to not contradict oneself. But he already fails at this as follows.

In the web site of his Center (page /about-tom), he says he wants a team to

"conduct a set of unique quantum mechanics experiments that will forever change the way we view consciousness, reality, and ourselves"

and for more complete description of these experiments, refers to an article where he wrote

"We will now describe the simulation theory from a computational perspective. Although we may call the system performing the computation computer, VR server/engine, or Larger Consciousness, the specification of the fundamental nature of this system is not necessary to the description of the theory"

This means, any experimental confirmation of this theory would fail to have any implication on consciousness and the nature of reality, in contradiction with the previous claim.

Of course, since this big work of inventing (for no reason) a hidden reduction of quantum operations (on qbits…) to classical ones (on bits) indeed has no reason to change anything on the metaphysical issues (the difference between bits and qbits being rather futile for metaphysics).

This reason is further developed below.

Nonsense about "being a simulation"

The question whether physical objects really exist or not is a nonsensical question. The reason for this is that, since they are described by mathematics, they enjoy a mathematical existence anyway, but then any idea to give them another existential attribute begs the question of where it may come from. For subtle reasons, the only meaningful solution is that the source and nature of physical existence beyond mathematical existence, consists in being observed by consciousness, which itself escapes mathematization. Now Thomas Campbell commits a fundamental error : the error of failing to understand that this is already perfectly clear, coherent and necessary and perfectly matching the laws of quantum mechanics as they are already well-known, and that some different and more fundamental underlying processes would be needed to make it work, namely a digitalization in terms of classical computation. In short, he believes that qbits would need to come as an emergent approximation from some quite large but fixed number of classical bits, and that such a reduction would be the confirmation he needs for this metaphysics. So my fundamental disagreements are the following points:
1) "to be or not to be a simulation" is a senseless question
2) There is no reason see a reduction from qbits to classical bits as making any metaphysical difference, or at least, claiming it makes a difference would beg for proper explanations, which I am not aware of having been addressed in his work
3) Nobody has a clue how this reduction can proceed, letting quantum mechanics successfully emerge from classical computation except in extremely complex and unnatural ways. It would require an explosive jump in complexity to simulate a quantum process (such as quantum computation) by a classical computation.
3) Some physicists would be happy with such a reduction and its experimental verification and yet deny the kind of implication on the role of consciousness that T Campbell claims
4) The fundamental role of consciousness in creating reality by a kind of computation is already clear and directly compatible with the known laws of quantum mechanics, considering computations as directly involving quantum states (qbits...), thus a kind of analog thinking, with no need of any modification with the kind of testable consequences which Campbell is calling for. I gave the details here.

Lack of clarity on the epistemological basis

This "Big TOE" contains lots of details, lots of claims. Where does he claim to take his knowledge from ? Does it come from spiritual experience or from rational speculation ? There was a discussion about it. To properly proceed rational speculation on such a topic would require one to be a genius knowing how to handle concepts with amazing accuracy. Such a skill would have to be verifiable, including in the accuracy of handling concepts from physics, but that is precisely a failure, as explained above.
But if, on the other hand, that whole story of discoveries was just based on spiritual experience of directly checking all details in a spiritual manner to not depend on his fallible rational abilities, then he'd just be a mystic like any other, so that

Someone commented for his defense

"We need to find our own way to do this work. Tom’s model is his model only, and it’s not “the truth”. It’s a framework that may or may not be useful."

That is another gap between science and spirituality. One of the principles of science is to only teach to a large audience what was clearly checked to be true, while those who don't really know should shut up (and only exchange ideas with peer researchers until a clear conclusion can be found); while anything unclear and/or partly incorrect begs for clarifications and corrections (which is the way science makes progress). To claim that this story is not the truth but only may or may not be useful, is moreover in contradiction with the effective attitude of many followers who are overenthusiastic, want everybody to read all of his books, and cannot tolerate any criticism but dismisses and condemns that as insults (see My husband believes Tom Campbell). Even scientists do not claim that everybody should learn theoretical physics even though it is well-verified.

Nonsense about social systems

Quote:

"A social system functions optimally if all of its members cooperate, help and care for each other and if they share the available resources. Such choices lead to low entropy at the system level. A social system doesn’t function very well if everybody is in it only for themselves, trying to grab as much as they can for themselves, their family, tribe or nation. Such choices lead to high entropy at the system level."

What a nice looking bet in the eyes of any good baby !
The former kind is called a communist system. The latter is called a capitalist one. Which of them works more optimally than the other ? I may seriously consider the possibility for communism to work best in some other reality systems out there. But I cannot feel concerned by this for the purposes of the one we are now in.
See my further explanation on this topic here, there and there.

What went wrong here : the temptation to provide a unified theory of everything and anything by a single coherent-looking story tailored to be simply understandable and good-looking for anyone, necessarily leads to very deep mistakes, because reality is too complex and full of paradoxes to be approachable in such a way.

My comment about one video of his

I tried to follow but could not have the patience to hear or read it all because it was too boring for me, with lots of trivialities spread across wastefully long wordings. I had found much better interest reading Seth Speaks and other writings from Seth.
Seth's creation story
Seth Speaks book in pdf

Indeed people practicing any kind of meditation to explore other realities are likely to have a just a modest look at some other realities because of their continued life here, and so only at some realities not much different than this one; while Seth having long finished his reincarnation cycle had the opportunity to go much further, deeper into aspects of consciousness quite different than what we are familiar with.
I just cannot see the point of coming to this particular life just to spend one's life hearing the news that there were some other, slightly different possible forms of life. If you're not happy with this life and you are so curious about some other possibilities, then why did you come here in the first place ?
One argument from this video didn't seem so logical to me, and not fitting with Seth or other sources either: his claim that the constraint of our universe, to have physical constants fine-tuned to make this universe work, should affect other realities as well and this would force similarities with this one. I'd say, well, this universe is so constrained only by choice : the choice of being so heavily physical, with its so big strictly connected space-time block that started so long ago with a big bang, and with very constraining laws that lets so little place for free will. Other realities, where any geometric space only comes as a fruit of a free imagination, may be much more flexible than this, so that the difficult fine-tuning problem simply is no more applicable.

Some concluding thoughts

What is the point of looking for a theory to describe reality ? Any theory, being expressed in rational terms, remains somehow reductive. Physics is reducible to a specific theory, even if only very few people in the world can understand it. And that is precisely its interest : physics is such a deep theory that it is a whole intellectual adventure requiring high intellectual skills to understand it. But a theory expressed in rational terms which a large public can understand and would even need to, what is this ? It is no more an intellectual challenge. And therefore, by its way of being poor enough to be understandable and followed by many, it would be by necessity very reductive. Okay, there can be a few clues about the key principles of reality which may be useful for lots of people. But if it starts taking a lot of time and energy to study, then it is a reduction of life to abstract generalities which are neither good in themselves as abstract generalities, nor good for the life of the many, because the point of the life of the many is that there are endlessly many different things to learn from life, that is the open-ended adventure of life, and much too diverse to be contained in a general book, even a big one. So many people came to life for experience and went back, they need not have believed in afterlife, and still had the good surprise to find one when they died. They did not feel sorry for that mistake. Because they may have found the truth they needed in any other topic, including the most mundane ones, which are so many, and that is okay. Long stories about other realities aside this one aren't any better basis for spiritual growth than watching many films, because the lack of direct access makes it neither a chance for personal training and challenges, nor even a good means to discern truth from random baseless speculation, as there is not even a way to figure out whether Tom Campbell was able of such a discernment himself, and from what source.

More external links

My husband believes Tom Campbell
Is Thomas Campbells education and work experience valid
A comment
Other comments
Some key points are simply wrong
A very important error in Tom Campbell's double slit/consciousness presentation