David, I've finished the third video and think it's a good one to watch. There's not just one double slit experiment, but many, all designed in different ways to determine whether lying behind reality is a Larger Consciousness System (LCS) -- i.e. whether we're living in a virtual reality. I'm genuinely surprised that physicists haven't thought to perform these experiments, especially as the experimental designs Tom uses are simple.
His method of quantum erasure is especially elegant: he simply increases the path length from slit detectors to recorders so that it's longer than that between the slits and the screen. He also joins the two slit detector wires so that which way information is lost. He plays around with this idea in a number of different ways, sometimes predicting erasure (leading to a diffraction pattern), and sometimes not (leading to a two-bar pattern).
It's all so elegantly described in the video that it'd be pointless my trying to re-describe it here. But put concisely, he's proposing a number of experiments that can only work if reality is virtual. One or two of the results, if they turn out as he expects, would be astounding -- what he calls "major miracles", such as the LCS being able to affect the randomness of a radioactive decay process just so that the output of the system as a whole remains consistent.
In some ways, I wish he wouldn't use the term "virtual reality", because it can conjure up the idea of God as a kind of mathematician/programmer/scientist who knows and micromanages every event occurring in the universe. It's not like that, and Tom knows it isn't, nonetheless the metaphor is compelling and he's found ways to be parsimonious with the amount of processing involved. First, we live in a rule-based virtual universe. This is akin to Bernardo Kastrup's contention that MAL's universe is one in which we can see the operation of "rules and regularities" as Bernardo puts it.
In Tom's case, these rules are very largely probabilistic. One can think of it
in the metaphor as the LCS keeping a number of probability distributions and using those to determine the displayed results of experiments. Everything that we perceive as avatars (akin to Bernardo's alters) is generated not directly by the LCS, but by the way we perceive as avatars/alters. It's all "eye candy" as Tom puts it. We create the apparent reality, but we are constrained by the ruleset. We can never perceive anything that is inconsistent with that. The great variety and multiplicity of events is all constrained by that ruleset, but it has to be probabilistic for there to exist all of the potential that we can actualise.
Moreover, anything we create has to be consistent in an historical way. That's part of the ruleset. If we didn't have that, and if probabilistic determinations didn't exist (so that the whole thing was deterministic), then free will would disappear. The virtual universe is designed so as to fool us into thinking it's not virtual. The first intimation that this was the case was the first double slit experiment. It's just that physicists, being materialists, seek to create materialistic explanations, inventing the idea, for example, that there's such a thing as a probability wave that can pass through the slits and interfere with itself.
Tom's experiments are designed to enable us to take the idea that consciousness can affect "reality" seriously. Physicists haven't so far done this because they already "know" that everything has to have a basis in materiality. But if they do the experiments and they turn out the way Tom expects, they'll be forced to accept the notion that this reality is in fact virtual and the creation of the LCS, bringing "God" back into the equation.
In Tom's view, it isn't only life that is evolving, but the LCS is too, intimately involving us, its avatars, i.e. virtual representations of Individual Units Of Consciousness. IUOCs are somewhat akin to Bernardo's alters, but Tom more obviously differentiates between avatars and IUOCs -- IUOCs, it seems, are what we really are, and avatars how we perceive ourselves whilst alive). At the end of the "game" for us, when we die, our IUOCs continue to exist and at some later stage can take on a new avatar (i.e. we can reincarnate to continue our evolution, and thereby the evolution of the LCS as a whole). Bernardo has a similar basic idea; when we die, we as "ripples in the pond" cease to exist, but the underlying vortex continues to exist and maybe can make a subsequent reappearance.
It's a fascinating idea, and I must admit that in the past I've been wary of it because it seemed like Tom was saying the LCS is
literally a cosmic programmer. But he isn't; he's just using that idea as a metaphor. An
unusually apt metaphor at that.
If the LCS has been trying to "deceive" us for so long, how come that we are now able to design experiments to test whether or not it exists? If Tom's expected results were to eventuate, wouldn't that blow the gaff? Tom says that, whilst the LCS is pretty cagey, and can't interfere with our free will, it may be able to apply a little gentle persuasion from time to time. The right time: a time when there's less danger of a falling back into religious dogma. In any case, one can be sure that some physicists would try to sneak materialism back in somehow, but as far as the general public were concerned, the cat would be out of the bag.
If Tom's experiments work as expected, they'd create an idea of "God" that is nothing at all like the Abrahamic one (though one possibly more in sync with some non-Abrahamic ideas of God, e.g. as found in aspects of Hinduism or Buddhism). Conventional ideas of religion would be as threatened by it as science would be, because suddenly, much that seemed supernatural would begin to seem natural. Eventually, both religion and science as we now know them could begin to disappear, to be replaced by the acceptance of nature as a conscious, intelligent and purposeful force.
I'll just mention that Tom speaks to the phenomenon of people with no brains who still manage to function effectively in the world (in the second video as I recall). Some do, and some don't, being severely retarded. He suspects the difference might be accounted for by how early in development it becomes "known" that there is "neurological damage". Just the fact of it being known and accepted might be enough to make retardation happen. The guys with no brain who function effectively were only found out in adulthood, when they've already grown up and proven they can function. Just thought I'd mention that because it goes towards
recent discussion here.