Robert Bonomo on how 9-11 Truthers defeated Hillary |336|

is anyone interested in reaching out to Tom and seeing if he'd like to come on Skeptiko?

I'll try, but I don't hold out much hope, as he's a popular guy and the only contact I've had with him wasn't too successful! ;)

But as guests go, I believe he's right along with much of your thinking Alex.

Done!

Well it turns out it wasn't so difficult, and the message should definitely get through. Fingers crossed. ;;/?
 
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On the topic of anarcho-capitalism / individual sovereignty / hierarchy / God / Demiurge ...

I envision a 2x2 matrix (not sure how to draw it real quickly on my iphone, but I'll try)

God (benevolent) ---- Demiurge (controlling sociopath)
l
l
l
Trickster Jesus (benevolent individual) ---- Trickster devil ( sociopath individual )

So there is a + and - expression of the top of the hierarchy and a +/- expression of the bottom of the hierarchy (individual).

Anarcho capitalists / libertarians generally express the benevolent bottom side of the hierarchy. The anarchists who smash windows demonstrate the neg side of the bottom of the hierarchy.

Trump (if he does what he said he would do) would be acting as benevolent top of hierarchy. Kim Jong Il or the Rothschilds for example demonstrates neg top of hierarchy.

For the longest time it was a mystery to me why the devil could show up as an overly controlling big brother and puritanical religious leader or conversely show up as a criminal joker. I was only thinking one dimensionally: either the top is + or the bottom is + ...either the individual is supreme and all hierarchy is evil, or hierarchy and the benevolent god at top is good and rebellion is evil. But thinking 2 dimensionally about hierarchy and good/evil makes a lot more sense.

Because we've seen so many examples of bad hierarchy (because hierarchy tends to get corrupt over time) I used to think (like I believe Corbett and other anarcho capitalists think) that governments (hierarchy) should be done away with altogether if possible and that with the internet we can do peer to peer networking and crowdsource everything making hierarchical government entirely obsolete.

But I've changed my mind and think we still need hierarchy but it must be benevolent and must be balanced by strong network / crowd sourced structure. All hierarchies should be viewed with suspicion and cut down to size if they grow too powerful due to their tendency towards corruption.

Hurm, I'm a bit surprised to reaqd your description of armed rebellion as "evil" - aren't you the one who dares to criticise pacifism (a mortal sin for many love-and-light free-spiritualists... ;)). Do you mean that no matter how opressive and inhuman hierarchy is, violent resistance still cannot be justified? That any atrocity on the part of rulers can be met only with symbolic protest, never with an attempt to fight back?

I'm curious to learn more about your position concerning justifiability of the armed stuggle against authority...
 
I'll try, but I don't hold out much hope, as he's a popular guy and the only contact I've had with him wasn't too successful! ;)

But as guests go, I believe he's right along with much of your thinking Alex.

Done!

Well it turns out it wasn't so difficult, and the message should definitely get through. Fingers crossed. ;;/?
great. thx.
 
Do you mean that no matter how opressive and inhuman hierarchy is, violent resistance still cannot be justified? That any atrocity on the part of rulers can be met only with symbolic protest, never with an attempt to fight back?

I'm curious to learn more about your position concerning justifiability of the armed stuggle against authority...

No no I think you misunderstood me.

If the hierarchy is corrupt, malevolent, oppressive, evil etc, then rebellion is good. If the hierarchy is benevolent, beneficial, constructive, protective, and good, then rebellion is generally evil.
 
Very interesting listening to Alex and Robert discussing virtual reality and Robert saying it was a metaphor. I'm not sure how far from reality a metaphor is allowed to be, because I have a hunch that this one isn't far at all. Interesting for me too, was that at around the same time Myths were mentioned, which brought to mind Bernardo Kastrup's latest offering. A couple of reviews I've read on Facebook recently were of the kind that would, had I been the author, thinking that I may have written something truly worthwhile, a type of literary 'American Pie' sort of book.

Tom Campbell has recently released a few videos where he discusses his latest 'cunning plan' where he has devised a plan to try to lure someone to run some experiments that he's concocted (double slit type). At a time when billionaire Elon Musk is in the mainstream headlines you just never know? It used to be when you used that phrase it didn't mean that much, but now......The same could be said of the phrase 'living in interesting times'.

See Around 1:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson shooting himself in the foot (heart?) without even realising it.


Tom Campbell discusses what might happen if he is right and someone takes the bait and runs the experiments.(around 36mins)


It's all a metaphor. Everything!
 
Can anyone give a concise description of Tom Campbell's experiment that could determine if we are running in a simulation?

David

David, you should watch the whole series of 7 videos beginning here:


Many thanks to Steve for the heads up. I'm currently half way through the third video, and I must say that so far it's the clearest exposition of his TOE I've ever seen. His idea of a virtual reality, although expressed in a "scientific" way, is clearly metaphorical and so far not in my view at odds with Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism, just expressed in different terms. It's an exhilarating series of lectures and I hope I'll be able to understand the experiment he suggests. If so, I'll report back as and when.
 
No no I think you misunderstood me.

If the hierarchy is corrupt, malevolent, oppressive, evil etc, then rebellion is good. If the hierarchy is benevolent, beneficial, constructive, protective, and good, then rebellion is generally evil.

How often does it happen that a hierarchy is corrupt/benevolent to all reasonable parties?

It seems people will always disagree on the level of acceptable hierarchy based on what particular things are being enforced from the top down?
 
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.
 
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).

Thanks for putting together a relatively technical discussion of Tom's presentations. I've always had a soft spot for his ideas, he is a good guy too. Some of his lesser ideas don't sit well though. These is just probably just my own thoughts that are being jarred, but it's interesting how deeply felt some of our own ideas really go.

The idea that we don't actually have a brain until it is necessary for the LCS, as Tom likes to call it, to render one, for example we get a brain injury or such. That is one such idea that is very difficult for me to accept. But who am I to say it's nonsense ? I think that's what he says, it is what would be found in a computer game for example. He thinks that time is more or less the same in other dimensions, but I have real difficulties with that. There are other small examples which I forget.

But my main complaint is that I don't think he's spiritual enough. I mentioned this directly to him one time and he gave it short shrift 'Then you haven't seen much of my stuff'. He was wrong about that, but I let it lie. That was a couple of years ago. He has since become less left sided and more right in his presentations I think, more likely to use the word God than say 'It's just data' than he used to imo. As I said, it's just a personal thing, but I'm still a big fan of his,
 
How often does it happen that a hierarchy is corrupt/benevolent to all reasonable parties?

It seems people will always disagree on the level of acceptable hierarchy based on what particular things are being enforced from the top down?

Sure, classification of a hierarchy as good or evil based on subjective assessments of reported "facts" which are not fully available to everyone leads to a lot of disagreement and nuance. I'm dealing (as I usually do) in the realm of generalities, omniscience, and ideal platonic forms.

This is why crowd-sourcing and networking can have a symbiotic relationship with hierarchy: all of that disagreement and nuance can develop into beneficial resolutions to problems that the top of the hierarchy might ignore or exacerbate... thereby refining and steering the hierarchy towards the good.
 
Sure, classification of a hierarchy as good or evil based on subjective assessments of reported "facts" which are not fully available to everyone leads to a lot of disagreement and nuance. I'm dealing (as I usually do) in the realm of generalities, omniscience, and ideal platonic forms.

This is why crowd-sourcing and networking can have a symbiotic relationship with hierarchy: all of that disagreement and nuance can develop into beneficial resolutions to problems that the top of the hierarchy might ignore or exacerbate... thereby refining and steering the hierarchy towards the good.

I should add that although this is abstract and seemingly applies mainly to human politics, I believe there is a direct application to the nature of the "spiritual realms" as well. Any system where there are groups of conscious beings interacting should have this same political dynamic arise. So there is a God and a Devil and a Demiurge and a Jesus: these 4 poles will arise in all political systems... metaphorically speaking.
 
When Bonomo talks about the zombies meme as reflecting materialism and consumerism, that's exactly why George Romero made the satirical Dawn of the Dead (1978), where the zombies are drawn back to their old lives spent in the mall:
 
But my main complaint is that I don't think he's spiritual enough. I mentioned this directly to him one time and he gave it short shrift 'Then you haven't seen much of my stuff'. He was wrong about that, but I let it lie. That was a couple of years ago. He has since become less left sided and more right in his presentations I think, more likely to use the word God than say 'It's just data' than he used to imo. As I said, it's just a personal thing, but I'm still a big fan of his,

You mean he was wrong that you hadn't seen much of his stuff, or that he wasn't spiritual enough? Because I get the sense in this latest series of lectures that he's well aware of the spiritual dimension to his TOE. It's just that he chooses to use the virtual reality metaphor, which relies heavily on a scientific approach.

In the past, I've had the impression too that he wasn't spiritual enough because I thought he was making the LCS be an actual programmer-type entity. But now I think his motivation is primarily a spiritual one -- remember that he only worked with Bob Monroe because Bob promised that in return for his services he'd teach him everything he knew about consciousness and OOB experiences. Tom, as you probably know, did a lot of personal experimentation with this kind of thing, and it was natural enough for him, I suppose, to tie this in later with his training as a physicist.

There's plenty of his spiritually-oriented stuff out there, for instance:


or


or perhaps best of all (because he relates his TOE to his spirituality):

 
You mean he was wrong that you hadn't seen much of his stuff, or that he wasn't spiritual enough?

The former. I'd read (most of) his trilogy of books and seen a ton of videos.

There's plenty of his spiritually-oriented stuff out there

There is now. I didn't think it was that apparent three or four years ago. I think I realise why he's playing it this way, rather than too spiritually oriented. For me alone I prefer my worldview to be more right brain oriented, probably because I think I am that way. Especially since the stroke.

But all this is academic. It's my ego talking. He knows that it is love that is driving the LCS, or Cosmic Consciousness or God, whatever we prefer. I think we keep certain personality wherever we exist, at least for part of the 'time'. I think hearing Tom and Jurgen Ziewe comparing notes would be interesting to say the least. I don't think they would disagree about too much on the experiential level.

I think he overdoes the acronyms even more than aviators do!
 
Of course. Look, I don't know what the heck would be the result of a true popular vote. Could go either way. The point is that, given the electoral college system, you can't say that the popular vote was for the Democrats.
What? Yes, I can say that the popular vote in the 2016 election went to the Democratic candidate. I can also say that the last time this situation occurred, it was once again the Democrat who won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. We have two cases in very recent memory where the College went against the popular vote, and in both cases, it was the Democrat who won the popular vote. You can speculate all you want, but I have actual facts here.


I still maintain that the Democrats won't push to change the system to a straightforward majority vote, because they fear the possibility of losing the overall popular vote. It'd be too big a risk.
You still haven't explained exactly why you think the Democrats have good reason to fear suddenly being massively outvoted once the Electoral College is gone. You seem to be implying that they wouldn't want to get rid of the College on the off-chance that one day it will be their candidate who loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote. However, based on all the actual facts we have available, that situation appears to be exceedingly unlikely. We have every reason to believe that the Electoral College system only benefits the Republicans and works against the Democrats, because it effectively makes red state votes count for more than blue state votes.
 
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