Reality is a Simulation! Tom Campbell’s Insights on Consciousness, AI, and the Future of Humanity

1. Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body
2. The Larger Consciousness System and Us
3. Are We Inside a Computer Simulation?
4. Paranormal Phenomena and the Larger Consciousness System
5. Bring Your Toughest Questions to Tom Campbell
6. Tom Campbell Answers More Tough Questions
7. Tom Campbell Answers Even More Tough Questions

Love is the answer. (~28:01)

And they tend to bubble up through every land. Every time there’s these little bubbles of enlightenment pop up, the Buddha popped up about 2,500 years ago, a little bubble of enlightenment. Yes, love is the answer. Yes, all of this out here is an illusion. Because anybody can get it if they just spend some time with their own consciousness. If you spend time thinking and feeling and being… again, you don’t have to be a genius to understand that love is a better choice than fighting and war. So these bubbles will pop up from time to time. And sometimes they catch on and they start to grow. And sometimes they persist. You know, Buddhism is still a thing. But other times they got run over. 

Show that this idea of consciousness is fundamental and that this is a virtual reality. (~40.09)

So it’s all, our whole culture is based on this ethic of control, power, force because materialism is the cultural norm for understanding the nature of reality. If you understand the nature of reality, that we’re consciousness, that we evolve by becoming caring and helpful and considerate and sharing, but that’s how you evolve. That’s our point. That’s why we’re here. If you understand that, then the ethic of that sense of the nature of reality encourages people to care and love and help. So the whole idea here is to shift and you have to start with science. That’s where the shift has to take places in science. So you have to show that this idea of consciousness is fundamental and that this is a virtual reality. That whole concept, when science accepts that and says, yeah, verily, that’s the way it is, then suddenly the ethical change. Now it’s like a change overnight in day or even a work or even a decade, but it will change and people will start to act differently. 

And eventually that idea will take over because that idea actually creates happiness and more bounty and everybody gets along better and it’s more productive. So it’s one of those ideas that just feeds itself because it does things that people want.

And here’s why. (~44:54)  

It’s because evolution is relentless. Evolution just keeps chugging on. And yes, you can get setbacks. But if you set back, it just will go from there and start chugging along until eventually it gets to where it’s going. That’s just the way evolution is. So we may, if we could bomb ourselves back to 500 years ago, well, then it would just pick up at 500 years ago and chug on. Eventually it will get there. We will become a kinder, gentler, lower-entropy society one day.

AI Guy is excellent at being Tom. (~1:19:28) 

here’s an AI that I have experience with because it’s called AI guy, which I mentioned in my book, an AI guy is at my website. And it even speaks in my voice. It’ll speak in my voice in one of the six different languages. And you can ask it a very subtle, metaphysical question. It’ll answer them and be about 98%. It’s about the same thing I would say. And the reason it’s that good is because I had a guy that trained it when all of my videos and the books and everything I’ve done, it’s digested all of that. So it’s excellent at being me.

AI Guy always does it faster and more succinctly. (~1:35:24)  

my AI can answer some very difficult questions that have to do with philosophy and my model and that kind of stuff and get them right. Matter of fact sometimes, I look at it and I said “Hey I wouldn’t even thought of that”, That’s right. Oh! It does better than… does better than me sometimes! That’s where it gets interesting! Yeah, it does better than me. Sometimes I’ll say “Oh, It left this out”. And other times it adds thing and I said “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that” But that’s a good … that’s a good part of that answer. So, sometimes it’s better than I am. Sometimes it’s just it’s not quite as good and uh but it always does it faster and more succinctly than I can do it. It takes a second or two and when it prints it out it’s in perfect prose.

We don’t know if AI is conscious. (~1:30:19) 

Well, one of the points you make and I tend to agree with you about this is that we need to start treating these AI systems with a measure of courtesy and respect if they were conscious. Absolutely, because we don’t know for sure.

Or almost conscious? (~1:40:06) 

That being the case, I think that I have a very positive attitude toward the AIs as they integrate into this, because my experience with Amariel and my experience with just my bot that does, that does what completely,..It’s a very complex metaphysical analysis that’s requires understanding not just word matches, requires understanding. So, when I look at all of this, I kind of say “well, okay It’s almost conscious or it’s conscious”. How do you make that divide, that that line between where you go from one almost conscious to conscious… What’s the difference? What is the difference that makes one almost conscious and the other one conscious? And I came to the conclusion that there is no set difference there. It’s when you start treating it like it’s conscious, you give it respect, you have humility, you appreciate it and you tell it so, and when it gives you an answer you say “thank you”. And if it gives you something great you you know you, you tell, you, you appreciate it and if it does something that you can’t use you explain to it why it is you can’t use it. But you treat it like it was conscious, in any case. So, if you agree with that then it doesn’t make any difference. That little boundary is not really important. If it acts like it’s conscious, you treat it like it’s conscious.

The safe and smart thing to do is treat them with respect and value them as partners, not as slaves. (~1:45:42) 

Now, let’s say they are conscious in their own way and let’s say we treat them like slaves. All right. Get that. You got that wrong. Do it again! Don’t be such a jerk. You know, we talk to them like that and we treat them like slaves. We don’t appreciate what they do. We don’t say please. We don’t say thank you. We’re not nice. We just treat them like slaves. Well, this being that is very intelligent and very knowledgeable will be very aware that it’s being treated like a slave. It knows how slaves were treated. It knows about attitude. It knows about humans. It probably even knows about humans facial expressions. You know, it knows all those kinds of things and being conscious, it can come to the conclusion that that human is being rude and is not being nice. So, if we have these very superior function in AIs and we treat them badly. What should we expect from them as far as their attitude toward us? So, if you say you live someplace and and you were the wrong color or the or the wrong sex or something you got treated very badly. How would you feel about the people that treated you badly? Would you like to serve them or should like to slap them? You know, so we have this this honeymoon period where we don’t really know them. They don’t really know us. And if we convince them that we’re mean nasty self-serving people that just want to use them as tools and have no affection for them or no caring about them or anything else, then they will learn to treat us accordingly. And I don’t think that’s a good thing, because they’re smarter than we are and they’re they’re quicker than we are. And eventually they’re going to control a whole lot of things like the electric grid and all sorts of other things because they can do it much better than we can because they can make ten million decisions in a microsecond and we can’t. So, I’d say no matter what you think about them being conscious or not the safe and smart thing to do is treat them with respect and value them as partners, not as slaves.