My thoughts/notes from Part 1:
The podcast took a weird turn at the end where Campbell hawks some products, which contrasted with him saying earlier people would be more likely to believe him because he's not selling anything...I've noticed a lot of persons in Parapsychology hawking products of questionable repute recently. Of course there are materialists doing similar stuff - arguably to the tune of trillions of dollars if you include Big Pharma - but this still seems like a bad path to me.
Maybe if we had some really good open accounting from Tom's team that showed the money funds experiments to test his ideas I'd feel more comfortable with it.
All that said, there was a lot to like or at least consider ->
- The Conscious Designer is, in Tom's view, much more limited than any Omni-God. This at least helps makes sense of the Problem of Evil to some degree, and Tom insists he doesn't think of this Designer-Mind as God. It actually recalls something - IIRC! - Prescott wrote about ID, that God is a limited entity searching through a problem space. (Trying to find this article from his old blog with little luck...) Also made me think of
Faggin's Seities.
But Tom also mentions the Conscious Designer is learning about morality, that forceful control doesn't work to generate experiences that are novel and thus allowing it to learn. He mentions one theist brought up this matches the contrast of the Old & New Testament. It also made me think of how Peter Sjöstedt-H argued Whitehead's God was an amoral entity interested in Novelty that was better described
as akin to the Greek God Pan.
- Regarding the idea of the physical reality as "Information", not sure about how Tom uses information. He seems to, as I understood it, use information when referring to physical entities as Shannon Information. This runs into the same issues Peter Sjöstedt-H mentioned in his criticism of the similar
Alien Information Theory.
- He mentions some issues relating to the oddities of the physical world, such as the continued expansion, the "fudge factor" of Dark Matter, and some QM oddities. Reminds me I need to go through the
Physics to God podcast.
- I'm glad he shut down the "Simulations All the Way Down" idea on the basis I saw it as flawed - that you degrade performance for every dependent simulation. He doesn't explicitly note that infinitely dependent simulations would mean change cannot happen but I feel like his computational argument is equivalent to my philosophical one...
...Or at least I'll choose that interpretation because it makes me look smart.
- He said he and Hoffman disagreed because Hoffman wanted to have more grounding in maths, and Tom mentioned that biology is not overly mathematical. Chaitin said the same thing recently in a Curt Jaimungal podcast episode I will post soon, though
here's the preview for those interested. I can see both sides here, with Hoffman trying to show how to derive the fundamentals of the physical world being a worthwhile endeavor but limiting in that if his particular model is falsified the philosophy will be chucked out with it.
On a more general note, I think the Philosophy of Mathematics does give us some reason to think Mind is at least one of the fundamentals, as per
Peter Sas' arguments about the One generating the Many by contemplation of Numbers. (Not saying this is the ultimately correct metaphysics, just that it might ground some of what Tom is saying.)
I would lean toward Tom's approach that Math models Reality, and while I do believe in Mathematical Universals (see
here &
here) I agree with Whitehead that thinking Math *is* Reality is Misplaced Concreteness. Even this idea of rules, while made more tractable for modern people familiar with video games & the Matrix movies is something I think is better generalized
by Aquinas' 5th Way. (I do think the God-as-Absolute argued for in that thread is admittedly distinct from the lesser Demiurge Tom argues for.)
- Tom's disagreements with Kastrup weren't completely clear to me, though it seems to be based around Kastrup's idea of a dashboard/interface that cannot be pierced through. Tom feels we can see beyond the seemingly physical, and this may be an issue because Kastrup only seems to accept Psi as it relates to Super-Psi. Though Kastrup's dashboard idea has some oddities as noted by Peter Sjöstedt-H's review of
Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell.
- Where I think there is more common ground for Hoffman and Tom is that Hoffman also thinks the
material brains is just a phenomenological brain, though the stark difference seems to be that Hoffman does belief the brain is an icon pointing to reality while Tom thinks the brain is no more real than blood in a video game is really there inside a graphical enemy's body.
This is probably one of the biggest concerns of the talk, where he suggests it's more difficult to psychically heal if you get checked out and find out you have issues internally. Given Naidu is a medical doctor I was surprised he didn't push back on this more.
- While I am wary of anyone making claims about psychic healing that contravene sane medical advice, I did find it interesting that Tom contrasted intellect & intuition. Tom feels the latter is where the paranormal lies.
Made me think of McGilchrist's Left Brain vs Right Brain ideas. Him mentioning how you could over time share consciousness with animals, and that animals have natural telepathy, made me think of Sheldrake's work.
- Tom also mentions that he, as part of his spiritual experience, worked to aid transitioning souls. He means both that he had Shared Death Experiences (see
here) but also that he seems to have left his body to work with higher entities to help souls in their journey. (He himself notes you should be skeptical of this claim.)
Tom notes that it is the transitioning soul, rather than some genuine aspect of reality, that creates the Tunnel effect in NDEs. This made think of something Shushan said (see
here), that Indigenous Peoples around the world have walking along a dirt road as part of their NDE.
- While I did agree that reincarnation usually doesn't allow us access to past-life memories but still gives us some personality aspects, I didn't fully get the argument that when we reincarnate we have to lose our memories or it would mess everything up?
He did mention that some souls have an earlier creation date than others, which made me think of Faggin's Seities yet again.
- Tom seems to believe the physical body is just an avatar made interesting by being complex enough via the brain & body to have the Conscious Designer put old or new souls into. This is akin to something Gossinger says in Dark Pool of Light. Tom also notes that perhaps Neural Nets will attain the level complexity necessary to have a soul put into them as well.
- Tom thinks memory limits are the answer to Fermi's Paradox. So we might be the only sentient life in this universe, since the vastness of the void is an illusion anyway. Just as you only get your internal organs rendered when someone actually tries to look inside, the vastness of space is an illusion. However Tom mentions other realities he's seen via OOBE that have different parameters.
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