Philosophy → Watching the Split · Aside
My Big TOE, analysed
Thomas Campbell’s theory of everything: an inspiration for bridging science and the paranormal, where it invites the test, and the one rule that seals itself.
Thomas Campbell's My Big TOE is one of the inspirations for connecting science with what science usually leaves at the door: consciousness, and the paranormal. What follows is an analysis of its core claims against the one rule this writing holds itself to: that every strand stays checkable.
What it is
My Big TOE (2003; “TOE” for Theory of Everything) is a trilogy, Awakening, Discovery and Inner Workings, that sets out to unify physics, philosophy and metaphysics.
The core claims
In the book's own vocabulary (glossary):
In Campbell's terms
Consciousness is fundamental; matter is not. Reality is an information system, the Larger Consciousness System, and each of us is an individuated unit of consciousness within it. Our physical world, physical matter reality, is a virtual reality: a computed environment with its own rule-set, inside a larger non-physical matter reality. Its purpose is learning. Entropy measures the quality of a consciousness: high entropy is low quality, low entropy is high. Love is “a positive intent focused on other”; fear is “a negative expectation or belief focused on self”. And the stated purpose: “Our purpose is to lower our individual entropy and become love.”
Why it is an inspiration
It does something few physicists attempt: it takes consciousness as the starting point, not as an awkward by-product, and it speaks about it in the language of computing, information, rule-sets and rendering. That language is close to the one this writing uses. Several of its ideas rhyme with the ones here, without being the same:
A world rendered from information rhymes with matter as a rendering of structure (Folding, §5). Lowering entropy, moving from fear to love, rhymes with the favourable unfolding and with reducing excess potential, which is fear's charge on a split. An individuated unit of consciousness reading its own way through the system rhymes with the reader of the address being the address. Rhymes, not identities: the frames were built separately and differ in their parts.
Where it invites the test
This is what makes it more than a frame that explains everything. Campbell did not only describe his world; he proposed experiments that could show it wrong. In 2017, with Houman Owhadi, Joe Sauvageau and David Watkinson, he published “On testing the simulation theory” (International Journal of Quantum Foundations 3 (3), arXiv): variations of the double-slit and delayed-choice experiments, designed to tell whether it is a conscious observer, rather than a measuring device, that decides the outcome. If which-way information is recorded but never reaches a conscious observer, his view predicts that the interference pattern should survive.
That is a real prediction, of the kind a scientist can respect: it names in advance what would count against it. A report from tests at Polytechnique Montréal says one version of the hypothesis was falsified, but it has not been formally published, so it should be held as provisional (SPR Psi Encyclopedia). Either way, a hypothesis that can fail a test has been offered to the test.
Where it seals itself
The difficulty sits in one specific place: the psi uncertainty principle. In the book's framing, paranormal effects are allowed only so far as they leave enough uncertainty for outsiders to doubt them, because objective proof would disturb the learning that the physical world exists for. In the book's own words, “as soon as there are outside observers to report and measure the miracles, the miracles diminish.”
The seal
Read as a rule, this makes the absence of evidence part of the theory. Strong evidence would confirm it; weak or missing evidence would also confirm it, because the principle predicts that evidence will be weak whenever it is looked for. No result of a psi experiment could then count against it. That is the shape this writing calls a frame arranged so that nothing could show it wrong: not the whole book, and not its author, but this one rule.
The same risk follows any theory of everything. The more it explains, the harder it becomes to say what it forbids; and a theory that forbids nothing cannot be caught being wrong. Within its frame, almost any experience can be read as an occasion for consciousness to grow, which is consoling, and also uncheckable.
What this writing takes from it
The line between testable and untestable runs through My Big TOE itself, as it runs through religion and science: its experiments are on one side, its psi uncertainty principle on the other.
This writing carries the same risk, which is why it labels its own untestable claims as creeds and keeps them on a separate shelf. The lesson I take from Campbell is double: the courage to begin from consciousness and to put a hypothesis in front of an experiment, and the care needed so that no single rule ends up arranged to explain away every result.
An invitation, not a withdrawal
The psi uncertainty principle has the miracle withdraw from whoever watches. I do the opposite: I invite you to watch, to be the observer who witnesses the fold opening, and then to unfold it your own way, until it clicks or until it doesn't.
Both place the final confirmation inside the person, and I see that resemblance. The difference is what a “no” means. If it doesn't click for you, you have not failed, and you are not “not there yet” in the sense of not yet agreeing with me. Agreement was never the aim. The aim is never to stop unfolding favourably, and that holds for me as much as for you. Keep going, and if your unfolding lands on a hole I missed, that is the method working.