EvolutionFM Transcript: Why Quantum Physicists Know Reality Is a Simulation But Won't Say It, and What It Reveals About Consciousness (Thomas Campbell)

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Thomas Campbell takes listeners on a fascinating journey that begins in the world of nuclear physics and expands into the exploration of consciousness itself. While working on his PhD, a simple meditation class led to experiences that challenged everything he believed about reality. What started as an unexpected ability to identify errors in computer code through altered states of awareness became the foundation for decades of research into consciousness, remote viewing, healing, and the nature of existence.

Drawing from over 30 years of experimentation, Campbell presents a bold idea: consciousness is fundamental, and reality is best understood as an information system or virtual reality designed for growth. He explains how our choices shape not only our own evolution but also the evolution of the larger system we are part of. According to Campbell, the purpose of life is not accumulation, control, or power, but learning cooperation, compassion, and love.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.661)

Hey Thomas, how are you?

Thomas Campbell (00:02.568)

I'm doing just fine, Scott. Thank you for the invitation to come here.

Scott Britton (00:06.961)

I'm excited. I've been, you know, diving into the My Big Toe trilogy. It's packed full of, first off, incredible stories. I mean, having had the CEO of the Monroe Institute on here to hear a little bit about your experience really being there, you know, in the formation days and the experimental days. Yeah, very, very interesting. And then I think just the way that you, the metaphors you use to talk about consciousness,

are highly relatable, especially to someone who's spending career in the technology sector. I think just to kind of kick things off, what was the first thing that happened that started to make you curious about this idea that maybe consciousness was actually fundamental?

Thomas Campbell (00:59.79)

Well, I would say that would be when I was in graduate school. I was working on my PhD, nuclear physics, and I saw a little advertisement on the physics building door that says, learn to meditate, transcendental meditation, $25. And now it's thousands of dollars, but at that time, it was just getting started, and $25, and you can get by with less sleep.

and I was doing my low energy nuclear physics research with a big Van de Graaff generator. So that's the low energy atom smashing, not the high energy like they do at CERN. But anyway, when that machine was running, you took data because it wasn't running for a long time, it very often. It was an old machine and it would break down. Systems wouldn't work. So if it was

running and you were taking data, then you stayed with it, whether that means you didn't sleep for a couple of days. That's just the way it was. You worked when the machine worked. So I was interested, went to get my mantra, found that it was a natural for me. I just immediately kind of winked out, disappeared for a little short of an hour.

and came back, thought I'd been there maybe 10, 15 minutes and found out it was a lot longer than that. And then there were several other meetings and each time I just disappeared and I was experiencing things in other reality frames. So just fit real easily. And I've been meditating for about three, four months. When one day when I was in a meditation state, I was also thinking about the software that I had written for my research.

and those were in the bad old days with punch cards and there was very few debug options then. The way you knew that there was something wrong with your input was that this computer stopped. That's the only information you got out. So I was thinking about the cards because I was having trouble running my job. It was bombing out and I was having trouble finding it.

Thomas Campbell (03:13.102)

So I was just thinking about the cards and what cards they were and where the problem might be when suddenly I saw my card deck, like it was on a computer output paper and it was scrolling by and some of them were in red. The rest of them were in black on white like typical printouts. And I looked at them and said, wonder what that's about. But I was familiar with every line because I had written every line of code. It was really in the bad old days. It was a great big burrows.

mainframe that took up the whole floor of a building and I think they celebrated when they got a whole 1k worth of memory that was like a great a great upgrade and It probably has about a hundredth of the power that the average cell phone has so these were really in the very beginning days of Really good computers so I found out that those

cards colored red were where the errors were. But a couple of the cards that were red didn't seem to have any errors on them. When I looked at them, it was like, what's the problem? Couldn't find a problem, so I ran my deck of cards again, and it still bombed. So I said, well, let's just take those cards that said they were red and just repunch them. I repunched them, and it ran perfectly. So at first, when this was happening, I was thinking, well,

Maybe it was my subconscious realized that I had forgot to put that semicolon at the end of the statement. I really knew somehow inside what the problem was, but then I got to those two cards that had key punch errors and there was no way I could do that because it was totally invisible from looking at it. It was like a tenth of a millimeter shifted the wrong direction and the computer just couldn't read the light through that hole.

So anyway, that hit me like a ton of bricks because as a young physicist, I thought like most physicists that reality is operational. If you can't operate, if you can't measure it, then it either doesn't exist or it isn't important because if you can't touch it or see it or smell it or do anything to it, then it's of no consequence. But now here, I had some information that there was something else out there in the world of consciousness.

Thomas Campbell (05:37.918)

and it was real because otherwise I couldn't have debugged that software like that and I started playing with it after that and I wanted to study it. What physics is all about is it's trying to model reality. That's what physicists do, they model reality. So here I saw all this large piece of reality and had no idea how it worked, but I know it worked.

because that wasn't the only thing. That just got me started. So, I started using these meditation states after that for all sorts of things, and it worked, and it consistently worked. It wasn't just a one-off freaky thing. It was a consistent tool that I could use. So, I get... Yeah.

Scott Britton (06:20.969)

And can I interject for second? When you say it worked, does that mean like you were able to retrieve information from a space and then apply it in the physical reality effectively?

Thomas Campbell (06:34.187)

Yes, exactly. That's what I mean by it worked. Just like finding out where the errors were on those cards and finding the key punch hole errors as well, which couldn't have been in my subconscious that that was information that I just could not have had. And nobody could have had that. You couldn't tell that by looking at it. So anyway, yes, I applied it to, I very think I helped some other people with their...

coming up with what the errors were in their card decks too. And I started getting other data about things, information would come to me. And I was very skeptical, of course. I'm a physicist, I'm skeptical of everything. So it took me a while before I kind of realized what I had, the experience I had and how important it was. So I got out of graduate school and my first job, I run into Bob Monroe.

Kind of cutting that story short because you don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this, but I ran into Bob Monroe, and Bob had just built a lab for the study of consciousness. Bob Monroe, if you don't know him, wrote the book, Journey Out of Body. Then he wrote Far Journey and then Ultimate Journey, three books. And he was a businessman, a wealthy businessman, owned a cable company in Charlottesville. And that was the only cable company. Cable was just starting to...

to reach cities the size of Charlottesville by then. And he had these out-of-body experiences. It scared him to death. He thought maybe he was going insane. He finally realized he wasn't insane, and he was told by Charlie Tartt, who's a psychologist, that he should take notes. He should write it down. He should log his experience. So he did. He started writing what happened.

every time he'd have one of these outer bodies. And his first book was just that log of all the things that he experienced and what happened. So that created the first book, Journeys Out of the Body. And a friend of mine who was an electrical engineer, we both met Bob at the same time and we volunteered to be his science guys and help build equipment for his lab because that lab had nothing in it. It was just an empty shell of a building. It had three

Thomas Campbell (09:00.437)

three booths, experimental booths for people to experience. And those booths were soundproof. The first one was not only soundproof, but it also was a Faraday cage. It had solid metal walls that had been welded, you know, on all the seams and grounded. So that's the one I always got in was the Faraday cage and Dennis got the last one. So we had an empty soundproof booth between us, which made it doubly soundproof between the two of us.

And we told Bob that we would do whatever we could to help understand what was going on with him, and we would try to research and see if we couldn't come up with some information or some way of approaching the problem. But we also said that we need to study consciousness from the inside, not the outside. If we're trying to just study you or what happens to other people, we're not going to get very far. We need to study it from the inside. In other words, what happened to us.

So said, you need to teach us to do what you do. And he agreed. So for the next eight and a half years, Dennis and I spent, oh, I'd say 15 to 20 hours a week out at Bob and Rose. We'd go out, we'd start building equipment, outfitting the lab, coming up with ideas, testing various theories and hypotheses. And then Bob would come up about two hours later and we'd get in the booths and he would...

teach us about going out of body. Then after that, we'd go down to Bob's house and spend another couple of hours talking about it. So it was going out right after dinner, coming home sometime after midnight. And then when I got there, when I got home, I'd spend most of the rest of the night practicing what I had learned that night with Bob. So I was in this mode of probably getting two, three hours of sleep a day.

going out to Bob's for the halftime job, having a full-time job at work. And sometimes it got little difficult telling exactly what reality frame I was in. I'd have to look around and say, okay, that's my desk. I must be at work. Because between the lack of sleep and spending hours every week in altered states, it got a little fuzzy there for a while. But I managed to get through all that and keep it organized.

Thomas Campbell (11:28.093)

and I got to sleep some extra on weekends sometimes. So that was my life for about eight years with Bob. And Bob taught us not only to go out of body, and I'd say within a year, Dennis and I both could go out of body on demand whenever we wanted to. It became an easy thing. In the beginning, it took a half an hour to go through this ritual of relaxation and so on. And then after a year or so, you could do it in, you know...

five minutes and now it takes like tenths of seconds. You can just switch from one reality to another. It doesn't take very long at all. All that's really happening here is you're letting go of one data stream and attaching your awareness to another data stream and there you are. You're out of body in a single player game with the larger consciousness system. So that's what we did and we studied and worked on everything evidential.

That was important to Dennis and I because if it didn't turn out to be really worthwhile, then we didn't want to put in that kind of time. So we had to have evidence and we did everything paranormal that could be done. We did remote viewing, mind to mind communications, healing, talking to dead people, exploring, running into entities in other reality frames and having conversations.

We did all of that kind of stuff, but the most evidential was the remote viewing and then secondly, the healing because you could see the effects. Now remote viewing is quick. You either get it right or you don't and you get that feedback very soon. With the healing, if you somebody you work on them and they get better, well, they may have just gotten better anyway. You you don't know. So you have to do it many, many times. You have to do it hundreds of times. And it depends. The evidence depends on

on what you're healing. If it's a headache, well, headaches come and go, you know, that's not very evidential. But if it's somebody who's been crippled for 10 years and the doctors have given up on them, and then after you work on them, they're not crippled anymore, then that's very evidential, even though it's just one time, you know, it's a one-off. But those things are very evidential. So we did that for, like I said, about eight and a half years. So Dennis and I got very adept at doing these paranormal things. And my job

Thomas Campbell (13:51.51)

was to figure out what was going on. What was happening? Why was it happening? Why did it happen sometimes and was really hard other times? And what was the theory? Now, I knew there was going to be some kind of rational theory because the things that happened weren't random. They weren't random at all. So if something is not random, then there's some structure behind it. You know, there's some pattern, some structure, some rules that make it

not random, and this definitely was not random. So was my job to figure out what was that structure and how did it work. And I worked on that for about 33 years before I published the books. And the way I worked on it was to basically do research. So I would do some paranormal thing like remote viewing, and then I'd change a variable.

And then I do it again and see what effect there was on my ability to do the remote viewing. And then I changed the variable maybe a little more. And then I hold that one still and change another variable. So it was very tedious work that took a long time because there's a lot of variables involved in doing those things. I mean, just what you had to eat before you get in the booth was a variable. What was on your mind? How concerned were you about the rest of your life? Lots of things. How comfortable were you?

pains or all sorts of things were variables. The state was not such a variable because by then Dennis and I had learned to get in those altered states pretty precisely and very quickly. So we could return to the same state pretty easily. So that's kind of how it was and what I did. And eventually I was able to figure out a

a set of rules, set of understandings about consciousness that allowed me not only to understand all the things paranormal, but it also allowed me to figure out how quantum physics worked. Quantum physics works the way it works because reality is the way it is, not because quantum physics defines the reality, but it's the other way around. And we can get into that a little later. once I figured that out and I was real excited about figuring that out, I finally get it.

Thomas Campbell (16:11.647)

It's not a weird science at all. It's a rational science. You just have to understand the nature of reality. Then I got very quickly, within a few hours, I came up with why speed of light was a constant. Then I started looking at a lot of other of these paradoxes that are in physics, in philosophy, in theology, even in psychology and sociology. And I was able to answer all of these paradoxes with logic.

So that is kind of my trajectory from beginning to end.

Scott Britton (16:44.907)

That's quite the story. And I think you personify the term consciousness explorer, perhaps better than anybody I've ever met. It's really amazing. And I've heard you talk about how science, mean, this to me is a really important point from my big toe where it's like, it needs to explain everything. Right? And that's like a concept that our current Western science does not.

Right? We have like all these edge cases and anomalies. so like, you, I just want to underscore this, like you held that rigor with your theories and your experimentation in your theory of everything.

Thomas Campbell (17:29.323)

I did, I held that rigor and I'm actually a pretty tough case as far as demanding rigor goes because I had pretty well understood the theory and I called it a big toe, a theory of everything. And I did that for almost about 18 years, almost 20 years. I said, this MBT is a theory of everything.

because I wasn't sure that maybe there was something else that was more complete or things that I had left out or I just thinking, you know, something I didn't understand. So I spent all that time looking for exceptions, looking for things that it didn't explain, trying to, you know, kind of scan the internet for things that happened that nobody understands that mine would fail to explain or to come up to some, you know,

problem in my own theory, know, something that didn't really make sense. So I spent a lot of time focused on that. And at the same time, that led me to explain a whole lot of things that otherwise I was never even run across because I was out searching for mysteries and searching for paradoxes. So I eventually decided that you couldn't get that much right. You you couldn't get that many paradoxes solved, logically not solved from, you know, some

belief-based thing, but just logically solved without being at least mostly right. There may be things that still need to be added or whatever. don't know. Theories should be a living thing. It's not like here's a theory and it's done and it'll never change. Theories get replaced all the time with better theories and they grow and extend. So that's what I was trying to find. But now I had all of these things that I could explain.

I have a list of just short of 40 of these things that I could explain, and it doesn't cause any new paradoxes. So, it explains all those, but doesn't create anything new. And it only had one assumption, and that's that consciousness exists. That's where it starts. So, in physics, we have this way of analyzing and deciding whether a theory is a good theory or not.

Thomas Campbell (19:54.016)

And it goes like this. If the new theory can explain everything that we know already, then that's good. If it can predict things that we don't know already and they turn out to be true, that's even better. And if they can do all that without creating any new anomalies or any new paradoxes, that's good. And the last thing is they have to have very few assumptions.

a minimum number of assumptions, because if you have a lot of, know, assumptions are like wild cards. If you have enough assumptions, you can make any hand that you want. If all your cards in your poker hand are wild cards, well, you have a royal straight flush every time. So this is one assumption and no new problems created and a lot of old problems solved. So that's because of that work, then I decided this is the theory of everything because it...

just makes better sense. It creates a better physics, more general physics. It takes science and, say, spirituality and erases the barrier between them. It sees how they are all part of one thing. So, that's, you it's a unifying thing. I have a non-profit organization called the Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness.

Scott Britton (21:07.413)

Hmm.

Thomas Campbell (21:22.059)

That's another thing. mean, that's kind of the science house end of MBT. They're doing experiments and lots of things like that.

Scott Britton (21:26.537)

it.

Scott Britton (21:30.179)

Talk to us about this idea of reality as an information system.

Thomas Campbell (21:34.739)

Okay, well, let me...

Scott Britton (21:36.577)

Because I think that's kind of core to the theory of everything, correct?

Thomas Campbell (21:41.472)

It is, it is. Let's start with the physicists. The physicists now, particularly those that do particle physics and those that do quantum physics theory, they will pretty much agree on the fact that reality is information-based. That's what their experiments tell them. For instance, if you're one of those atomic physicists that mash particles together, if you try to model

you if you match those particles together, you want to model and understand what's going to come out. And if you model an electron as a piece of mass, a tiny little piece of mass with a charge, you can't get the right answer. Doesn't work. But if you model it as a point with the attributes of mass and the attributes of charge, works perfectly. Now, a point with attributes of mass and charge is the way you would model an electron in a computer.

If you were trying to model an electron, that's what you would do. So they know from their experiments, particularly it started with a double slip, but then there's been hundreds of other experiments that confirm all of this, that reality is information-based, but they don't know what to do with that. They're stuck there. The obvious thing is if it's information-based, that means it's computable. If it's computable,

That means it could be a simulation or we can call it a virtual reality. But they don't want to go down that obvious path because if they go there, obviously the elephant in the room then is, well, who's the programmer and where is this virtual reality created and who's creating it and why? And they have all these questions. Yes, so anyway, that would create a big storm and they'd have nothing to say about the storm. So they don't.

Scott Britton (23:23.776)

Right.

Scott Britton (23:27.457)

I don't think the religions were like that.

Thomas Campbell (23:37.87)

They're stopping at the fact that reality is information-based. Now, they're right about that. It is information-based, and it is a virtual reality. And the way to understand that, there's several ways to understand it. One is, well, let me back up. One thing I should have said earlier when I was talking about the early days at Bob and Rose.

One of the facts I learned, I learned lots of facts, and I needed to come up with a theory that answered or explained all the facts of consciousness as well as all the facts of the physical world. Just one theory to explain them both. And one of the facts of consciousness that I had understood was that consciousness is fundamental. And one of the ways I got to that realization was I could do things in the...

altered state, I could do things with mind, I could do things with consciousness that would affect the physical world. But I could not do anything in the physical world that had any effect whatsoever on consciousness. So the arrow of causality has to run from consciousness to the physical world. So that was just one. And then many of the rest of my experiments also verified that.

Scott Britton (24:57.761)

Well, could I could I just interject there for clarification point? So wouldn't, for example, like an action that you take, that makes you upset? Wouldn't that be an example of like the physical physical world affecting the subjective experience?

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