The Consciousness Stack – Mapping a Substrate Model of Existence

Peter: 00:00:00

You're listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast, exploring the universal truths that we see woven through culture, consciousness and the human experience.

Ryan: 00:00:18

Good morning everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast. My name is Ryan.

Peter: 00:00:23

My name is Peter.

Ryan: 00:00:23

And today I wanted to share something with you that I found really interesting.

This is what we're calling the consciousness stack and was a result of a conversation I had with ChatGPT and it yielded an illustration of a model that kind of aligns with some of the more computer based models of what reality could be.

So we just talked about Tom Campbell who discusses simulation, and we've discussed Donald Hoffman a number of times who describes a user interface kind of model and, and I find those to be quite interesting and useful in my own conceptualization of how consciousness, if it is taken as fundamental, how out of that yields this material experience, the hardened state, all those kinds of things. So this I found to be an interesting take on creating an illustration for how that could work.

But before we dive into this, Peter and I, we embrace the mystical experience. But mystical experience doesn't come from intellection.

But what I found in thinking about this is it may not drive mystical experience, but the intellect can be an obstruction or a barrier to mystical experience.

The egoic mind has thoughts and beliefs, and if it's too constrained to consider possibilities of mystical experiences and a world beyond, then it is a barrier. And so I think there is value to engaging in these intellectual exercises to open the mind.

And so what I'm offering today isn't a description of anything scientific. This isn't being presented as teaching or anything like that. It's meant to be a little bit of entertainment and tickling the intellectual mind.

I enjoy imagining these kinds of things. I find it useful in my own practice. And maybe you will as well.

Peter: 00:02:30

I appreciate what you're saying about having a thought experiment or an exercise to stretch the mind and limber it up and make it more flexible and less constrained and less closed and more open. And I think in part it's letting it know that we're going to go out of the comfort zone. But here are some ideas to maybe assuage the mind, right?

And then I think later I'll want to talk a little bit more maybe about Camel.

Ryan: 00:02:58

So a little context to the listener.

So, as I had said, this came out of a conversation I was having with ChatGPT and ultimately I posed the question, consider a philosophical theoretical contemplation from a consciousness first mechanism whereby the conscious awareness is the underlying essence of all things. Taking that consciousness first ontology where consciousness is to existence as the Taoist to the way.

And imagine plausible mechanism for how consciousness gives rise to the whole show the space, time, matter, feelings of solidity and such. And so it describes seven layers. But the layers conceptually are infinite.

So there's infinite strata of filters and layers and information that would stack conceptually on top of itself, adding depth and complexity to ultimately give rise to what we experience. But also what people might call dimensions or multiple universe scenarios.

But that there's no limitation as far as what other kinds of experiences and systems could be generated in this model.

The first layer, this essence layer, is the pure awareness could be related to or described as Dao or Brahman, or any other number of descriptions or names for that fundamental essence that underlies all things. You could call it consciousness however you want to describe it. And its nature is infinite and non local. There's a timeless element to it.

The analogy is the infinite ocean with no waves. So it's pure stillness, but holding the potential for all motion.

And what came to mind is the imagery of God floating over the waters in pre time or in the beginning, where the field of awareness was still and infinite and absolute. And that gives rise to a second layer called differentiation. And this is where separation begins.

And what that is is that the fundamental essence begins to modulate. So that goes to the wave in the ocean kind of analogy, where the waves are individuations of the one essence.

What I realized was that modulation is that essence of this versus that and that. It's the base by which conditional and relational logic can occur.

So in our binary code, it's that this and that kind of relationship that gives rise to the complexity that we see in computing.

The waveform itself is an analog wave, which actually has infinite points of information along its entire waveform, which would give rise to essential infinite complexity. Computational complexity, such as the analog system would be constrained within the material world with Shannon's law and Planck's constant.

Where there is physical barriers and frictions that would constrain the absolute nature of an infinite encoding.

But if this was in this second layer, which is before space and time and the material rules and systems that dictate how things work here, infinite potential and capacity for information would have no restrictions. After that comes a rule layer. This is the proto laws.

What I interpret this to be is Tom Campbell's description of rule sets, physics and our understanding of the physical world and nature and rules that govern it, lives in this layer, where once information exists, relations and Patterns between them naturally emerge. So this is what I'm thinking of as far as like beginning with a high entropy. And then eventually coalescing into a lower entropy.

Into coherence and boundaries. And that the laws aren't created or imposed specifically. But that they're consistent habits of consciousness interacting with itself.

So as consciousness has begun to modulate and have this sort of information layer. The patterns begin to emerge through more randomized interactions.

Creating restrictions and rules that ultimately govern the next layer, which would be space time rendering protocol. Which is described essentially as a coordinate system. That consciousness uses to organize experience.

So space and time isn't some sort of container or absolute. But that it is an indexing system for individuated experience. And it could be rendered similar to like a VR engine.

Where the scene in the local experience. Is rendered as part of the observed. And interacted with space. Not necessarily rendered en masse. So once we have space and time as an indexing system.

We start exploring matter, which I'll describe as solidity. So a condensing tangible and self reinforcing informational structure. So patterns become self reinforcing.

And solidity becomes a perception from our perceiving faculties. Interaction with these patterns. That solidity is a resistance to change. The tactile sensation is us sensing the pattern's resistance to change.

And different patterns have varying resistances to change. So we could go from very fluid and mobile. To very rigid and solid. So ultimately there is no actual substance.

But that the substance we perceive is patterns interacting in a way that gives an illusion of solidity to a perceiver. So we have space and time. We have information, we have rules, we have matter. Now we start discussing perceiving faculties.

So these are the sensors and mechanisms by which we have been endowed to interact and interface. With this model. The senses are part of the interface. They're not outside the interface.

And they're tuned to detect narrow bands of possible information patterns. Such as smell, such as hearing, such as taste, such as infrared, if you're a snake, and so on.

As we interact through the interface with these sensory inputs. The object that we observe and the observer meet in that moment. And the experience crystallizes. Where there is both a material pattern object.

And the ultimate observer experiencing that object in that moment of space and time. And that's where experience manifests out of potential. And then the last layer described was the interaction of causality.

Where cause and effect are rendered. Effects of the rules and the patterns and the observations all materializing. So in the base layer, interactions could be more Like a shared database.

So that information is instant and non local. So in a way that kind of describes some of the what we observe with quantum where things change at exceedingly long distances instantaneously.

Because the information database is non local and can update instantly. But in space time, the rendering imposes a sequential and causal mechanism so that the game as it is described stays coherent to all players.

So that is the story that we live, the linear sequence of cause and effect that we perceive, but that at the base layer, the data information layer, these things are not bound in locality and they can update essentially instantly in that infinite nonlinear space. How is it that finite experience is called out of that?

The imagined mechanism was a four dimensional addressing schema where the coordinates for a given experience or time, however you want to describe it, would start with a domain id which describes your specific rule set, the physics and metaphysics that run your universe system. So that could be considered similar to an operating system.

Then there'd be a pattern vector, which is the stable pattern within that rule set, a state index, which is the current condition and moment that that pattern is existing. And then there's the perspective key, and that's the, the observer's relationship to all those components.

And basically the query would be able to render a time specific rule set, specific pattern specific experience that could be called out of infinite potential. The perspective key is the important component that translates from an objective state into a subjective experience. So I found that interesting.

Did you have something you wanted to respond to?

Peter: 00:12:41

Well, talking about the perspective key and the perception parameters made me think about some recent experiences and how they feed the goal of transcendence.

I think more than just conceptualizing the boundaries of our physical reality as we have been doing, talking about the ideas of how it could work, but we also, in order to really graduate, we have to have experience in moving beyond that or, I know, kind of like acquiring the experience that allows us to be separate from it, to be separate from it, not just imagine being separate from it or talk about being separate from it. And so one of the things is this shedding of localized perspective, which is a characteristic of physical existence. It's very intrinsic.

It's part of the rule set. It's a key perspective key. And this has come up for me recently. No matter where you are, you're here.

Like, you only experience things from the location of your person, right? The location of your head. And if you go over there, you're still here.

You're not in this physical location, you're in that location over there where Your head is where your perceptions are. That's your location. Your location is always where your perception is. I've had some recent experience in dissociating from localized perception.

Not very strongly. I think it's not a very sophisticated way, because I think what I think of as a dissociation or sophisticated one is out of body experience, right?

Which is something that's still not in my experience.

And the other thing which I probably talked about at some point before, which is much stronger, is kind of the dissociation from the sensory inputs of.

And this is related, I think, to perspective because I think normally the way we experience the world through our senses and our senses kind of define and confirm our perspective location, right?

And so the experience that I've had in deep meditation is recognizing my senses as separate from my awareness and a very clear experience of, oh, this is my visual sense, this is my vision, this is my visual experience, this is my auditory experience, this is my tactile experience. And that they relate and I relate to them, but they do not define me. And I'm not identifying with.

I see the cup and I see my hand, and there's a sensory experience associated with my hand or a tactile sensory experience associated with my hand. And also a visual sensory experience for the cup.

And the recognition that just because there's a tactile sensory experience associated with my hand doesn't make that more me. I guess what I'm trying to do is describe how this model can relate to direct experiences.

Obviously, people like Campbell report extraordinary experiences like traveling out of body and meeting other entities, kinds of stuff far beyond.

I mean, I can't speak to that, but I just want to report, like, oh, yeah, I do have some direct experience pointing to how these elements of experience, these elements of what we call the physical reality, you know, generally we just call reality. We don't specify. It's like, this is what's real.

What's real is, you know, the texture of this thing and the weight of that thing and the color of this thing. But, you know, really, they're elements of existence in physical reality in the context of.

I guess that's probably the best way of putting it, the context of physical reality.

And that when you have an experience of separating your awareness from those things as identity, then it becomes more real and less conceptualized that we're operating in the context of physical reality. That was something that keyed in when you went over the address components concept.

Ryan: 00:16:39

So that was the framework. There's yet some more to discuss. Specifically, our Access to different layers. And we've talked about these supernatural kinds of experiences.

So things like psi phenomena is not a supernatural thing, but is the temporary bypassing of the guardrails of the shared simulation.

Peter: 00:17:05

So Campbell says the same thing, that it's not supernatural. But I think that's ignoring really the shared meaning of natural. So what we generally mean by natural is following familiar laws.

And so in the sense that it's breaking the laws, it's unnatural. I think that the point that Campbell makes is just that our conception of natural, our conception of what the laws are, is slightly inaccurate.

And so these things aren't breaking the rules, they're breaking what we think rules are. And I think that that's Campbell's point, is that there's a continuum of rules or perceived rules or rules that we understand.

And so in the sense that you can move from one to the other, it's all natural, it's all part of reality. But then again, in terms of the way we have the conversation, like we're having this conversation in physical reality.

And so in that sense, these things are outside of that reality. It's a distinction of, I guess, perception, like this idea of degrees. And how common is the experience to say that something is natural or unnatural?

Right. I guess really the accurate term would be usual and unusual.

Ryan: 00:18:16

Yes.

Peter: 00:18:17

Nothing at all is unnatural. If it can happen, it's natural. It's just. It's unusual. You won't often meet people who have that same experience.

Ryan: 00:18:26

I think it's an important point, and I think that this is the reason I talk about it in this way, is when we try and describe it as natural or not supernatural, it's in an effort to break down the stigmas of impossibility. Right. So you were absolutely correct, I think, in saying, well, it is supernatural insofar as it's outside the norm of experience.

I think that's a fair way to define it.

I think that in part, it's to break down those barriers of the mind that we were talking about early in the episode, saying these things aren't impossible, and they're not necessarily even strange or anomalous, so to speak, in its essence, but in the frequency of experience, they do come off as anomaly. Is that fair?

Peter: 00:19:15

Yeah. It all has to do with frames of reference.

So if you have brought yourself into secondary frame of reference that is outside of our physical experience, you've significantly shifted your frame of reference. That's a commonly shared frame of reference.

So from the shift shifted frame of reference, there's no anomaly but for anyone in the standard frame of reference, it's anomaly.

Ryan: 00:19:40

Yeah. The second thing I wanted to bring up is why is it uncommon and why would it be undesirable? And I think it goes back to this shared experience.

And in a way, the. I guess I'll say purpose.

I don't know if that's the word I really mean, but we've talked about before, this nature or desire to experience is conceivably part of why all this came to be. Right. Why do we not just live in that first infinite layer? There's no experience, there's no movement and flow.

And so if those things like that debug mode, if it were the norm, would start to break down at the experience that we engage with the experience of the mystical, the experience of that sort of supernatural is only possible because we have this norm, Right? If everything's special, nothing's special kind of thing.

Peter: 00:20:44

That's interesting. That touches on another insight that I have this morning. So what you're saying is, why is the debug mode limited and not just wide open?

And the reason is to ensure stability. And the reason that you want stability is that you need that in order to contrast with the experience of the mystical. Take.

Okay, so as you know, I've been delving into Campbell more, and I would say that that essentially aligns.

It's interesting how your independent exploration parallels his work, of course, the work of Hoffman, and of course, how he and Hoffman parallel each other, as we've mentioned.

And I think what's encouraging is that the more independent investigations come to the same conclusions, the more confidence we can have in the conclusions. And so I think that that's the pattern. I mean, that's our whole premise here, right?

Is that we're looking for these underlying rules or the perennial wisdom or the ultimate truth.

And it's like, okay, so the more we find these things recurring, then the higher confidence that we have in the validity of this as a potential absolute truth. So going back to the first layer of this undifferentiated infinity, as you say, it has profound roots in all kinds of traditions.

And you cited Old Testament of moving on the face of the deep. Right. Which I love that because haven't thought, thought of that.

And it relates so closely to my shared experience of, I don't know, deep meditation or mystical contact, you know, and then the next step being this modulation. So this is straight from Campbell very explicitly postulates these two things in his own building of the model.

So he calls this undifferentiated auo, which is absolute unlimited oneness. He introduces that as a term and says this is familiar from multiple traditions. And you could say, oh, that's Shiva. Oh that's God.

But in reality it doesn't have to be as absolute. It's apparently absolute. When he describes, or we think of the absolute unlimited oneness, it is that from the perspective of our physical reality.

And that what he demonstrates is that in absolute reality it actually does not have to be unlimited. It only has to be unlimited from our perspective in order to allow the generation of our universe.

He basically goes through what we would call ground of being, this essence of what he calls the absolute unlimited oneness. And he shows you only have to go a bunch of powers of 10 beyond what we conceive to have this apparently unlimitedness.

But then his next step is this differentiation, this, this modulation and the creation of the wave. So, so that's right on.

And the, the rule set is very interesting because as a physicist, he walks it through really explicitly and basically says the speed of light is just the fundamental basic rule of our physical reality, right?

Which, oh, so I should say he moves it from AUO to generating these waves and these differentiated bits and expanding the bit ness of it and growing that out until it contains multiplicities. And so then it becomes a manifold.

So it moves from being a one to being manifold, which is interesting also because this has come up repeatedly in conceptions of the divine. Right. Well, is the divine one or is it manifold? And so now he's gotten to a U M Absolute unlimited manifold or ohm, which is cute.

And so he then he describes how speed of light is one of the rules or the essential rule that Om created to start to define our physical reality. And it just occurs to me that is very invocative of Let there be light, where light is the essential. I mean, it's very interesting.

And so that's not a connection that he makes, but when I say it, it's like, oh my God, how could you avoid that? Right?

And I guess what I'm pointing to is the recurrency of these themes and then the idea of moving into matter as being these self reinforcement forcing patterns that arise out of the rule set. What that suggested to me was the reality of physical experience being solid.

And I wrote that matter, solidity and reality mean the same things to us, and yet our egoic self is that it is this self reinforcing pattern, right? But we don't call it a physical reality, but we recognize that it has this Persistence.

And maybe that's why people think it is part of physical reality, because it seems physically real. It has this quality of solidity and persistence which then becomes the soul. Right? The soul is immortal even though it's non physical.

And so you have this crossover almost between physical reality and spiritual reality because of this persistent pattern. And then we start looking for ways to make it mean something in terms of physical reality. Like, well, how does the soul work?

How does the soul get reincarnated? And it's like it doesn't in terms of physical reality. It's just the persistence of pattern.

Don't worry about how it fits into a body because the body is just another persistent pattern. These patterns are associated. There's not one inside another necessarily.

You can construct patterns where one pattern is spatially inside of the other pattern, but it doesn't have to be spatially inside of it only has to be associated with in some way. And then you're talking about the senses and the shared reality. And you said separation, that's not real.

Like, even though everything is not actually separated, it appears separated. And my, my note was, well, it is separated in this simulation.

So we have to, I think, be willing to continually return to shared reality and not just, oh, it doesn't matter because we're not separate, because we still have work to do in physical reality, even as pure consciousness. And so that's just the caveat of, yeah, don't go off the rails because nothing matters, because it's all not real. It's real.

We're not done playing the game because we're not all wise and benevolent and pure and whatever it is that we need in order to naturally transcend the game.

There's some tendency to learn about, about the unreality of separation, the unreality of physical reality, and then discount it as unvalued and unfactual. When as far as we know, there's a huge utility to it for us as non physical beings. We're not just here randomly. Given this physical rule set.

I don't believe anymore that there's an intentional individualistic direction saying, you know, I'm going to place you here in this situation so that you can learn things and become better. It's just the way things are. But we are learning and we do have kind of a drive to be better. And so this whole discussion is useful as an exercise.

And we have to be careful about being too glib about just saying everything's relative. And that doesn't matter.

The reason we have to say it's not real is because being unrelentingly attached to the experience of physical reality constrains us too much. It prevents us from seeing things that we want to see, and it can cause us to deny the reality of actual experience.

And so that's why we have to say, oh, it's not real, or we have to be able to see that physical existence isn't absolutely real.

Not because it doesn't matter, just with what we started out the whole episode with the purpose of expanding perception and enabling us to learn things that we can't learn if we're overly constrained.

Ryan: 00:28:53

When you were discussing the infinite, not having to be absolutely infinite, it reminded me of an excerpt in Conversations with God where in a conversation, God was saying, I am all that you imagine God is, and yet I am to that. To another, it's not constrained in the way that we think of. Well, because we think of infinity as a constraint.

Peter: 00:29:20

Right? Right.

Ryan: 00:29:21

We imagine infinity, which is by definition unconstrained in this box.

Peter: 00:29:26

So one thing that I just read about in book two of Campbell was that from our layer of reality, what he calls pmr, from our physical matter reality, we can conceive of this outer layer, but there's no way for us to model it. We can conceive that there is something that we can't conceive, and that's as far as we can go.

And so I'm guessing that that's what we're scratching with the mystical experience. So we start to have an idea, and not just a conceptual idea, but a direct taste of all air beyond the physical.

When Ryan had introduced this chat conversation, I had some concerns about, about how and why we were talking about it. And I think I'm being heavily influenced by Campbell. It does a good job explaining why we're here, which is not to say that he's stating facts.

In fact, the book is my big toe Theory of everything. It's a theory, it's a model. It's a model that's very, very well supported by a lot of evidence, but that's all it is.

And so one of the things that he says is, you know, it's important that you not believe all the stuff I'm telling you. In fact, I don't believe it either. He's building a working functional model. And so it's not a question of believing it. Right.

It's a question of matching the elements of the model to available evidence. You advance with a little conjecture, which is imagination, but it's logical imagination.

And then you reconfirm and you match it to more evidence, and you add that to the model because it matches the evidence. The other big point he makes is it's called my big toe because it's mine, it's not yours. This is all from my experience and my knowledge.

And everybody has to have their own experiences and build on this. And so the purpose of my big toe is so that you can develop your big toe. You can develop a model of interpreting your experience.

So my concern with talking about this stuff was our goal isn't to try to tell people the way things are. It's to try to share our experiences and how we're putting these things together in such a way that we feel like we're growing and becoming better.

Better in objective and subjective ways. As we got into this very conceptual exploration with ChatGPT, that was my concern.

One of the things that relieved me was I had some insights with my experience of driving in. So I'm reacting to drivers who are irritating me and frightening me.

And I was connecting this to the idea of being in the physical reality so that we can have experiences to grow. And I realized that this is part of my growth is dropping these habitual thought patterns, which I've talked about an awful lot.

And I talk about it as conditioning in terms of psychological conditioning and conditioning in a larger sense. Thich Nhat Hanh called them habit energies.

And recently I've started recognizing it as a subroutine, just a pattern that exists which is developed as part of me, but it is not me. And what I realized was a big part of the growth process is learning to let go of things.

I mean, this is pretty trite bumper sticker philosophy, right? But it's a very key truth. And so I realized that a very important part of our development is gaining a lot of attachments.

But then later on, it becomes very important to be able to let go of those attachments.

And before we let go of attachments, we have to learn discernment, which is to say that some of our attachments are constructive and continue to be useful, and some of them are not. And so then we have to be able to let go of those ideas that are no longer serving us.

So one of the things that Campbell talks about is he introduces a term of fundamental process, which is evolution. But I think that by introducing the term fundamental process, he helps us conceptually dissociate it from biology.

I think growth and development are probably the terms that we should use, but we like to use the term learning. And then in our culture Learning tends to be the accumulation of knowledge.

And in the awakening sphere, there's this concern around the mind and thinking and ideas and knowledge, right? And I think in this process of development as an individuated portion of infinite consciousness, what's really most important is experience.

But as humans in this context, the way we get there most is we actually do accumulate a lot of intellectual knowledge. That's what gets us to the experiences. For most of us, accumulating more knowledge helps us access more experiences.

Not true for everybody, but I think definitely true for you and me.

And I think that the problem is when we prioritize intellectual knowledge over experiential knowledge, and none of these are bad things, it's just that we're suffering a very bad imbalance, emphasizing our thoughts and emphasizing our body, because our body and our thoughts are the only things that are real because they are us. Like I am my thoughts and I am my body and that's all that's real. That's what we're trying to get away from.

But it doesn't mean that my thoughts and my body are bad. My thoughts in my body are my tools in this reality to move on.

But in our growth process, all of that helps us have insights which often come out of subconscious and intuition. And those are specific terms that have technical meanings or have meanings in certain circles.

But basically they're these processes that process all of our accumulated knowledge into new knowledge, into new insights. So it's not about throwing away knowledge and ideas. It's just realizing knowledge and ideas aren't going to take you all the way.

Don't be so constrained to the familiar that you can't grow beyond the familiar. And that's where most of us tend to exist most of the time, is we're so constrained by what's familiar that we can't grow beyond it.

And then we're stuck in this repetitive, harmful, uncomfortable things that we call life and suffering.

Ryan: 00:35:29

So are we equating or do we equate learning as part of evolution? Is that kind of what we're saying? Is there part of the same process.

Peter: 00:35:39

In the sense that learning is the ability to retain a choice, right? To memorize a choice of is it one or zero? Yeah. So Campbell talks about the fundamental process arising very, very early.

And it's all built around entropy and the resistance to entropy. Because basically the undifferentiated void is pure potential entropy and zero available energy for work.

That first binary bit, that's the first anti entropy occurrence, okay?

And then you generate more and Then you try to stabilize it and then what stabilizes your pattern or bits is beneficial in the fundamental process because by having less entropy you have more energy available to do work.

Ryan: 00:36:26

Because it's interesting, I would have thought of it the opposite way.

But what you're saying, I'll say also makes sense, which is I would have thought of the initial state as low, almost, basically no entropy all the way.

Peter: 00:36:41

Yeah, I can understand that too, because it's perfect. It's right, like there's no chaos.

Ryan: 00:36:45

You start introducing. Right, some chaos which creates randomness and.

Peter: 00:36:51

Yeah, but it's not introducing chaos, it's introducing variation in the randomness. So you have total field of randomness and now you have a choice of from 0 to 1.

Now that you have one point of non randomness that stands out from the totally random field. So when you have that one point, when it falls down, like you can use that energy of it falling down, but then it's gone.

Ryan: 00:37:12

Right.

Peter: 00:37:12

So you build up a thousand of those.

Now you can drop a whole bunch of points and do some work and communicate through your change of states of these binary bits and still have some leftover to rebuild and oppose entropy. Yeah, I mean you get to read the book. No, he does do a really good job of walking through it in terms of mathematics and logic.

Ryan: 00:37:33

What's the purpose of the work? Or what does that mean? What is the pursuit of work?

Peter: 00:37:39

It's always to lower entropy. Okay, so this is where it becomes hand wavy. Very, very much so. As he like defines love as low as the state of low entropy.

Ryan: 00:37:47

I guess what I'm thinking is like that describes the essence as being in transformative function, which I think we have taught, talked about to some degree as far as our learning is the one learning about itself. And I can understand the pursuit and process of achieving lower entropy and organizing and that by doing so it affords resources to do work.

But I just don't understand what that pursuit is. What's the end goal of the process?

Peter: 00:38:17

Well, it's the nature of this absolute ground of being, this au o as what he calls bootstrapping itself. So a is not conscious, Right. It bootstraps itself into these binary states, waves. Right.

And the self organization of those accumulated changes leads to consciousness. And, and that consciousness evolves in one segments of its extent. It allocates a portion of its memory to a given rule set.

And that's how consciousness generates physical reality. So there are other segments of its memory that are allocated to other rule sets. And so there are other physical Realities.

One of the interesting things that he says is that from the perspective of our physical reality, another physical reality is not physical. So there's a movie in which the main character seems to live in a haunted house. And the twist is that the main characters are actually dead.

They're all ghosts. And their haunting is by people who are living.

The people who are living in the main character's house are actually psychic investigators that are poking them with their seance and rituals to elicit response from them. And so. But each of them perceives the other as being spirit and themselves as being real. And so that's what Campbell's model reminds me of.

He says all the other dimensions or realities seem non physical as we describe them all as non physical. And they would describe us as non physical because that's just the way perception works in consciousness, in the location. Right.

So I guess broadly the work is just decreasing entropy. That's it. Which is circular. I mean, you decrease entropy so that you have more energy available to decrease entropy. But that's what.

That's life, right? That's what life does.

Ryan: 00:40:02

That was my point was where's. What's the end of that?

Peter: 00:40:06

There isn't an end. I mean, it's just a process. It's like, well, what's the end of life?

Ryan: 00:40:11

Right?

Peter: 00:40:11

What's the goal of life? The goal of life is to self propagate and to survive and to fight entropy. That's almost the definition of life, right?

Is things that actively oppose entropy. Things that don't actively oppose entropy are things we call inanimate objects.

Ryan: 00:40:26

Some. You were talking about your attachment and knowledge and use the word models as far as using them as long as you.

They have utilitarian purpose, but then to be free to release them and use new models as that situation occurs. And so I guess I'm trying to reiterate something that we said before, which is that the models themselves aren't a problem.

They are useful for various perspectives.

That the model, when we had more physical dangers and things like that was a different kind of model than we need in current state, generally speaking.

And so I guess it goes back to multiple teachings, multiple models, multiple multiplicity in general as being useful as tools and maps and guides, but not absolute in their truth and efficacy.

Peter: 00:41:23

Yeah. So here is one of his quotes.

The paths to absolute truth, big truth, and the individuals who walk those paths can be so different that the description of the same absolute truth may appear to be very different, particularly to those of less understanding. Individual interpretations are as they should be. A reflection of that big truth within the mind and experience of that individual.

So it's funny because this is emphasizing individual minds and human experience, which don't exist. That's what I was.

I was laughing at is because he is talking about our individual experiences, understanding that our individuality isn't absolutely real. It's completely real in the context of our physical reality, just not absolutely real.

And so he's emphasizing the nature of the perception of truth from our perspective in physical reality.

Ryan: 00:42:12

When we say our learning, are we talking about a collective learning? I mean, obviously our individual learning supports or helps the collective learning.

Peter: 00:42:21

But I mean, I guess I would have to extrapolate and say, yes, it's not what I was taught. I wasn't thinking about that.

So one of the things that he says is that evolution is not a group process, meaning that you evolve your consciousness independent of everybody else. So he's not talking about evolution as a. As a biological thing, because obviously evolution as a biological process is a group process.

But in a sense it's not because you have to have individual variations in order to have the variability. That's the grounds for evolution. And so the answer is yes and no. Right? Because your question was, is our learning individual or collective?

Ryan: 00:43:02

Both, in a way.

Peter: 00:43:03

It's both in a way because we.

Ryan: 00:43:05

Need to grow individually, but as we do so it supports. I guess my question really was, is the goal of learning, goal of the evolution?

Peter: 00:43:17

So everything's fractal. So everything is. Everything is a system. Everything's a subsystem of another system. Right?

So you and I as individuals are systems of cells, but we function as individual units in a larger system of society, which is a subsystem of a subsystem of subsystem of a subsystem of physical matter reality. And eventually that system optimizes.

And by optimizing that system, if you or I and you and I become enlightened, then we raise the consciousness quality.

That's what he talks about a lot, is consciousness quality of the human system, which raises the conscious quality of the physical matter system, which raises the consciousness quality of which I think answering exactly.

Ryan: 00:44:03

What I was trying to get at.

Peter: 00:44:04

It's all fractal. Makes sense. Yeah. I feel like I got off my chest when I wanted to.

Ryan: 00:44:08

I think you had legitimate concerns, and I'm glad that we were open to having this conversation. I enjoyed this little mental exercise bringing science and spiritual awakening and enlightenment, the perennial wisdom and philosophy all together.

I find it really fascinating and enjoyable to continue to uncover these alignments as as we had noted before. As always, we'd love to hear your perspective on what we talked about and hear your comments.

So feel free to share those in the comments section and we will engage back. That's all we have for today.

Peter: 00:44:45

Sounds good. Bye bye now. Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast. Join us next time as we continue the discussion.

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