Insects? Tom Campbell Discusses Lower Forms of Consciousness

as I was driving for a long time yesterday you know the front of my car just got completely covered in in bug guts from you know hours and hours of driving and I thought a little bit about it because I was sitting there driving you know I'm like well is this a moral question here like these bugs am I causing a great deal of harm here like is this how am I should I be avoiding this or like it's so I find it so hard in our culture to not cause harm to other other beings

so I got thinking well like are these bugs actually I mean you've talked a little bit about like what's conscious and what isn't like is a clam really conscious it's hard to tell or whatever insects you know they're probably conscious but I mean are they really iuocs or I got to thinking well you know that doesn't seem right like there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of growth and learning opportunities for some level of life I'm thinking well maybe it's just the LCS playing the these Critters as like a kind of a background thing

and I got me thinking well Kayla does that change the morality of these sorts of things if it's really just kind of the LCS playing um the creature as like sort of a background character versus kind of the front line iuc's in whatever shape they may be taking you know humans or not and uh yeah I don't know like how do you how do you handle or deal with that sort of thing like sure that's a good question and you know there are some groups in India who when they walk they take a little broom

and they constantly sweep the path in front of them so as to sweep any insects or whatever out of the way now I guess tumbling an insect over and over head over tails with a broom you know this is not as bad as stepping on one but still you know that is a because that is a issue for them and there are some people that are called fruititarians that just eat fruit and they only eat fruit that falls off the tree because the pluck the fruit off the tree it'd be an insult to the tree

so there are people that take this kind of thing very very seriously in my way of thinking it's all part of this reality frame the insects have adapted here to the fact that they have many hazards then by birds they've Splat on windshields uh you know if it if the winter is too cold you know that way may wipe out half of that species in a certain area because the winter was was too cold too long or sometimes you'll have an early spring and a lot of bugs will get up and then they'll have a

cold snap and stop they all die you know all the ones that woke up now are all dead because the cold kills them so the environment is is such that the insects have adapted to that that's why when they lay eggs they don't just lay one egg they lay a hundred thousand eggs and these hundred thousand eggs not all of them hatch but a lot of them do and a lot of them maybe never even find food it may be that 20 of the you know it's like ticks you know little ticks you get out

in the woods well six late tens of thousands of eggs they create lots and lots of other ticks but probably 80 or 90 percent of them all starve to death because they don't happen to just be at the right place where an animal walks under a bush or where they happen to be and they can drop and get to eat and if they get to eat then that's part of their cycle you know that they can they can then perhaps lay eggs themselves or do something else but that first lucky shot of being able to

drop on something with blood in it it doesn't happen to but a small fraction but then they create large numbers such that they survive that way you know they're adapted to that well in our environment you should be caring of other living things okay that's that's true but how far do we take that well if it's another human or a dog or a cat well then we have to take that very seriously because now we have a a uoc something that you know has a life and that life is valued and you should value it

as well but dogs and cats don't drop ten thousand puppies you know at a at a time you know so it's a little it's a little different than than with the with the bugs now with the bugs each bug does not represent an iuoc it represents perhaps something somewhat like an iuoc for maybe that whole species or maybe all the bugs in that area but not just it doesn't have enough it doesn't make enough choices for an iuic to be making the choices of a gnat or whatever those things were that you were running into

I know in Virginia there was a thing called love bugs and they would get so thick sometimes that you'd actually run through a cloud of those you'd have to stop pull off the side of the road and clean your windshield because you just couldn't see through them they would be thick black clouds of these things flying around and they were just completely make your windshield opaque so yes they don't have enough choices for an iuoc to spend his time making those choices even a very diminutive value I see it's just not enough there so you

might say that there was an iuoc that represents the species or all those kinds of things in that or maybe a whole bunch of different kinds of bugs in that neighborhood or maybe they're NPCs and they're just run by the LCS but it's not an iuoc like we are it's not making a lot of progress evolving the quality of its consciousness it's just kind of a player that does its thing it's evolved to be here after all you know the initial conditions and the rule set and all kinds of things evolve to be here but

they all don't make good avatars that a piece of Consciousness would want to play the only reason a piece of conscious wants to play something is if it helps them evolve the quality of their Consciousness that's the reason for logging on it's a it's a choice making you know way of of growing up more quickly better choices more profound choices well the choices of a love bug or a lightning bug or something are not really big leaps forward in the Evolution game so I think that now they they in their own little way are doing

the same thing we're doing in the sense they have choices let's say a lightning bug does have choices whatever that limit it is and if they make good choices things work out better for them and if they make bad choices so entropy still applies choices so it still works like that but they're not really making progress for themselves or the larger conscious system in any significant way but they are kind of work similar the way we do in that in that case but I think they have adapted to hazards all sorts of Hazards and that's

part of the way they are uh you know like the reason that fish have learned through Evolution to swim in schools small fish big fish don't do it why do small fish swim in schools well that's because when another fish comes along to eat them they'll only get a few and the rest will escape so that is their strategy says all right the big Hungry Fish comes along and it'll run into our school with its mouth open but it won't get us all so the attrition is part of their part of what they do is

they live with that attrition so no I don't think you have to be concerned about hurting the bugs on your windshield or the bugs that you might step on I don't think you have to sweep them out of the way but I think you have to be aware so if you see an ant walking on the sidewalk you wouldn't go out of your way to step on it you'd walk around it you'd step over it you'd leave it alone but if you were out uh you know getting your exercise and jogging and running 10 miles

you probably wouldn't notice you wouldn't be looking at the ground that carefully yeah you may not you just step on whatever happens to be under your feet when they land if it's a bug there then there's a bug there and unfortunate for that bug but it doesn't take a big negative it doesn't increase entropy very much to step on that bug if at all whereas if you you know you shoot your neighbor that has a very negative effect on entropy it creates a lot of dysfunction creates a lot of problems creates a lot of chaos

and and fear and other things that aren't good so that raises entropy a whole lot squishing a bug on your windshield does not raise the entropy of the system very much so it isn't really something you have to worry about too much yes avoid it if you can but if you can't then no you don't now in my house I have a thing that uh I let bugs be in my house and as much as I don't mind living with some bugs my wife has a whole different attitude toward that you know I see little

spiders you know and they're running up the wall and I'd say hello and I just leave them alone and they have webs in the corner and I leave them alone until my wife notices them and when she notices them that's the end of them you know and it's not her that has to go get rid of him it's me that has to get rid of them because she doesn't want to get that close to them so it's a problem it's creating a problem in my house It's upsetting my wife then you know how that goes

your wife's upset then everybody's not doing so well so the spider if it's easy to catch and put outside I'll do that but most spiders are hard to catch they're fast uh wasps and things I can catch them I put a cup over them and I slide a paper under the cup then I pick the whole thing up and I let them go but you can't do that with a spider because spiders are too fast to snatch like that besides they're getting little cracks and and things that you can never get them so you know

they just get sucked up in a vacuum cleaner or you know something else happens to them that's fatal and that's the end of them so that's part of the risk of living in my house if you're a spider if you can stay out of sight you're good to go if you can just stay out of my wife's site you're good to go so you know if you're in the garage or someplace where my wife never looks you know I got spiders in that garage who've been there for years and she never goes and looks around

in those places so they live happily there and I don't mind them they don't do anything to bother me so I leave them alone but if my wife went out there for some reason and saw those spiders well they would have to be removed so sometimes I kill spiders and sometimes I leave them alone now things that multiply and then become a real big nuisance like cockroaches and ants they get in my house I get rid of them because I know what will happen if I don't get rid of them I'm going to have hundreds

of them and if I don't get rid of those it'll be an infestation that'll be almost impossible to get rid of so when I see those ants wanting to put up a home in my house well they go right away you know they get stepped on they get sucked up I have no pity on those kinds of things because I realize they are going to try to take over the whole house if they get a chance so they already have a bad reputation and because of their bad reputation as not being you know the spiders

don't do that the spiders seem to only to only uh reproduce and spread around in as much as there's food for them and there's not that much food for them in a house they get little bugs now and then or whatever so one or two spiders here and there can make a living but you know 100 spiders most of them just die hunger in the house because the house just doesn't have that much things for them to eat so the population stays small so I'm fine with that but roaches and ants and things that multiply

and live inside of walls where you can't get them and I become a a killer of those things just because I I figure that that's you know you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone kind of a thing you don't bother me in my life I won't bother you in your life but if you overrun my house I'm going to do something about it because I can't have them all through my cupboards and through my food and every place else you know that's not that's not acceptable so yes think of it in terms of

Entry if I kill these bugs how much is that going to decrease or increase entropy well it's not going to increase the entropy it's good I'm not going to raise it much either it's not really going to make much difference they have they are designed to deal with with those kinds of situations where you know half two-thirds eighty percent ninety percent of their population gets wiped out and that's just normal that's just part of what they're designed to do like the ticks I think I read someplace at like 95 percent of them all starved at

death they they just don't happen to be at the right place at the right time and they don't survive but they create so many small ticks that the 10 that does survive is plenty enough to carry on the species so don't feel too guilty about running into bugs or even stepping on things that you don't know are there but don't go out of your way to step on things or if your wife doesn't mind spiders then leave them alone if you don't mind spiders if you really don't like spiders and you see a spider and

you want to get rid of it well then that spider has gotten into your space and it'll die after that mistake it needs to go somewhere else and that's really okay it's funny because just today actually I was in my garage and uh saw a spider about yay big made a web while we were gone I guess on the trip and I was like that also prompted me to think about that question I was like okay little bugs okay now I've got a big spider here now what's my play here yeah that's different now let's

say you have a big spider and the big spider is big enough to really hurt somebody and let's say you have small children and your children play with stuff they have toys in the garage all right now I would say you need to get rid of that spider now you can get rid of him by putting a stick or something up there and getting him and taking him outside or you can get rid of him by sucking him up in a vacuum cleaner or splatting them someplace but that's a that's a risk you have children

you have a spider big enough to actually hurt them then the spider loses that that argument and you get rid of it get rid of it by relocating it if you can but again what are you going to do with the big spider pick it up and carry it you know someplace probably not you know can you catch it in a can or a bottle Maybe is it worth the trouble Maybe kind of depends on how you feel about that but if you can't then it's to kill it and the reason it dies is because

it made its home in an inappropriate place now you don't have children like I don't have little children running around so yeah big spiders don't bother me now let's say you had a spider and you recognize it's a black widow and you have children around kill it because it's a risk the entropy that gets raised because your children get bitten by a poisonous spider is a whole lot more than the entropy gets raised because a spider dies it's good that you are concerned all those little bugs going Splat and you're going oh you know bugs

stay away from my windshield but it's just the nature of things when bears walk around in the woods they step on ants and bugs too and if they find a whole bunch of ants they eat them you know they uh think skill are the things that happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time you get eaten or you get splatted on the windshield or you get sucked up in a vacuum cleaner because you're at the wrong place at the wrong time that's just part of existence and if it's a poisonous spider or

a big spider and you have little kids well that's the wrong place and it's unfortunate they ended up in the wrong place but when you end up in the wrong place often what happens is you cease to exist thank you I and MBT events hope you like this video we will continue to post videos for free on my YouTube channel But please understand these videos are expensive to produce they represent many thousands of hours of production and editing as well as all the necessary audio visual equipment computers and software if you find something of significant

value in our videos please consider supporting their production through our patreon account or through a one-time donation it would be very much appreciated the links are in the description below thank you