The Soul of the Computer: Tom Campbell, Mathematics, and the Logic of Reality
The Allure of the Cosmic Computer
I first stumbled into Tom Campbell’s My Big TOE more than a decade ago. As a lifelong techie, I loved the way he framed reality as a kind of vast computing system. The metaphor clicked. The universe as information-processing? Of course. It fit the age of microchips and networks as neatly as the old Gnostics’ myths of demiurges and archons fit the ancient Mediterranean imagination.
Physicist John Archibald Wheeler once put it starkly: “it from bit.” Every particle, every field of force, even spacetime itself, arises from information. Reality, in this view, is informational at its core. Campbell’s model doesn’t float in isolation—it’s part of this larger shift in physics and philosophy, where the deepest structures of the universe are seen less as stuff and more as code.
Campbell wasn’t alone. Stephen Wolfram, with his cellular automata, pushed similar lines. Reality as computation has an obvious appeal: it feels intuitive, modern, even testable. And the stories of Campbell’s workshops—friends of mine returning with tales of astonishing breakthroughs in out-of-body exploration—only reinforced the sense that this model wasn’t just dry speculation. It worked as a guide to experience.
And yet a question still lingers: if reality is a computer, what is the computer made of?
The Model and Its Limits
Campbell himself insists MBT is just a model. That humility matters. Because every model, no matter how useful, is partial. The early Gnostics had dazzling models of cosmic layers and angelic intelligences, stories that guided people toward transcendence. MBT works in a similar way—as a kind of modern mythos. Not mythos in the sense of Zeus and Hera, but mythos in a Silicon Valley dialect: reality as server, avatar, simulation.
The genius of MBT is that it gives us a living metaphor for how reality might work. The opportunity, then, is to ask: what happens when we extend that mythos into logos—into the actual logic of reality itself?
Campbell on Mathematics
In one of his YouTube Q&A sessions, Campbell was asked about Leibniz’s dream of a universal calculus, a language that could express everything—math, science, metaphysics. He answered, with his characteristic clarity, that mathematics is “the logic of quantity.” Two plus six equals eight, fine, but life isn’t about quantities. Life is about qualities: trust, love, caring.
He’s right that most of us experience math this way: lifeless symbols, sterile syntax. And yet there’s another possibility. What if mathematics is not just a language we use to describe reality, but the very structure of reality itself?
This is where Ontological Mathematics enters. And I suspect Tom, as a physicist and engineer, would deeply appreciate its technical and mathematical rigor.
When the Map Is the Territory
Ordinary math is descriptive. It is syntax without semantics. Symbols pointing to things, equations modeling but never embodying. Ontological Mathematics—Ont Math—is different. Here, form and content are one. The equation doesn’t describe reality; it is reality.
Think of it this way: when we experience mathematics, we’re not observing a code written on reality—we’re encountering reality itself. The map is the territory. That’s why Ont Math isn’t “math as we know it.” It is living math—math that breathes, feels, thinks.
Here’s one way to picture it. Inside a video game, buildings, vehicles, and characters feel real enough. But behind it all is code—the instructions that generate the world. That code isn’t a representation of the game. It is the game. The surface is appearance. The code is structure.
So it is with reality. Not digital code, but mathematical code. The universe isn’t written in math. It is math. We’re living inside the pattern. This is why simulation theory catches so many imaginations. Ont Math doesn’t say we’re inside a literal simulation—it says reality operates with the same structural logic. Science describes the pixels. Ont Math points to the source code.
Leibniz glimpsed this. His “monads” were not little particles of matter but indivisible centers of thought, each reflecting the entire universe from its own perspective. He famously called them “windowless,” meaning that, in deference to the Church of his day, he had to deny that minds could directly interact. But the truth he circled was richer. Monads don’t need windows because they are already linked at the deepest level: by the shared mathematics of existence. Every monad resonates with every other, bound together in the great frequency domain.
Leibniz didn’t have the modern language of wave mathematics, but he intuited its logic. In a way, Ont Math is simply Leibniz carried through with the rigor his age couldn’t provide.
Euler’s Formula and the Jewel of Reality
The most elegant emblem of this comes in a single equation: Euler’s formula.
Physicist Richard Feynman once called it “the jewel of physics.” It ties together exponential growth, circular motion, and the two fundamental waves—sine and cosine—into one breathtaking identity. And it doesn’t just pop up in abstract math; it appears across physics, engineering, quantum theory, even electrical circuits.
In Ont Math, Euler’s formula describes the eternal, dimensionless mind in perpetual motion. The sine and cosine waves—perfectly orthogonal, at right angles to each other—are light itself, the pure expression of Being. They are the ground notes of existence, arising inevitably from the structure of mathematics.
(Note that this 2-dimensional diagram is a simplification.)
But the story doesn’t stop there. When the waves are produced at other angles—not just 0°, 90°, 180°, or 270°—these sinusoidal waves can be woven together into complex interference patterns. These are the patterns of Becoming, the living tapestry of our shared reality. Across countless minds, these angled waves overlap, combine, and generate the vast collective dream we inhabit.
Light is, in fact, sine and cosine waves orthogonal to each other. Literally, and scientifically, an electric wave and a magnetic wave. The soul, then, in its eternal form-is light!
Reality emerges from these sinusoidal foundations. Being (the eternal frequency domain) and Becoming (the unfolding interference of waves) are fused together in this one expression. Reality is not built on matter, but on mathematics in motion.
From Chaos to Coherence
At the Big Bang—or more precisely, the initial state of the frequency domain—all minds began in maximum dissociation, a chaos of overlapping waves. Imagine billions of radio signals, all scrambled together. That’s us, at birth: consciousness fractured, phase-shifted.
The purpose of life? To regain coherence. To bring those signals back into harmony, first within ourselves, then with others. That’s why qualities like love and trust matter. They’re not abstractions floating outside math—they are what coherence looks like when lived through us.
Minds must be eternal. If we were created by something outside ourselves, we could never be free—we would always be the effect of a prior cause. For true free will to exist, each mind must be uncaused, self-originating. That’s what a monad is: an uncreated unit of consciousness.
So if reality is a “computer,” its hardware is Fourier mathematics—the mathematics of waves and harmonics. Fourier transforms are the bridge between the eternal frequency domain and the spacetime universe we inhabit. They translate pure frequency information into the appearances of matter, energy, and dimensionality. Our “rendered world” is nothing other than the Fourier display of an underlying frequency-based reality.
And if we want to look even deeper—at how choices arise within this computer, how outcomes aren’t dictated by blind probabilities but by the logic of resonance and interference—that takes us into the heart of the Unus Mundus, the One Mind of all minds together. I’ve explored that in detail here: The Mathematical Unus Mundus.
Consciousness and the Evolution of Love
Campbell has always emphasized that consciousness is fundamental. On this, Ont Math is in full alignment: the universe is not made of matter, but of mind. Yet here’s the nuance: every monad is eternal, but not every monad is conscious in the sense we normally mean it. Consciousness is not a binary switch, on or off. It is a spectrum, evolving as minds move from maximum dissociation toward coherence.
Here Campbell’s “entropy reduction” finds its mathematical twin. MBT describes our purpose as lowering entropy through cooperation, trust, and love. Ont Math describes the same process as increasing coherence—bringing once-scrambled waves into harmony. Love, in this framework, is not just a feeling. It is the very mathematics of resonance between minds.
(For more about the mathematics of Love, see my talk at the 2023 School of Neurotherapy Conference. Finding the Signal of Love in the Most Complex Noise in the Known Universe.)
This also sheds light on Campbell’s emphasis on out-of-body exploration and non-physical realities. In Ont Math, what we call the “physical universe” is simply the lowest-frequency range of the grand spectrum. Higher frequencies, out of mathematical necessity, are unable to manifest physically. This gives rise to what we commonly call the astral planes—a domain many have visited in altered states and OBEs. These are not illusions. They are just as mathematically real, differing only in frequency configuration.
So when Campbell speaks of the evolution of consciousness through love, and Ont Math speaks of eternal minds regaining coherence, the two are pointing to the same truth in different languages.
The Brain as Mirror of Mind
One final piece brings this all down to earth: the brain.
Neuroscience likes to say the brain “produces” consciousness, as if thought were some byproduct of neurons firing. Ont Math flips the picture. The brain doesn’t generate the mind—it reflects it. Physiology is the mirror image of mathematics.
Every oscillation of thought has a neural echo. Brainwaves are not the source of our inner life, but the translation of eternal frequency patterns into biology. And the feedback runs both ways: just as the brain mirrors the mind, the mind can be reshaped by the brain. Neuroplasticity is proof. Trauma, meditation, neurofeedback—each rewires the circuitry. Structure bends structure.
This is why coherence matters. When our waves are scrambled—when dissociation dominates—the brain shows it: chaotic signaling, disorganized patterns. When we move toward coherence—through clarity, trust, love—the brain reorganizes too, firing in more integrated rhythms. Mental harmony leaves fingerprints in physiology.
Seen in this light, the brain and the mind are not rivals in some tired dualism of matter versus spirit. They are two faces of one system: eternal mathematical thought interfacing with temporal biology.
And this is the premise of my upcoming book, The Dream of Matter. What if we could interpret the brain itself through the lens of Ont Math? What if every neural firing were understood as part of an interference pattern, an unfolding wave logic written across the brain’s topology? Consciousness, then, isn’t trapped inside the brain, nor separable from it—it is expressed through it. The folds of cortex become the stage where thought’s mathematics displays itself.
And this is why Campbell’s model of reality as a kind of computer feels so apt. The “rendered world” includes not just our external environment, but our very physiology. The brain is our most intimate avatar, the local display of a far deeper code.
MBT Re-imagined through Ontological Mathematics
If we take MBT and ground it in Ont Math, the model comes even more alive. Imagine Campbell’s metaphor extended:
The “server” is the eternal mathematical Singularity.
The “ruleset” is the inexorable logic of Fourier mathematics, translating frequency into spacetime.
The “information exchange” is the dance of phase relationships between monads.
The “avatars” are the rendered appearances of our eternal minds within the shared interference pattern.
In this view, our bodies, our brains, our sensory environments—these are the avatars. Behind them, each of us is also a programmer: an eternal mind generating and participating in the simulation-like interference pattern of all minds together.
MBT already offers us a brilliant metaphor, one that has inspired countless breakthroughs. Ont Math doesn’t replace that vision—it deepens it. It shows us how the cosmic computer might actually work under the hood, and why Campbell’s computing metaphor resonates so strongly in the first place.
The Wider Arc
So how does the cosmic computer work? Not with silicon or energy packets, but with pure mathematics—numbers dreaming themselves into coherence.
Tom Campbell gave us a new story, a modern mythos that has helped many of us navigate reality in new ways. And when we extend that story with the rigor of Ont Math, we find logos shining through the mythos. Together, the two perspectives let us see reality not just as computed, but as computation itself—mathematics, experiencing itself through us, asking us to learn coherence.
Every time we move toward greater clarity, every time we knit together parts of ourselves that were once estranged, every time we reach across the gulf of fear to meet another mind—we are doing the very work the universe itself is doing. We are restoring coherence to the great equation.
The soul of the computer is us.
Great article!
P.S. a “+” sign missing from your Euler’s formula 😉