Thread: Global Consciousness Project

A good idea but such things have been done before and they've always given a negative result.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a positive result would be something to interpret as being comforting, but the phenomenon of emergence and consciousness is actually mysterious enough in the first place.

Always given a negative result? That's not what I've heard.

Large groups of people concentrating on peace had been shown to lower violent crime rates.

They do small experiments on that from time to time on Coast to Coast AM.

siy tay shun

Originally Posted by The Cusp

Large groups of people concentrating on peace had been shown to lower violent crime rates.

I've heard of that. It may instead suggest that consciousness can effect other consciousness, as opposed to being able to effect physical systems.

I'd argue that conscious is clearly a result of a physical system in the first place. That's why our souls are clearly glued quite firmly to our neurons.

But I'm still pretty sure it hasn't. I've come across a few of these studies and they always make some kind of major statistical error.

Originally Posted by Invader

It may instead suggest that consciousness can effect other consciousness, as opposed to being able to effect physical systems.

It may also suggest poor research and/or wishful thinking.

Yeah like I said, I always find it funny that people feel the need to create these 'magical' effects of consciousness, because with the current state of science and reductionist philosophy, consciousness is magical anyway.

New Age thoughts are comedically myopic in general actually. Madly hoping for things which cannot happen - something 'unworldly' to make life seem special - without realising that things that do happen - things of this world - are extremely mysterious as they stand.

Originally Posted by Xei

A good idea but such things have been done before and they've always given a negative result.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a positive result would be something to interpret as being comforting, but the phenomenon of emergence and consciousness is actually mysterious enough in the first place.

"They've always given a negative result" is a pretty bold claim. Citation?

Originally Posted by Xei

siy tay shun

I will back him up on this one.

http://www.mum.edu/m_effect/dc_md.html

Originally Posted by Xei

I'd argue that conscious is clearly a result of a physical system in the first place. That's why our souls are clearly glued quite firmly to our neurons.

But I'm still pretty sure it hasn't. I've come across a few of these studies and they always make some kind of major statistical error.

Where I'm all for pointing out a 'major statistical error', what I'm not for is finding a loophole and stating what a study "might not have taken into account" and spinning into something that resembles a major statistical error. Forgetting all of the 'other studies' that you came across, what is the major statistical error in this one?

Originally Posted by Xei

Yeah like I said, I always find it funny that people feel the need to create these 'magical' effects of consciousness, because with the current state of science and reductionist philosophy, consciousness is magical anyway.

New Age thoughts are comedically myopic in general actually. Madly hoping for things which cannot happen - something 'unworldly' to make life seem special - without realising that things that do happen - things of this world - are extremely mysterious as they stand.

Well said, though not particularly relevant. No one - who is the least bit respectable - has called any of these 'findings' "magical". If these phenomena exists, there is nothing magical about them. It is a lot more telling that someone would attribute the (subjectively) unorthodox findings to something that they believe someone would call 'magical', even though no one actually did.

You say that new age thoughts hope for things that cannot happen, though you address phenomena that haven't been explained. I'm sorry to say, but that's a bit of a fallacy. There are way too many unexplained phenomena in the universe to say the metaphysical 'cannot happen'. In all honesty, the most objective you could get is that some of these things that do seem to happen (and they do) happen for reasons that haven't yet been figured out.

Telekinesis, telepathy, astral projection, etc; these are all things that have not been proven impossible. They have simply been explained away (despite their numerous experiences) as things that don't yet have physical explanations.

My point is, you imply that something like telekinesis 'cannot happen', yet state that you don't understand (specifically) how the telekinetic 'experiences' that people have actually do happen. The two perspectives clash.

It's "Telekinesis cannot exist, because telekinesis is 'magical'" vs "telekinesis can exist, and its explanation is not magical" that are the two opposing viewpoints.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

I will back him up on this one.

http://www.mum.edu/m_effect/dc_md.html

Honestly, this study is a bit of a joke. They didn't even use a control group -- it's hard to imagine an element that is more basic to conducting a good experiment. Normally for quasi-experiments on the city level like this, researchers select a few cities that are similar to the city in question on key factors, e.g., size, climate, region, etc. The idea is to see if the city in question experienced a change in the dependent variable (violent crime in this case) relative to the control cities -- this would help to rule out a range of alternate explanations for a significant effect.

Interestingly, the violent crime rate didn't actually decrease at all over the course of the study. It increased. In fact, it rose to the highest levels ever recorded -- violent crime has literally never been as rampant in DC, before or since, as it was that summer. The researchers' entire case is based on the idea that it didn't raise as much as they think it would have otherwise. Seriously?!

There is simply no good reason to accept these results as good support for their hypothesis.

"They've always given a negative result" is a pretty bold claim. Citation?

That's not how it works... you can't prove a negative, it would require infinite data.

You're supposed to give a study with a positive result. Until then, we can assume it's negative, because there's no reason to believe it should be true.

As Carl Sagan elegantly summarised; extraordianary claims require extraordinary proof.

Where I'm all for pointing out a 'major statistical error', what I'm not for is finding a loophole and stating what a study "might not have taken into account" and spinning into something that resembles a major statistical error. Forgetting all of the 'other studies' that you came across, what is the major statistical error in this one?

I'm saying this a lot these days, but; see DuB.

Well said, though not particularly relevant. No one - who is the least bit respectable - has called any of these 'findings' "magical". If these phenomena exists, there is nothing magical about them. It is a lot more telling that someone would attribute the (subjectively) unorthodox findings to something that they believe someone would call 'magical', even though no one actually did.

You say that new age thoughts hope for things that cannot happen, though you address phenomena that haven't been explained. I'm sorry to say, but that's a bit of a fallacy. There are way too many unexplained phenomena in the universe to say the metaphysical 'cannot happen'. In all honesty, the most objective you could get is that some of these things that do seem to happen (and they do) happen for reasons that haven't yet been figured out.

Telekinesis, telepathy, astral projection, etc; these are all things that have not been proven impossible. They have simply been explained away (despite their numerous experiences) as things that don't yet have physical explanations.

My point is, you imply that something like telekinesis 'cannot happen', yet state that you don't understand (specifically) how the telekinetic 'experiences' that people have actually do happen. The two perspectives clash.

It's "Telekinesis cannot exist, because telekinesis is 'magical'" vs "telekinesis can exist, and its explanation is not magical" that are the two opposing viewpoints.

Pretty much the same as my first point, but the way science works is that until evidence for something is observed, we do not think it exists.

When I say 'magical' things - impossible things - I am hence talking about things which have never been observed.

Yes, they may be possible - clearly there are many possible phenomena which have never been observed by man - but until any one phenomena is observed, there's no reason to believe or hope that it is real.

The 'non-magical' things I'm referring to include emergence with respect to conscious systems, fine tuning, and the question 'why is there something instead of nothing?'.

They attempted another one of these experiments on coast to coast am last night. A listener wrote in complaining about the drought in Texas, and requested that George Noory get his listeners to attempt this to bring Texas a little rain.

There is no way of telling how many people participated, but it could be interesting to watch the weather in Texas for the remainder of the week.

And would allow us to conclude absolutely nothing.

Although The Cusp has managed to inadvertently derail this topic with vague references to pseudo-science with no citations, the actual topic (which has nothing to do with meditating on peace or listeners of c2c making it rain) is quite interesting, and the PEAR project has reams of statistical data to back it up. I keep wondering, what could it be that is causing the deviation from the expected mean output other than what the researchers suggest(the intention of the participants)?

Wait, so we shouldn't be asking about the statistical significance of scientific data?

Because the lack of such in the case of PEAR is a much simpler answer to your question.

Why are you so desperate for the 'paranormal'? Isn't normal mysterious enough? Is your wish for consciousness to produce magic effects a reaction against the fear of the point at which your consciousness comes to an end; are you just praying for something more?

Originally Posted by Xei

Wait, so we shouldn't be asking about the statistical significance of scientific data?

Because the lack of such in the case of PEAR is a much simpler answer to your question.

Why are you so desperate for the 'paranormal'? Isn't normal mysterious enough? Is your wish for consciousness to produce magic effects a reaction against the fear of the point at which your consciousness comes to an end; are you just praying for something more?

Xei, your mind is so clouded by your preconceptions, its a wonder you manage to get around in day to day life (and its only a blind assumption on my part that you do). I feel as though I've told you this before, but I'll say it again just to be sure. I'm not desperate for the 'paranormal' as I'm quite positive that it doesn't exist. If something is real, it is just plain normal. 'Magic effects' is a phrase that you are using to discredit something, not one that I've applied to anything at all. I have no fear of the unknown, so that last bit could not apply to me.

If you honestly want to discuss the statistical significance of the PEAR project, I am all for it; but you'll have to let me know which of their 54 publications you've read first, as I'd hate to debate over something that I'm fairly certain you have done little to no research into. So far, the best argument against PEAR that I've been able to scrounge up is that all they have shown is that the random number generators are not really random, but in that case they at least have strong evidence for clairvoyance as their data shows a strong correlation between the 'operators' intention for the deviation to be either above or below the mean, and what direction the actual deviation went in.

Unlike what you often appear to do, I don't research in order to validate my preconceived view of reality; I do it in order to test the boundaries of what we as humans think we know. This is, after all, the ideal of scientific exploration.

If by correlation you mean a deviation of 2 or 3 results in 10,000, then yes, PEAR had a fucking huge correlation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/sc...prod=permalink

Originally Posted by Xei

If by correlation you mean a deviation of 2 or 3 results in 10,000, then yes, PEAR had a fucking huge correlation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/sc...prod=permalink

Actually, the 2 or 3 in 10,000 that you are referencing are actually deviations from the expected mean of the number generators. What I am saying is that they showed a correlation between the operator intending for those 2 or 3 to be above or below the mean and whether or not they were actually above or below the mean. In other words, when as that article puts it, the people "thought high" the deviations were high. When people "thought low" the deviations were low. Even if the number generators were not truly random and were deviating on their own, this is evidence that the operators were able to successfully predict which way the generators would deviate.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/...01-01-0021.pdf

You're not making much sense. I think you're using 'high/low deviation' to mean something very different, which is a positive/negative deviation. If you didn't mean that then you were just wrong. Neither is it correct to say that the subjects were intending those 2 or 3 to be above or below the mean; they intended all 10,000 in one way or another, let's say high, and the 2 or 3 represents on average 5,002 or 5,003 results coming out high.

The point is that, being a random process, you wouldn't expect to get exactly 5,000 anyway. The anomaly is statistically insignificant.

It's just silly really. I mean, even if these tiny anomalies were caused by some kind of mental interference; who'd care? The difference is so tiny that the reasonable conclusion would be best stated as 'mental intention has virtually no effect upon random phenomena', which is far from exciting.

Originally Posted by Xei

You're not making much sense. I think you're using 'high/low deviation' to mean something very different, which is a positive/negative deviation. If you didn't mean that then you were just wrong. Neither is it correct to say that the subjects were intending those 2 or 3 to be above or below the mean; they intended all 10,000 in one way or another, let's say high, and the 2 or 3 represents on average 5,002 or 5,003 results coming out high.

The point is that, being a random process, you wouldn't expect to get exactly 5,000 anyway. The anomaly is statistically insignificant.

It's just silly really. I mean, even if these tiny anomalies were caused by some kind of mental interference; who'd care? The difference is so tiny that the reasonable conclusion would be best stated as 'mental intention has virtually no effect upon random phenomena', which is far from exciting.

Your interpretation leads me to again believe that you haven't read any of their publications. I used high/low because the article you cited used high/low. The people that participated in the study were average people. If we were to conclude that average people caused the tiny difference by some kind of mental interference, then the natural extrapolation would be that above average people could cause an increasingly larger difference by a more effective, focused mental interference, or that large amounts of average people with similar intentions could produce large differences.

If you refuse to actually read what they have published, then I guess I will try one last time to explain their findings to you. The random number generators, or random +/- generators were shown to consistently deviate from the theoretically expected outcome in the + direction by 2 or 3 out of 10,000 iterations when the operator intended for them to deviate in the plus direction. In still other words, the operators rarely got wrong which directions the outputs would deviate, no matter how small the actual deviations were Also. when they did get it wrong, they showed that they got it universally wrong, or that intending up would produce down and down would produce up, as opposed to intending up producing down and intending down producing down as well. This still suggests that they were having some sort of effect or otherwise simply misinterpreting what 'up' and 'down' mean psychically speaking.

It's really not worth discussing this in words. It's a purely mathematical problem, and from what I've heard, the mathematics say very little.

Originally Posted by Xei

It's really not worth discussing this in words. It's a purely mathematical problem, and from what I've heard, the mathematics say very little.

I guess this means that my initial reaction to not discuss something that you haven't actually read was a good one. Did you even glance at the publication I linked you to? I feel like you are guilty of what you accuse Hard_Wired of; drawing conclusions based on 'some shit you herd' instead of actually taking the time to find out for yourself. Actually, I'm fairly certain that yours were foregone conclusions since you tend to disregard anything that doesn't fit into your predefined model for reality. If someone claims something that you already believe to be false, you don't even pay it any mind.

I can't find out for myself because I haven't studied statistics to the required level yet.

I guess you have?

Originally Posted by Xei

I can't find out for myself because I haven't studied statistics to the required level yet.

I guess you have?

Nope. I just operate under the assumption that they aren't lying in their publications, since they present it all in a pretty straight forward way. If they are cooking the books then you can just disregard everything I've said.

None of their detractors that I have been able to find have addressed the issue of the intended direction, direction of deviation correlation and I have to assume that at least some of the skeptics are able to understand the mathematical intricacies. They all rely only on the assertion that the deviation itself is not signifigant, which to me is hardly the issue at all, and is precisely the reason why they do so many thousands of trials; because the average joe off the street would be expected to have a virtually imperceptible effect, otherwise we would all be psychics. It is the fact that no matter how small the effect, it usually tends to be the specific type of effect that was intended that interests me.

What I would like to see is a similar experiment done with a more than binary choice involved, and also one with those claiming to be adept in mind control like a handful of practiced monks and yogis.