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The Global Consciousness Project

noosphere.princeton.edu

50 pointsalgorithm_dk16 comments

The fundamental question here concerns the boundaries of subjective experience. (Rather than, say, rational materialism vs. mysticism.)

Is it magical that you can see a running rabbit and throw a stone and hit it? Certainly the subjective experience of doing something like that is just as problematical for science as the research above. I have in my pocket a tiny machine that uses crystals to shake light to send my voice etc. to far receivers practically instantly. Is it really so strange to consider something like that being done biologically?

I'm glad somebody's doing science to it. ;-)

Like you say, science can't really help with questions of subjective experience. I think this is more about observing an objective phenomenon, which is that "thought" can affect random number generators. The problem, as stated on the site, is this:

  When it comes to "what we are measuring" the story becomes
  more complicated because there is no real understanding of
  the mechanism whereby an REG [Random event generator]’s 
  behavior can be altered by thoughts and emotions or 
  intentions.
  [...]
  We do not know how a mental state such as an intention or 
  emotion is able to inform the physical system to affect 
  its behavior. In addition, all of the robust measures we 
  have providing evidence for the anomalous effects are 
  statistical in nature, and the signal to noise ratio is 
  extremely low. This means that we typically cannot be 
  sure that the "signature" of an effect in any individual 
  analysis is driven by the hypothesized influence of 
  consciousness. The details written in the data from 
  single instances are more likely to be chance 
  fluctuations than consciousness effects. Only in larger 
  concatenations, gathering the weak signals from many 
  separate events, can we be satisfied that trends and 
  structure represent the hypothesized effect.

In short, they believe they have observed an inexplicable phenomenon -- intention influencing random number generation. The attempt to quantify, describe, and eventually fully understand that supposed phenomenon is the key purpose of their research.

What is this doing on the website of Princeton?

It seems to be a continuation of PEAR's research program in some form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie...

I wondered the same thing (my exact thought was "WTF?"), and upvoted the link and your comment so both would get more attention, hopefully from someone at Princeton...

I would have thought this approach would have been highly susceptible to the Birthday Paradox[0]; it seems to me to be nothing more than modern day numerology.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

they're using 200 bits. look at the generalized birthday problem section on your cited link--the number of samples for there to be greater than a 50% probability of a collision is > (3-2ln2)/6 + sqrt(2(2^200)ln2) = 1.4910^30. For a probability of 0.01 of a collision you expect at least sqrt((2^200)ln(1/(1-0.01))=1.27*10^29 samples.

This is trash science.

Nobody else has been able to replicate their "results".

Seems like they are running experiments and collecting data to test their hypothesis. Doesn't that count as science? Or do you call it trash science simply because the hypothesis seems unreasonable?

Here's a good post about this [0], including this gem:

> Schiltz is a psi believer [... but Wiseman] is a psi skeptic [...]

> The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. [...]

> The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.

Running experiments and collecting data is necessary, but not sufficient. Bias and other failures are extremely hard to avoid.

Saying "it's not science" is (derogatory) shorthand for the assertion that their results are due to failures in their process, as opposed to being reflective of reality.

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

It's a good first step, however unless the experiments are repeatable/independent, it's not particularly trustworthy.

Consider that they may be falsifying or misinterpreting data. The only way to be sure they aren't -- or pretty sure, anyway -- is to have independent researchers be able to follow the same repeatable process in order to replicate the results.

I don't know enough about this case to say whether they have a good repeatable experimental process -- it's possible that the website just smells so strongly of woo that nobody has even tried to replicate their results in the first place. But without that independent verification, the proposed results seem questionable.

I'm just going to leave this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Inquisition

Agreed. Sites not loading for me, but I've looked into this nonsense from time to time over the last 15 years.

A couple of issues I remember:

1. They only publish results for positive events. They only use pseudorandom data, not sampling other time frames of their existing data

2. Their random source showed consistent bias (I believe it was something like 51% chance of 1 vs 49% of 0. This is after Von Neumann whitening which means they have some additional biases in their random sampling

1. They also publish for negative events. Look at the really low Z-scores: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html Also you can get all their data (downloading it day by day).

2. Possibly, but unavoidable to get rid of a systematic error which would pollute everything else. Details are here: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/gcpdata.html

1. They publish events that don't have high scores, but they don't publish non-events that do have high scores.

2. I was actually wrong on the VN whitening, they use XOR, either 10 for some devices, or a 560 bit mask for others(!). This is just silly.

  the XOR is used to exclude an important class of potential spurious effects — biases that might arise from temperature changes, component aging, etc.

It's not excluding spurious effects, it's hiding it.

Inclined to agree but lack of replication does not of itself point to trash science. There may well be other good reasons for so-defining this project.

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