Can intention alone cause changes in physical systems? Can the collective attention of a large group of people to an event cause changes in the coherence changes in physical systems, despite that lack of intention to do so?

In today’s episode we’re going to be exploring a field consciousness hypothesis: so a variation on the idea that consciousness may extend beyond the body and interact casually with physical systems and the consciousness of other beings, in some kind of resonant field phenomena. We’re going to be learning about the experiments with random number generators used to test this hypothesis; how human intention and attention has been proved to be able to affect these random outputs in a vast backlog of positive results and meta analyses; We're going to hear about how these experiments have been taken global, looking at collective effects on RNGs of particularly important world events that many people are attending to; we’re going to be looking at criticisms of the statistical analysis and a potential experimenter effect; and we’re going to be talking about the contrast between some seemingly non-local effects with other localised effects; and as always we’re going to be getting into the implications, in this case of whether the ‘field consciousness’ effect the data seems to point to, is more likely to be a unified field of consciousness, so in some sense a single mind, or simply the aggregated sum of all individual consciousnesses.

Now fortunately to guide us as we carefully test the thickness of the ice on this genuinely alternative world view of consciousness, we have the cognitive psychologist that has pioneered these field consciousness experiments since he founded the Global Consciousness Project at the Princeton University PEAR labs, Roger Nelson. Roger worked at Princeton’s PEAR labs in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, initially under Bob Jahn, for over twenty years until his retirement in 2002. He is also the author of the book “Connected: The emergence of global consciousness”.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro.

07:30 Random Number generator ‘mind-matter interaction’ experiments at Princeton PEAR labs.

21:10 Bob Jahn - Dean of Engineering at Princeton.

28:45 Emotional and passionate group events saw coherence in the RNG experiments.

33:00 Contrast between apparent local and non-local effects.

37:55 David Bohm’s Implicate / Explicate order concept.

38:55 “Pilot wave” and “active information” link between the implicite and the explicate.

43:55 Statistical results generation and analysis of significance.

49:05 The sceptics criticisms.

51:45 The Global Consciousness Project methodology.

53:05 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s mind sphere, called ‘Noosphere’.

57:45 Measuring the group coherence of Princess Diana’s funeral.

01:00:25 The 9/11 Results.

01:05:55 The emotional component in coherence.

01:18:40 The quantity of people and strength of the emotion, whether positive or negative, raises the effect size.

01:11:10 A single collective consciousness VS an aggregate of all individual consciousnesses.

01:14:50 Different levels of collective consciousness above individual bodies.

01:16:55 The analogy of individuals being like neurones in a cosmic brain.

01:20:55 The Experimenter effect criticism.

01:26:10 The Helmut Schmidt “Unobserved tape” experiment.

01:29.10 The indeterminate state before observer ‘collapses of the wave function’ analogy to explain results.

01:37:25 The Schmidt ‘retrocausation’ hypothesis.

References:

Roger Nelson, “Connected: the Emergence of Global Consciousness”

Robert Jahn And Brenda Dunn, “Margins of Reality”

International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL) Publishing.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Phenomena of man”